Three men charged with trafficking in archaeological resources have been sentenced in South Dakota. A fourth has pleaded guilty and will be sentenced next year. They have forfeited more than 12,000 artifacts between them.

The Army Corps of Engineers cautions that a proposed floodwall at Lake Pontchartrain, Louisiana, could dredge up American Indian ancestral bones. “It’s almost a given that where there’s a shell midden, there are human remains,” agreed Ken Carleton, archaeologist for the Mississippi Band of Choctaw.  

The skull of an American soldier who died in 1777 after being held on a British prisoner of war ship could be reburied after forensic study. As many as 1,000 men had been held on the ship; 46 of the men were dumped in Milford, Connecticut, where they died of smallpox and were buried in a mass grave. The skull was found in a local museum collection.  

The bodies of the last two Australian soldiers missing in action in Vietnam will be returned home today for burial.  

Miami’s Lemon City cemetery, where African-Americans were buried in the early twentieth century, will likely be preserved as a historical monument.  

Ancient monuments in Pakistan’s Taxila Valley are threatened by quarrying and blasting. The vibrations produced by mining equipment have also damaged artifacts in the Taxila Museum.  

British archaeologists dug test pits at a twentieth-century campsite in the Forest of Dean, but found little more than tent pegs. “The conclusion I draw from that is that people were very careful to take everything away with them,” said Lisa Hill, a doctoral candidate at St Cross College, Oxford.  

Take a tour Magdeburg Cathedral, the first Gothic church in Germany, with archaeologist Rainer Kuhn as your guide.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Monday, August 31, 2009. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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