Next month, the Portland Art Museum plans to unveil a stele of the Hindu god Ganesha it purchased from Christie’s last year. “I can’t trace its provenance prior to … the year 2000,” said Maribeth Graybill, curator of Asian art. The sculpture is the first to be listed on the Object Registry on the Association of Art Museum Directors website, where individuals and/or nations are given a chance to claim artifacts as looted property.

Archaeologists are debating when jewelry was first made. “It has been repeatedly argued that personal ornaments are one of the innovations that emerged in Africa among early modern humans, and that they represent behaviors that allowed them to migrate out of Africa and determined their evolutionary success,” wrote Solange Rigaud and a team of researchers in the Journal of Archaeological Science. But were naturally perforated fossil sponges modified and worn by hominids in Europe?   

Surveillance cameras are being installed at Machu Picchu this month. “These cameras will allow authorities to monitor the flow of tourists in real time,” reported the newspaper El Comercio.  

Are Danish passage graves oriented to the path of the full moon? Researchers from the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen are plotting the Stone Age burials with GPS and using a computer program that calculates the positions of the planets to find out.   

Here’s a wrap-up of archaeology in Egypt in 2008 from Al-Ahram.  

The discovery of a third-century Roman battlefield in Germany continues to make headlines. “We believe the Germans ambushed the Romans here, but the legions quickly fired back with catapults and archers – and then it came to a massive man-on-man onslaught,” explained archaeologist Petra Loenne.  

The story of the Confederate submarine H.L. Hunley is back in the news, too. “She was a mystery when she was built. She was a mystery as to how she looked and how she was constructed for many years and she is still a mystery as to why she didn’t come home,” said state senator Glenn McConnell, chairman of the South Carolina Hunley Commission.  

Cannons from the CSS Alabama have been restored in the same lab where the H.L. Hunley rests.   

Like Italy and Greece, Turkey is seeking the return of its looted antiquities from countries such as the U.S., Germany, Russia, Croatia, Denmark, Italy, France, and Switzerland. More than 2,000 artifacts have been returned since 2000.  

Oregon state archaeologist Dennis Griffin reports that five shipwrecks have been exposed along the coast in the “Pacific Graveyard.”  

Rupert Till of Huddersfield University thinks that Stonehenge has the ideal acoustics for “ancient raves.”  

Is a 4,500-year-old limestone plaque found in Chester, England, linked to Stonehenge?

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Monday, January 5, 2009. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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