Seventeen tombs dating to the fifth century B.C. were discovered in southwestern Macedonia. In one of the tombs, archaeologists found the remains of a 15-year-old girl wearing a gold funeral mask.

Rene Larsen of the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts says the controversial Vinland Map is not a forgery. The fifteenth-century map shows Greenland and an island in the western Atlantic, and is said to have been drawn 50 years before Columbus sailed. The document has no known provenance.   

In northern Ohio, archaeologists have found a large and sophisticated American Indian encampment that was used periodically as a ceremonial spot, winter shelter, a defended village, and a trading hub. “This place is kind of a weird outlier of Hopewell artifacts that seem to be out of place in northern Ohio,” said Brian Redmond of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. The site was abandoned in the 1600s.  

Researchers in Massachusetts will look for the HMS Diana, a British schooner burned by the Continental Army during the early days of the Revolutionary War, after the Battle of Chelsea Creek. “It’s a relatively unknown or unrecognized battle so we want to give it more definition,” said Victor Mastone of the Massachusetts Board of Underwater Archaeological Resources.  

Three African-American soldiers who served in the U.S. Army in the late nineteenth century have been identified and will be reburied with military honors. Their graves at Fort Craig cemetery in New Mexico and many others were unearthed by the Bureau of Reclamation after widespread looting was discovered at the site.  

A shrine to a Roman god was unearthed near the north gate of Hadrian’s Wall in Vindolanda. “What should have been part of the rampart mound near the north gate has turned out to be an amazing religious shrine with a substantial and exceptionally well preserved altar dedicated by a prefect of the Fourth Cohort of Gauls to an important eastern god, Jupiter of Doliche,” said Andrew Birley, director of the excavation.  

New radiocarbon dates for human bones discovered in Britain’s Gough’s Cave suggest that people lived there 14,700 years ago. “The occupation really is right on the cusp of this warming which we can see in Greenland ice cores,” said Chris Stringer of London’s Natural History Museum. The bones made sensational headlines in the 1980s when cut marks compatible with cannibalism were noticed on them.  

Why do modern humans wear clothing? Ian Gilligan of Australian National University thinks that fitted clothing was a crucial behavioral adaptation to survive seasonal temperatures during the Ice Ages.

Another tourist to Israel has returned artifacts taken from a national park.   

The Grand Egyptian Museum is scheduled to open in 2013. “The new museum is one of the best ways of preserving these antiquities and showing them to the people at the same time. Our hope is it will be the greatest museum in the world,” said Alaa al Din Shaheen of Cairo University and the Supreme Council of Antiquities.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Monday, July 20, 2009. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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