In Guatemala, archaeologists have used sonar technology to map a Maya pilgrimage site, now submerged in Lake Atitlan. The site was discovered by businessman Robert Samayoa, whose grandmother told him legends of a sunken church while he was growing up. “We have found six ceremonial monuments and four altars and without doubt there are more, which means this was an extremely important place from a spiritual point of view,” said archaeologist Sonia Medrano.

Environmental damage “hastened the demise” of the Nazca people of Peru, according to a new study led by scientists from England’s Cambridge University. “Eventually, they cut down so many trees that they reached a tipping point at which the arid ecosystem was irreversibly damaged,” they wrote in Latin American Antiquity.  

Analysis has shown that a Moche nobleman buried near the pyramid now known as the Huaca Rajada was just 21 years old at the time of his death. Archaeologists think that he may have been a courtier sacrificed as part of the burial of an early Moche king.  

Archaeologists from the Museum of London are excavating three “ring ditches” along the River Thames in Oxford. “Ring ditches are, as the name suggests, circular ditches, which are often the remains of ploughed-out barrows, that may be associated with burials of high-status individuals in the later Neolithic or Bronze Age, about 4,000 years ago,” explained a spokesman.  

Here’s more information on the redesign of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.  

Blinds have been added to England’s Canterbury Cathedral to protect the Tomb of the Black Prince from sun damage. Stained glass windows overlooking the fourteenth-century tomb were destroyed by Puritan iconoclasts in the 1640s, and the sun’s UV rays have faded the tomb’s painted canopy.  

Arthur Tomlin, 88, claims his father told him where the Battle of Bosworth took place, and that it was depicted in a long-lost tapestry that hung at Ambion Farm, near the battlefield. “The tapestry showed everything, every detail. I never saw it but my father was always describing it to me because I was interested,” he said.   

The bones of 1,300 people buried in a medieval cemetery in Ireland have been examined by osteoarchaeologist Carmelita Troy.  

Forty unmarked graves in Dumfries, Virginia, could be burials of enslaved people from the colonial period. “All of my life I’ve always been told that the stand of trees is a slave cemetery. It’s one of those stories that you hear,” said Claudia Smith, whose father was caretaker of the Dumfries Cemetery.  

The remains of Lieut. Henry Le Vesconte, who died in the Canadian Arctic during the Franklin Expedition, have been moved from the old Royal Naval College to the nearby chapel of St. Peter and St. Paul in England.  

Archaeologists will investigate the site of the Battle of Tippecanoe, fought on November 7, 1811, by U.S. forces and American Indians during Tecumseh’s War.  

Revisit the nineteenth-century discovery of the tomb of Pharaoh Seti I by Giovanni Battista Belzoni, and learn what work has been done there recently.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Monday, November 2, 2009. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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