Few people are traveling to Taxila, Pakistan, due to the threat of Taliban bombers and gunmen. Taxila was a center of Buddhist learning between the fifth century B.C. and the second century A.D., and has been a premier archaeological attraction. “This is the worst time for archaeology. Militancy has affected it very badly. There were 15-20 foreign missions working in this field, now this research has completely stopped,” said Abdul Nasir Khan, curator of Taxila Museum.  

A map of Israeli archaeological activity in the West Bank and Jerusalem has been published online. “For the first time, both Palestinians and Israelis can dynamically consult this interactive map and view what cultural heritage will fall under the sovereign rule of each side during final peace negotiations,” said Ran Boytner, director for international research at the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA.  

The pots, scissors, tweezers, and bronze mirror of a woman’s 1,000-year-old makeup kit were found in a tomb in Nishiwaki, Japan.  

English farmer John Browning is pushing for stiffer punishments for “Nighthawkers,” metal detector enthusiasts who dig on someone’s property without permission. (In the U.S., we call them looters.) “Heritage crime does not exist as a distinct offense in this country and I have been meeting with an all party parliamentary archaeology group to urge them to introduce the crime of ‘metal detecting without consent,’ which I hope will include a suitable penalty for those that break it,” he said.  

Remnants of a stone wall that may have been built to protect Canada’s earliest English settlement were uncovered last September in Cupids, Newfoundland.  

Archaeologists have found the foundation of an early nineteenth-century lighthouse on a jut of land between the Atlantic Ocean and the Cape Fear River in North Carolina. The lighthouse was dismantled in 1863 because the commander of a nearby Confederate fort said it was a target for Union gunships.  

Some 250,000 artifacts have been recovered from the shipwreck thought to be the Queen Anne’s Revenge, the pirate Blackbeard’s flagship. They are being conserved at East Carolina University.   

Here’s a photograph of Galileo’s recently recovered finger. Three fingers, a vertebra, and a tooth were removed from his corpse in 1735, but two of the fingers and the tooth had been misplaced.  

An independent researcher claims to have found faint writing on the cloth of the Shroud of Turin that proves it to be the burial cloth of Jesus. Chemist Luigi Garlaschelli, of the University of Pavia, was able to reproduce the shroud using materials and methods available in the fourteenth century. He says that “unusual sightings” in the shroud are common, “and are often proved false.”

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Monday, November 23, 2009. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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