The wreckage of a ship that belonged to the Dutch East India Company has been discovered off the coast of Brazil. The ship, which was sailing from Indonesia to the Netherlands 309 years ago, was carrying silk, spices, tea, porcelain, and golden ducats when it was probably caught in a storm.

An Algonquin camp on Ottawa’s Rideau River dates between 300 B.C. and 700 A.D. “There was good fishing, good hunting, and good drainage. It was not a village because it was too far back in time for that,” said archaeologist Jacqueline Fisher.  

A 10,000-year-old projectile point has been found in Windsor, Ontario, by an archaeologist surveying the site of a new arena. The point is 7,000 years older than any other artifacts from the area.  

The transcript of a diary kept by a British soldier who participated in the deportation of Acadians from Canada in 1755 has been found in the Nova Scotia Archives.  

A new, state-of-the-art library in the center of Timbuktu promises to preserve the city’s ancient manuscripts and intellectual history.   

The latest scientific tools are being put to work at Civil War battlefields in Atlanta. “There’s a precision that goes with finding stuff on the ground. Think of historians as detectives; these tools help us find the forensic evidence,” said consulting archaeologist Garrett Silliman.  

Dogs trained to find the residues left behind when a person’s body decomposes will spend this week at Washington’s Port Angeles waterfront, where the discovery of the large American Indian settlement of Tse-whit-zen and its burial ground stopped a Department of Transportation construction project.   But the bone-sniffing dogs will not be allowed to investigate land at the nearby abandoned Rayonier Inc. pulp mill, thought to have been part of the Klallam village. That piece of land is scheduled to be developed as part of a sewer project.  

In the Arizona desert, archaeologists and Air Force pilots work together to protect ancient artifacts from the live fire of war games.  

Sandra Olsen of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History discusses the evidence supporting the idea that the Botai culture of Kazakhstan domesticated horses around 3,500 B.C. Residues of mares milk on potsherds carried a marker indicating that the milk was collected in the summer, during the foaling season. “With the identification of this by-product of domestication, we have compelling evidence that the Botai were indeed horse herders, since milking wild mares would be incredibly difficult,” she writes.  

In 2010, archaeologists will investigate the Stratford-upon-Avon property where Shakespeare died in 1616. “Plans for a dig are still at a conceptual stage, but we hope that a project of this kind would present a unique opportunity for our visitors to join in an excavation as it unfolds and ultimately advance our learning and thinking about Shakespeare,” said Diana Owen, director of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.  

Here’s more on the fine marble bust recovered from France’s Rhône River. “My God, it’s Caesar!” archaeologist Luc Long remembers shouting when he saw the statue.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Monday, November 30, 2009. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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