A tooth was removed from the head of a 4,000-year-old Egyptian mummy, as the first step in an effort to extract DNA from its pulp. “All of us were extremely concerned about not disturbing the head, because this is really a one-of-a-kind artifact,” said Dr. Paul H. Chapman of Massachusetts General Hospital.

“A royal building of some sort” has been found near a Viking palace in Denmark. Bits of golden jewelry, glass and bronze broaches, drinking glasses and ceramics, cooking stones, and 200 post holes suggest that it was some sort of beer hall or sacred site.  

Some tombs in the Valley of the Kings are aligned with surface fractures in the rock. Geologist Katarin A. Parizek of Penn State University says that while the cracks would have made for easier tomb digging, rare heavy rainfall in Egypt can flood the tombs and damage them.  

Egypt’s chief archaeologist, Zahi Hawass, has said that he will ask Germany to return the bust of Nefertiti if it can be shown that it was removed from his country illegally in 1913. “The documentation exists. The arrangements were agreed. The process was legal,” replied German government art historian Monika Grütters.   

Archaeologists are just now releasing information about an American Indian village discovered in Narragansett, Rhode Island, in 1986. “It’s just totally remarkable. It’s like suddenly being able to see,” said Paul A. Robinson of the Rhode Island Historic Heritage and Preservation Commission. A developer wants to build a subdivision on the site. The only similar seaside village is Werowocomoco, in Virginia.  

Scientists are studying vocal and non-vocal communication in primates, which have common origins in the brain in monkeys. “Monkeys respond to drumming sounds as they would to vocalizations,” said neuroscientist Christoph Kayser of the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics. Human language and music may have evolved from such vocal and non-vocal communications.  

Museums in the United Kingdom are trying to decide what artifacts they should be collecting, keeping, displaying, and junking. “We have wonderful things in the [University College London] museum that we would never dream of getting rid of – and we have things that we really have no idea how they got here, that are broken or duplicates, that have never been used, and that are sometimes in quite inappropriate storage,” said Subharda Das, who is in charge of reviewing the college’s collections.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Monday, October 19, 2009. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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