The conviction of Italian art dealer Giacomo Medici for conspiracy to traffic in antiquities has been upheld by an appeals court in Rome. Evidence from his 2004 trial was used to compel American museums to return artifacts to Italy.   Among them was the J. Paul Getty Museum, which is now opening a show featuring “The Chimaera of Arezzo,” an Etruscan bronze sculpture loaned by Florence’s Museo Archeologico Nazionale as part of the deal.   The Cleveland Museum of Art has also returned antiquities that had been stolen from Italy.  

The museum show “Pompeii and the Roman Villa” has traveled from Washington D.C. to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.  

Scientists now estimate the number of British and Australian soldiers buried in mass graves at the battleground of Fromelles, France, at 300. Fewer individuals have been found in each burial pit than had been expected.  Excavators have also uncovered the men’s personal effects.  

The emerging discipline of primate archaeology challenges the idea that tool use “is the exclusive domain of the genus Homo.” Julio Mercader of the University of California explains: “It’s not clear whether we hominins invented this kind of stone technology, or whether both humans and the great apes inherited it from a common forebear.”  

Guess what? Cannonballs were effective at sinking battleships.  

Stone carvings in southern Mexico suggest that Zapotec men carried human femurs. Burials missing femurs show this to be possible. “It seems likely that each firstborn son was expected to brandish the femur of his father,” commented Joyce Marcus of the University of Michigan.   

Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History has surveyed the historic shipwrecks in Banco Chinchorro, a coral reef atoll off the coast of Quintana Roo. More than 60 sites with parts of ships from Spain, England, China, Russia, and the U.S. were recorded.  

Here’s more information on the man accused of threatening the undercover informant in the federal artifacts case in Utah.  

NASA spacesuits present special preservation challenges. “Most of them are in restoration, but we can put them on display in a controlled environment for a short period of time,” said curator of Allan Needell of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Thursday, July 16, 2009. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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