A second man-made lake lined with limestone blocks was unearthed at the Temple of Mut in Tanis, according to an announcement made by Egypt’s Culture Ministry.

Frank Ruhli, a Swiss anatomist and paleopathologist, has mummified a human leg using an ancient Egyptian recipe and high-tech tools to monitor the process. “It is a very important project. Using the latest technologies for moment-by-moment analysis certainly adds to our knowledge on the ancient mummification process,” commented Bob Brier, who replicated Egyptian mummification using a male body in 1994.  

In Syria, experts are cleaning two Crusader-era paintings discovered within a fortress overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. The paintings depict heaven and hell. “Crusaders did not stay in one place for a long time, and so it is very rare to find such paintings left behind by them,” said Michel Makdisi, head of excavations for Syria’s Directorate General of Antiquities.  

The rediscovery of an amphitheater near Rome’s Fumicino International Airport has popped up on CNN. “The great Italian archaeologist Rodolfo Lanciani reported the discovery of a theater in the 1860s but nobody could actually find it,” said Simon Keay of the University of Southhampton.  

A team of European archaeologists has been studying an historic battlefield in Lutzen, Germany, where a modern supermarket now sits. “This area was a chess board on which the history of Europe was played out. It is really quite exciting to be involved,” said Tony Pollard of the University of Glasgow.   

Forensic analysis has shown that the remains of a Civil War soldier who died of disease in Washington, D.C., were in fact buried in his family’s cemetery in New Hampshire. The cemetery is being moved away from a highway exit.  

A local sheriff in Wisconsin has found looters’ holes on county land where human remains were found last summer.  

The Neues Museum, part of Berlin’s neoclassical Museum Island complex, a UNESCO World Heritage site, will reopen this weekend. “It is a special day … 70 years after it was closed, this building can be handed over to the public again. It is, in a way, the end of the postwar era for the Museum Island,” said Hermann Parzinger of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Thursday, October 15, 2009. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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