A rare Bronze Age cist burial has been unearthed at the site of Forteviot in Scotland, which also has a Neolithic henge and a medieval cemetery. “The real treasure of this burial is not the metal objects in it, but the organic remains. This sort of material rarely survives in Scotland and it gives us an insight into what other objects were being used, not just the things that usually survive such as flint tools,” said Gordon Noble of Aberdeen University.    This second article on the grave also has photographs of it.

A stone tablet commemorating a tax break awarded by the Roman emperor Septimius Severus to the people of Rhodiapolis was discovered by a team from Turkey’s Akdeniz University.  

The Baghdad Museum and Berlin’s Pergamon Museum have exchanged casts of two parts of the same statue, so that each museum will be able to display a “whole” figure. The body of the statue was discovered in 1905 at the Iraqi town of Ashur by Walter Andrae, who took it to Germany. The head was discovered in 1982 by Iraqi archaeologists.  

How did bipedalism originate in humans? A new study of wrist bones in gorillas, chimps, and bonobos by evolutionary anthropologists at Duke University suggests that human ancestors moved out of the trees to the ground and walked upright, skipping knuckle-walking. “We have the most robust data I’ve ever seen on this topic. This model should cause everyone to re-evaluate what they’ve said before,” said researcher Daniel Schmitt.  

The grave of Charles Dickinson, who was killed by Andrew Jackson during a duel in 1806, has reportedly been found in the front yard of a home in Nashville, Tennessee.  

Two people were arrested in Greece for illegally possessing Roman and Byzantine artifacts.  

And an elderly Wisconsin man was convicted of trafficking in archaeological resources.   

The earliest known example of madder, a red dye made from plants, has been found on a 4,000-year-old fragment of Egyptian leather by Marco Leona of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  

Here’s more information on one of the ships to be examined in the “Graveyard of the Atlantic” off the coast of North Carolina. Canadian and British soldiers perished on board the HMT Bedfordshire when it was attacked by a German U-boat on May 11, 1942.   

This video shows one of the skeletons unearthed in southern England from a mass grave of beheaded men. Further analysis may indicate if the men were slain Saxons or invading Danes.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Tuesday, August 11, 2009. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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