Excavations outside Naples have reportedly yielded parts of marble Roman sculptures, columns, and fragments of monuments bearing inscriptions.

In 2006, archaeologists uncovered a carved monolith of the Aztec earth deity Tlaltecuhtli beneath Mexico City’s main square. Since then, there has been speculation that the monument marks a royal tomb. “Everyone wants us to dig faster, and this is the only thing we cannot do,” said head archaeologist Leonardo Lopez.  

A controversial new study by astrophysicist Giulio Magli suggests that Machu Picchu was built as “an Inca pilgrimage site and a scaled-down version of a mythic landscape.” Worshippers would have been able to relive a mythic journey taken by their ancestors by walking through the city.  

Archaeological excavations in the Philadelphia area have uncovered an eighteenth-century home that happened to belong to the great-great-great-great-great grandfather of a local historian. “I couldn’t believe it. About 10 years ago, I ran out of discoveries. Any new information now is a breakthrough. That’s what delights me,” said Rich Remer.  

Further south along the I-95 corridor, in Miami, work crews unearthed an unmarked , undocumented cemetery. “There is no doubt it was a cemetery. No one knows what this cemetery is. It’s really unusual. I was amazed. It’s a real history mystery,” said contract archaeologist Bob Carr.  

A brick-and-concrete structure found underneath a street in Monroe, Louisiana, may have been a crypt associated with a nearby home built in 1895. No evidence of human remains has been found, however.  

The rest of the remains of a man thought to be a Union soldier were exhumed yesterday in Franklin, Tennessee. “We did find the little nails from his boots. So he was buried with his boots on,” said contract archaeologist Larry McKee.  

This article in The Salt Lake Tribune investigates the link between artifact looting and drug crimes.   

In Wales, analysis of soil and pollen samples taken from the uplands on Moel Famau has shown how human intervention, such as burning and farming, changed the landscape over time.  

Here’s more information on the two massive, 6,000-year-old burial mounds that were recently discovered during a routine aerial survey by English Heritage. Helen Wickstead, leader of the Damerham Archaeology Project, calls the find “completely amazing.”  

In Scotland, archaeologists think that Victorian builders reused stones from Preston House, the home of Jacobite James Erskine, Lord Grange. “An interesting result of the survey was the recognition that two sculptured flower heads in the wall of a garden in a nearby street, and long known about by local people, are in fact cockades – the white cockade being a symbol of the Jacobite cause. There seems little doubt that they originated in a garden ornament or decoration of the house across the road,” said Tony Pollard of the University of Glasgow.  

Sri Lanka’s Customs Bio Diversity Protection Unit has fined Swedish national Robert Ulvenkrantz for attempting to smuggle two nineteenth-century Buddha statues out of the country last January. Ulvenkrantz was caught when an American stopped by customs officials for smuggling named him as an accomplice.  

Actor Shia LaBeouf announced that work on the fifth Indiana Jones movie is underway.   And Harrison Ford has been named the highest-earning actor between June 2008 and June 2009 by Forbes magazine.

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

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