An unnamed Swiss art gallery has surrendered 251 artifacts to Italy. The artifacts had been looted from Etruscan tombs and burials in southern Italy.

Greek antiquities police have returned to Italy two medieval frescoes looted from a tomb near Naples in 1982. The Greek authorities recovered the paintings in a raid in 2006.  

Greece in turn received artifacts, including a Byzantine statue and ancient pottery and coins, from Germany, Belgium, and Britain.  

Colin Cooke of the University of Alberta has found evidence of pre-industrial mercury pollution in ancient sediments from lakes in the Andes Mountains of Peru. The pollution was produced by the Inca during the large-scale production of the red pigment, vermilion, from cinnabar. “Once we radiocarbon-dated the cores, we realized it went back many, many centuries – a few millennia even – and that was pretty shocking. The idea that they were mining there as early as 1400 B.C. had never really been suggested before,” he said.   

Letters written by a boy who discovered a Roman villa in 1947 and protected it from developers have been uncovered in the archives of England’s Bristol City Museum. “I mean, both the builders, while digging drains and so forth, and the inhabitants of the houses, are absolutely bound to disturb the Roman stuff and certainly find all sorts of things,” wrote the young George Boon, who became a leader in Romano-British archaeology.   

Here’s more information on the almost complete, 47-million-year-old fossil that could be the common ancestor of all primates.  

Officials from the U.S. Joint Prisoners of War, Missing in Action, and Accounting Command (JPAC), and South Korea’s Agency for Killed in Action Recovery and Identification, are working together to excavate the remains of American soldiers killed in battle in June, 1951. JPAC archaeologist Jay Silverstein estimates it will take six months to identify the bones.  

The number of tourists traveling to Egypt has dropped. “Twelve-point-six percent of our total work force directly and indirectly works in the travel industry,” said Zoheir Garana, minister of tourism.   

Ornamental dentistry in Mesoamerica was available to men from all walks of life.

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

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