Eric Schmidt, chief executive of Google, traveled to Baghdad to announce that his company will create a virtual copy of the collections held at Iraq’s National Museum. The images will be available to the public for free early next year, and are promised to be more extensive than the digital project funded by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. 

More than 200 Parthian artifacts were recovered from a multilevel tomb in Iraq. “It is not the first time the pick-axes of foreign and Iraq scientists strike Parthian treasures. But this time Iraqi pick-axes have brought to light the largest and the finest Parthian grave which has astonished and surprised us,” said Qais Hassan, acting head of Iraq’s Antiquities Department.  

A second Babylonian seal inscribed in cuneiform has been found at Tal El-Daba’a by the Austrian Archaeological Institute in Cairo and the Egyptology Institute of the University of Vienna. The two seals are 150 years older than similar seals uncovered at Tal al-Amarna. 

 Here’s more on the Aegean-style frescoes discovered at the Canaanite palace of Tel Kabri. “Canaanite excavations always find art that recalls the Mesopotamian culture dominant then. But not this palace, these people were looking to Greece,” explained Eric Cline of George Washington University.   

A team of underwater archaeologists has found a long-lost stern-wheeler that carried miners and supplies during the Klondike Gold Rush at the bottom of Lake Laberge in northern Canada. The A.J. Goddard is “literally a frozen moment in time,” according to James P. Delgado of Texas A&M University.  

Archaeologist Melinda Bell has described her experiences working for the Antarctic Heritage Trust at the Robert Scott base on Ross Island. The Trust cares for the artifacts left behind by Scott’s expedition to the South Pole in 1911. “It is very scheduled, which is actually good when you get to the middle of winter and you are trying to regulate your body to 24 hours of darkness,” she said.  

Sewers may be “out of the question” for neighborhoods just north of Warwick Neck, Rhode Island. Excavations conducted during the past three years have revealed artifacts ranging from 3,000 years ago to the 1600s. “The Native American findings are so significant that this project could be held up for five years or more,” said Councilman John DelGiudice.  

BBC News correspondent Christine Finn traveled to Indonesia to look for the home of Java Man.  

View pictures of the Jewish catacombs beneath Rome’s Villa Torlonia at About.com. Archaeologist Simona Morretta says that the catacombs will open to the public when safety issues are resolved.   

Rome’s police commander of the special unit for antiquities, Captain Gianpietro Romano, trained 95 Bulgarian prosecutors, police officers, and Ministry of Culture officials. “It is naïve to think that any country in the world is capable of dealing with the international trafficking in antiques on its own,” he said in an interview.  

Bulgarian archaeologist Nikolay Ovcharov has big plans to recreate the palace of Tsar Simeon the Great on a small scale in the medieval capital of Veliki Preslav. “I don’t think we need to make up legends to attract tourists because Tsar Simeon is legendary but is not just a legend,” he said.  

Did humans wipe out the earth’s megafauna? The Guardian has an explanation of of the research conducted by Jacquelyn Gill of the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She thinks that large mammals faced extinction as many as 2,000 years before Clovis hunters invented their deadly weapons.   

Read about the Blue Santas, discovered in 2002 at the site of the first American toy factory in Akron, Ohio. The American Marble and Toy Manufacturing Company mass produced the Santas in the 1890s.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Tuesday, November 24, 2009. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

Comments posted here do not represent the views or policies of the Archaeological Institute of America.