Traces of a temple dedicated to the Greek goddess Nemesis have been uncovered near the Aegean Sea in Izmir, Turkey. “It might be under the Hurriyet Anatolian High School building. We hope to unearth it in coming years,” said Akin Ersoy of Dokuz Eylul University.

Two 5,000-year-old rock-cut tombs were unearthed in Malta.  

Roger Atwood, a contributing editor at ARCHAEOLOGY, thinks that the best way to combat looting in rural areas is to enlist the help of local people. He has written an op-ed piece about the success of this approach in Peru for The New York Times.   

Six people died near Egypt’s Giza Pyramids when the hole they were digging beneath a house collapsed on them. They had been searching for buried antiquities.  

Iran’s Cultural Heritage Organization has given the British Museum two months to deliver the “Cyrus Cylinder” for an agreed upon loan. “If within this period this pledge is not honored then all agreements in archaeological research, trade fairs and so on with Britain might be harmed,” said Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Hassan Qashqavi.  

France has confirmed that it will return five fragments of Egyptian tomb paintings thought to have been stolen from Luxor. Egypt has suspended cooperation with the Louvre Museum until the matter is settled.  

Roughly 16 inches of sediment were deposited by a tsunami off the coast Israel when a volcano erupted between 1630 and 1550 B.C. on the Greek isle of Santorini, some 600 miles away. These new sediment cores, collected by Beverly Goodman of the Interuniversity Institute for Marine Sciences, support the idea that the tsunami had “a very real impact on coastal settlements,” in the eastern Mediterranean, and “might have been part of the fabric of the Atlantis story.”  

Archaeology students are investigating Union Siege Battery 8 in Port Hudson, Louisiana, at the last Confederate stronghold on the Mississippi River, known as “Fort Desperate.”  

Meet archaeologist Patrick McGovern of the University of Pennsylvania-he’s well known for recreating ancient beverages.  

PCB dredging in the Hudson River exposed timbers from Fort Edward, and an early nineteenth-century canal boat. “I’d give a near guarantee that more sites are going to be found downriver,” said Adam Kane of the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum.  

Will the world end in 2012, along with the 13^th Baktun of the Maya calendar? “If I went to some Mayan-speaking communities and asked people what is going to happen in 2012, they wouldn’t have any idea,” said archaeologist Jose Huchim.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Tuesday, October 13, 2009. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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