Sgt. Ronald Peters, a geospatial analyst with Multi-National Corps-Iraq C-7, is creating new maps of 800 of Iraq’s archaeological sites.

CT scans of skull fragments unearthed at the royal cemetery at Ur show that the palace attendants had died when a sharp instrument had been driven into their heads. It had been thought that the many attendants buried at Ur had been poisoned. The new study is part of an exhibition at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.  

Government conservation of synagogues in Cairo has become a political issue. “Jewish sites are an important part of our heritage, and we place as much importance on the maintenance and development of the Jewish temples as we do to the mosques and the churches in Egypt,” said Zahi Hawass, Egypt’s chief archaeologist.  

Is Thatcham the oldest continuously inhabited place in Britain?  

Further study of a statue fragment found in England in the 1960s suggests that it came from a statue of Nero as a teenager. Only two other statues of Nero have ever been found. “This is exciting as it indicates that there may have been links between the Chichester area and one of the most famous Roman emperors of all time,” said Miles Russell, who completed the laser scan.  

Turkey’s Emali coins are on display at the Antalya Archaeology Museum. The coins had been smuggled out of the country in 1984.  

An eighteenth-century tombstone was found during the renovation of Washington Square Park in New York City. The area was once a cemetery.  

Conservation of headstones at a church cemetery in Elizabeth, New Jersey, has revealed information about figures from the Revolutionary War. “Some of the stones have gunshot marks from the British using them as target practice,” said archaeologist Seth Gartland.  

Svante Paabo, director of genetics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, has analyzed the Neanderthal genome. He says he knows that Neanderthals and modern humans got together. “I’m sure that they had sex, but did it give offspring that contributed to us? We will be able to answer quite rigorously with the new [Neanderthal genome] sequence,” he told conference attendees.  

The new movie Amelia will open soon. Here’s what archaeologists think happened to aviator Amelia Earhart.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Tuesday, October 27, 2009. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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