Ameruddin Askarzai will receive a medal from Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai, for his role in protecting the Bactrian Gold from the Taliban. Askarzai, who works for the country’s central bank, also controls the key to the presidential vault at the presidential palace, where the artifacts had been hidden. “I didn’t want them to take the gold outside of the country and sell it. It belongs to the people of Afghanistan,” he explained.

Chinese historian Chen Jingyuan thinks that the massive terracotta army buried at Xi’an may not have belonged to Qin Shihuang, but his ancestor, Empress Xuan. “The hairstyle, the ancient Chinese characters found on some unearthed warriors, and other evidence indicates the owner of the warriors was Empress Xuan,” he said. Critics point out that the soldier’s weapons are inscribed with the name of Qin’s prime minister.  

A gold-banded dagger was one of the artifacts found in a 4,000-year-old cist tomb unearthed in Forteviot, Scotland. “It is also incredibly rare to find some kind of animal skin wrapped around the dagger. The metal is in good condition. It’s a spectacular and unusual find,” said Kenneth Brophy of the University of Glasgow.  

The first traces of Jewish culture in Lycia have been uncovered by archaeologists from Turkey’s Akdeniz University. The artifacts date to the third century A.D.  

Here’s more information on the prehistoric dwelling discovered during airport construction in Great Britain’s Isle of Man. Artifacts from the site include burnt hazelnut shell mounds, hammer and anvil stones, and flint tools. “There were presumably so many hazelnuts near the house as a result of processing and consumption of these within the building,” said project manager Fraser Brown.  

A 6,000-year-old building has been unearthed from a prehistoric peat bog in London, near the Thames River. “The discovery of the earliest timber structure yet found in the London Basin is an incredibly exciting find,” said Diccon Hart, who directed the excavation.  

A large trading post from the early Viking period has been found in Norway.  

Bone analysis suggests that a taste for seafood may have given Homo sapiens an edge over the Neanderthals in northern Europe. “It seems modern humans had a much broader diet, in terms of using fish or aquatic birds, which Neanderthals didn’t seem to do,” said Michael Richards of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, and the University of British Columbia. It is known that Neanderthals in southern Europe ate seals and dolphins.  

Neanderthals and modern humans shared a gene that gives the ability to taste bitter flavors.  

Castle moats were not just defensive constructions, according to two recent studies.  

A large seventeenth-century pewter serving plate, discovered 100 years ago by a local farmer, has been returned to the medieval Mount Grace Priory in Yorkshire, England, by his grandson. “Whilst my mother fed ducks from the plate, she also knew it was pretty old, even guessing, wrongly as it seems, that it could have been used by the monks,” said Arthur Dent, aged 73.  

Jordan Emmett, aged 8, spotted a 5,000-year-old Newnan projectile point, once used to hunt small game, at a Florida construction site. “I saw a red thing sticking up and I brought it home,” he said. He has since put the point on permanent loan at the Safety Harbor Museum of Regional History.  

The conservation of ancient bronze statues pulled from the sea could help scientists develop metals resistant to “biofouling,” the accumulation of sea creatures that eat away at metal ships’ hulls.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Wednesday, August 12, 2009. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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