Destruction of the largest Indian Mound in Alabama’s Choccolocco Vally continues. The city of Oxford’s mayor, Leon Smith, is promoting the construction project, and his “campaign has financial connections to firms involved in the $2.6 million no-bid project,” to build a Sam’s Club on the site, according to the Online Magazine of the Institute for Southern Studies. “What it’s going to be is more prettier than it is today,” the mayor insists.

Archaeological monuments and natural wonders are threatened by “a greed that infantilizes rather than enhances experience,” according to Telegraph travel writer Michael Kerr. The Agra Development Authority wants to “enhance visitor experience” at the Taj Mahal by surrounding it with ropewalks, a suspension bridge, cable cars, and a Ferris wheel.  

Warning! Watching these top ten most historically inaccurate movies could leave you seriously misinformed.  

Here’s another article on the new “hobbit” study by Debbie Argue of Australian National University. “Our cladistic analysis created two very similar evolutionary trees which establish a very early origin for H. floresiensis back around the emergence of the very first members of the Homo family. This suggests that H. floresiensis was not a sick modern human, not even a very close relative,” she explains.  

A total of 26 sets of human remains have been disinterred at a high-school construction site in California. A Bay Miwok village was probably located nearby. The bones will be reburied at the Ohlones Indian Cemetery.  

Excavations continue on Roanoke Island by the First Colony Foundation. Last year the team unearthed a copper necklace, a Venetian bead, and a delftware pottery shard.  

The Israel Antiquities Authority will begin to register private antiquities collectors, according to a law passed in 2002. The IAA estimates that more than 100,000 citizens possess more than 15 artifacts, but only several hundred of them are registered.  

It seems that there is an Egyptian bust from the New Kingdom period that is the spitting image of the late “King of Pop,” Michael Jackson. The sculpture is housed at Chicago’s Field Museum.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Wednesday, August 5, 2009. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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