Experts are busy decoding the clay tablets inscribed with cuneiform that were discovered in an Assyrian palace in southeastern Turkey last summer. “You’re really getting at the nitty gritty of the management of the empire through these kind of records,” commented Melinda Zeder of the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.

The Independent, a British newspaper, tells the story of the Rosetta Stone and the quest of Zahi Hawass, head of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, to get the British Museum to relinquish it.   This article on the Rosetta Stone by the Associated Foreign Press contains more quotes from Hawass.   

A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences says that corn grains from five sites in Arizona and New Mexico are too old to have been brought north by migrating Mesoamerican farmers. The authors think corn was probably passed from group to group of Southwestern hunter gatherers. “We think the Southwest stands as a region in which indigenous foragers adopted crops and made the transition to agriculture locally rather than having been joined or displaced by in-migrating farming societies,” said Gayle Fritz of Washington University in St. Louis.  

A University of Washington student unearthed a projectile point estimated to be between 4,000 and 6,700 years old while doing some landscaping work near a greenhouse on the Seattle campus.

Hotels in the Maya world are taking advantage of the publicity accompanying the release of the movie 2012 and offering “Doomsday” tourist packages.   

The city of Ottawa will have to decide what to do with the 2,000-year-old artifacts being excavated from a site near the Rideau River. Two bands of Algonquins have filed competing claims for the stone tools, animal bones, and pottery.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Wednesday, December 9, 2009. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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