A five-foot-tall quartzite statue was found by maintenance workers near the smallest of Giza’s three main pyramids.

The widow of an American antiquities collector has returned 8,100 “black-market artifacts” to the government of Mexico. Her dentist husband started collecting in the 1930s. Marco Antonio Santos, head of the Xochicalco archaeological zone, said that some of the objects had been “crudely glued with dentistry material.”   The Associated Press offers more photographs of the objects, but very little information.   Here’s another interesting photograph.  

The storm surge from Hurricane Ike could be responsible for revealing a Civil War-era shipwreck near Galveston, Texas. The bays around Galveston are being scanned with sonar to chart debris from the storm. “This is the first time I know there’s been such widespread coverage,” said state marine archaeologist Steve Hoyt.  

The sale of two Chinese bronze animal heads is scheduled to take place this morning at Christie’s auction house in Paris. The heads were taken from the Summer Palace in Beijing by French troops in 1860. 

Excavations at the site of Latta University in Raleigh, North Carolina, have uncovered tools used to teach blacksmithing, carpentry, and brick laying to underprivileged and orphaned African-American children in the late nineteenth century.   

A gun emplacement dating to the 1830s has been unearthed during road construction in Bermuda’s Dockyard. “This discovery will cause us to re-evaluate other gun emplacements in the Dockyard, which were thought to be originals from the 1830s, but are now probably from the rearmament of the Dockyard in the 1870s,” said Edward Harris, director of the Bermuda Maritime Museum.  

The construction of a new water line in Kentucky has turned up human bones. Archaeologist David Pollack recommended that the water line be rerouted and that the homeowner preserve the cemetery in his front yard.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Wednesday, February 25, 2009. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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