Ronny Reich of the Israel Antiquities Authority announced that a 79-foot section of 3,700-year-old, 26-foot tall fortification wall built by the Canaanites has been exposed. “When you just stand there and see it, it is amazing,” he said.

Researchers in Israel have developed a pattern-recognition algorithm that identifies letters, words, and handwriting styles in ancient manuscripts, and can recreate portions of texts that have faded or have been reused by later scribes. “When enough texts have been digitized, it will manage to combine fragments of books that have been scattered all over the world,” said Uri Ehrich, an expert in ancient texts.  

The glass-topped casket that once held the body of 14-year-old lynching victim Emmett Till will be displayed at the Smithsonian Institution’s new National Museum of African American History and Culture. Lonnie Bunch, director of the museum, called it a key artifact of the civil rights movement.  

Volunteers are assisting in the search for Camp Security, a Revolutionary War prisoner camp in York, Pennsylvania. So far, diggers have unearthed nineteenth-century artifacts and a nest of locusts.  

Volunteers were also on hand to paddle a replica of a 3,000-year-old logboat, carved with replicas of Bronze Age tools and their modern equivalents, about Scotland’s Loch Tay.  

Reports from China have claimed that 100 more terracotta warriors had been found at the Terracotta Army Museum in Shaanxi Province, but an official from the museum says it’s more likely that there are just ten figures in the new excavation pit.  

Prehistoric tools were unearthed on Smuttynose Island, Maine. “We always suspected that native peoples may have stopped at the Shoals before the seventeenth-century fishing station was established, but now we have clear evidence for their presence,” said Robin Hadlock Seeley, assistant director of the Shoals Marine Laboratory and co-director of the Isles of Shoals archaeology project.  

A commercial diver has found the 500-pound brass bell used to greet people coming to Coney Island by steamboat. The bell sank into the ocean during a fire in 1911.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Wednesday, September 2, 2009. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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