Two anthropologists from the University of Utah speculate that people could have traveled to the Americas via Canada’s High Arctic islands and the Northwest Passage 25,000 years ago. “As neither archaeological nor genetic data have yet been able to unequivocally resolve many of the long-standing questions regarding American colonization, the generation of new models and hypotheses to which new and more powerful analyses may be applied is essential,” wrote Dennis O’Rourke and Jennifer Raff in Current Biology. 

The United States returned another batch of cultural artifacts to Iraq this week, including ancient artifacts and a rifle bearing Saddam Hussein’s image.  

An intact Roman burial urn was unearthed at a construction site in Cullompton, England.  

Roman-era skeletal remains uncovered in York, England, in 1901 have been shown to have been a woman of African origin. She had been buried with jet and elephant ivory jewelry and a blue glass jug.  Up to twenty percent of York’s Roman-era population was probably immigrants. “We’re looking at a population mix which is much closer to contemporary Britain than previous historians had suspected,” said Hella Eckhardt of Reading University.  

The African Burial Ground Visitor Center will open tomorrow in Lower Manhattan, inside a General Services Administration federal office building. The cemetery, which is marked as the “Negros Burial Ground” on a map dated 1755, was uncovered during construction in 1991.    

Archaeologists from China and Kenya will search for Ming Dynasty shipwrecks off the east coast of Africa. The ships are thought to have been part of a trade fleet led by Admiral Zheng He that landed in 1418.  

Seven tourists who had been viewing Peru’s Nazca Lines were killed when their plane crashed.  

Visitors will be able to take a peek at the excavation of the “House of the Chaste Lovers” in Pompeii. “This is the first house being excavated in Pompeii after many years. Visitors will be able to observe the dig process as it happens. Several pieces of Pompeii’s daily life are going to emerge,” said Marcello Fiori, Pompeii’s emergency commissioner.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Friday, February 26, 2010. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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