Hundreds of looted Italian artifacts returned from Switzerland have been put on display in Rome’s Colosseum.

Modern-day New Yorkers are asking questions about the eighteenth-century ship unearthed at Ground Zero. Was the ship involved in the slave trade, or could it have been a whaling ship?  More photographs of the excavation are available at Monsters and Critics.  

The stories of two Australian soldiers who died in 1916 at the Battle of Fromelles are told by Adelaide Now. Robert Courtney Green and Gregory Francis Stalgis will be laid to rest next Monday, along with other soldiers whose skeletal remains were recovered from mass graves near the French battlefield. “Even if some of them have not been named, 250 soldiers who fought and died in that battle and who have been lost for all these years will now finally be remembered,” said Louise Loe of Oxford Archaeology.  John Charles Bowden is remembered in The Age.   

A piece of sandstone carved with two pairs of concentric circles in the later Neolithic era was found in the Cambridgeshire village of Over. It is the first time the motif has been found in eastern England. “The big question in the case of the Over stone is whether we should actually be calling it meaningful art, or if it amounted to no more than Neolithic doodling. Either way it’s a great find,” said Chris Evans of the University of Cambridge.  

In Hampshire, England, a bronze representation of Harpocrates, the god of secrecy and silence, was found on a charcoal-burning brazier at the Roman city of Silchester. “The brazier, the sort of thing you would expect to find in Pompeii, is the first evidence of such a luxurious item from Roman Britain,” said Mike Fulford of the University of Reading.  

Excavation of London’s first successful theater, where William Shakespeare’s plays were performed, has revealed a curved wall made of bricks and a patch of hard-pressed gravel, where people with cheap tickets stood to watch the show. The traces of “The Theater” will be displayed under glass as part of a new theater to be built on the site.  

Jim West of the Quartz Hill School of Theology and other scholars offer criticism of archaeologist Eilat Mazar’s claim that an inscribed shard she uncovered is the oldest known written document ever found in Jerusalem. “My primary concern is that archaeology is being turned to political use and as nothing but a means to raise funds for ideologically driven projects. This certainly seems to be the case in the City of David dig,” West said.  

Whiskey distilled at Mount Vernon, according to George Washington’s recipe, is now on sale. “This is frankly a lot like white lightning,” said Dennis Pogue, vice president for preservation at Mount Vernon.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Friday, July 16, 2010. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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