A mass grave containing the skeletons of 51 horses has been uncovered in the Netherlands. The bones date from the seventeenth century. “It is easy to imagine this is how cavalry men might dispose of dead mounts in war time,” said contract archaeologist Angela Simons.

A team of scientists from the U.S. and Britain has used imaging technology to read a letter written by nineteenth-century Africa explorer David Livingstone. It had been written on pages torn from books with ink made from berry seeds.  

Scientists are calling people’s adaptation to living in Tibet’s high altitude “the fastest genetic change ever observed in humans.” According to Rasmus Nielsen of the University of California, Berkeley, “For such a very strong change, a lot of people would have had to die simply due to the fact that they had the wrong version of a gene.”  

A bronze tablet bearing a woman’s face discovered in central Israel 13 years ago is part of a 3,200-year-old linchpin from an Egyptian chariot. “Such an identification reinforces the claim that a high-ranking Egyptian or local ruler was based at this location,” said Adam Zertal of the University of Haifa.  

An entire African-American village has been located near Rancocas Creek in New Jersey, where archaeologists have located the graves of 13 African-American Civil War troops. “We have the opportunity here to see a total African-American community over time. How it was like here in the 1830s. How it was like here in the 1870s. How it was like at the turn of the century and during Jim Crow. How it was like in the ‘20s and ‘30s, all the way to World War II. This is very exciting stuff,” said site manager Christopher Barton.  

Researchers at Parks Canada will resume their search for the HMS Erebus and the HMS Terror in the High Arctic. Sir John Franklin’s ships went missing more than 160 years ago. “There’s little doubt that Franklin’s lost ships are probably the most sought-after shipwrecks in Canada,” said marine archaeologist Ryan Harris.  

National Public Radio will begin a series on human evolution next week.  

A New Mexico man was sentenced to one year probation, including six months home detention, for looting archaeological resources from the Gila National Forest. He will also have to hand over the artifacts and pay to have them repaired and restored.  

Archaeologists will try not to disturb the Pillar of Eliseg, a ninth-century monument, while they investigate a possible Bronze Age burial mound beneath it. The pillar was placed on top of the burial mound in the eighteenth century.  

Here’s another theory on King Tut’s health problems.  

German historian Christoph Schafer of the University of Trier thinks that Cleopatra committed suicide by drinking a lethal potion—not by inviting an asp to bite her. “Ancient papyri show that the Egyptians knew about poisons, and one papyrus says Cleopatra actually tested them,” he said.  

There’s been a rumor that a Roman woman unearthed in Hereford, England, had been a gladiator. She was rather “merely a woman of ‘considerable stature’ representing a lifetime of hard work.”  Could that rumor have been started by the Daily Mail?

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Friday, July 2, 2010. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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