The state of Arizona has closed five of its 30 state parks due to budget shortfalls, including Homolovi Ruins State Park, home to 500 ancestral Hopi sites. “We as the Hopi tribe are very concerned about the protection of the place first and foremost, and that’s kind of the scary part right now,” said Susan Secakuku, a member of the Hopi tribe and a former archaeologist at the site.

A small Roman-era sarcophagus and a sheet of gold depicting the four sons of Horus have been unearthed at a construction site in Egypt. “We are sure (the mummy) is female. Either she was a small woman, and mummies always shrink, or she could have been a young woman,” said Zahi Hawass, Egypt’s head of antiquities. 

Does the fossil skull of a juvenile male hominid dubbed Australopithecus sediba contain a remnant of his brain? A preliminary scan has revealed an odd cavity near the front of the rock-encased skull. “One way to explain that cavity is that when this individual died, it was mummified, and the mummification made the brain shrink by losing water, leading to an odd shape. Later you had water with sediment come up, fossilizing the individual and filling the brain case, but you still had that brain remnant inside,” explained paleoanthropologist Paul Tafforeau of the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility.  

The British government is allowing the sale of some 1,000 artifacts from the collection of antiquities dealer Robin Symes, who is being investigated by the Italian government. “Many of the antiquities are Etruscan and could only have been found in Italy. They left Italy illegally because they would require an export license,” explained Colin Renfrew of Cambridge University.  

Germany’s Roman and Pelizaeus Museum will loan the life-sized seated statue of Hemiunu to Egypt for the opening of the Grand Egyptian Museum in 2013. Zahi Hawass, head of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, has called for the stature to be returned to Egypt, but Kristina Zappen of the museum says that there has never been an official request. “Every item in our collection arrived in Germany legally,” she added.  

A cache of silver coins dating from 1780 to 1796 was unearthed by a laborer in the northeastern Indian state of Assam. The pot holding the coins broke open when it was hit with a spade, and authorities aren’t sure if the cache is intact.  

Curators at Monticello often examine objects thought to have belonged to Thomas Jefferson, but only one out of every 20 items turns out to be authentic. “I think that one of the happiest days for me was when a woman arrived at Monticello with a little book tucked in her hand bag and it turned out to be what we think is one of Jefferson’s earliest copies of Ovid,” said senior curator Susan Stein.  

Get your ancient Greek makeovers here! A DVD documenting the Caryatid Hairstyling Project, directed by Katherine Schwab of Fairfield University, is now available.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Monday, April 12, 2010. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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