When ancient artifacts are uncovered in the Gaza Strip, they often end up on the black market. “Gaza was at the crossroads of Africa, Asia, and Europe, and there is a great accumulation of human civilization here. But we don’t have our own specialists so we can’t manage the sites professionally,” said Mohammed al-Agha, Hamas minister of tourism and antiquities.

Ice melt in Canada’s Northwest Territories has revealed ancient hunting tools. “The implements are truly amazing. There are wooden arrows and dart shafts so fine you can’t believe someone sat down with a stone and made them,” said Tom Andrews of the Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Center. 

The Land of Punt has been found, according to analysis of the hair of a mummified baboon housed in the British Museum. Ancient Egyptians traded with Punt, also thought of as “God’s Land,” for fragrances, giraffes, electrum, and other exotic goods, in addition to baboons. “We think Punt is a sort of circumscribed region that includes eastern Ethiopia and all of Eritrea,” said Nathaniel Dominy of the University of California, Santa Cruz.  

Zahi Hawass, Egypt’s antiquities chief, spoke with ARTINFO.com about “Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs,” a museum show now in New York City.  

Archaeologists and volunteers in Delaware have excavated Avery’s Rest, a late seventeenth-century homestead near Rehoboth Bay. They uncovered two wells, a cellar to a storage building, plaster from the house’s walls, livestock bones, nails, pipes, a key, pottery, and other colonial artifacts.   

In South Carolina, 9,000-year-old campsites, including sandstone hearths, tools and projectile points made of quartz, and pottery, have been uncovered at Fort Jackson, now a U.S. Army base. “You were not supposed to find stuff like this in the sand hills,” said Chuck Cantley of the Department of Archives and History. It had been thought that Archaic period people stayed close to major waterways.  

A final report is said to confirm that some of the artifacts unearthed at a hunter-gatherer site in Tasmania are 40,000 years old. 

On Tasmania’s west coast, archaeologists uncovered the British penal settlement of Sarah Island.  

Effigy Mounds National Monument in Marquette, Iowa, may have been damaged by the construction of a maintenance shed and a boardwalk trail installed near the visitor center. “We didn’t mean to do anything wrong, but we did,” said Phyllis Ewing, Effigy Mounds Superintendent.  

There’s more information on the discovery of a Purepecha city on Lake Patzcuaro in Mexico. “We are not excavating and are more concerned with the mapping and preservation of the site at the moment,” said Christopher Fisher of Colorado State University. 

Here’s a travel article about Calakmul, located on the west side of the Yucatan Peninsula.  

You can visit Teotihuacan, located north of Mexico City, with this video from BBC News.

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

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