Gold jewelry, plates, and statues dating to the eighth and ninth centuries have been stolen from the Sonobudoyo Museum in Yogyakarta, Indonesia.

In Sarajevo, scientists working in the labs at the International Commission for Missing Persons try to identify missing persons from the bones recovered from mass graves around the world. They are also training Iraqi forensic archaeologists. “We see the issue of missing persons as something that stops reconciliation, that contributes to conflict,” said Adam boys, deputy head of the commission.  

Last week, Japan’s Prime Minister Naoto Kan promised to return a “small portion” of the artifacts that were taken from the Korean Peninsula during colonial rule. South Korea’s National Research Institute of Cultural Heritage estimates that 61,000 cultural items were moved to Japan.  

NPR investigates the development of communication in this installment of the series on human evolution. “We have no way of knowing exactly when or how people began to speak, or in the case of sign language, when they began to sign or to gesture in a way that was complex enough for us to consider it to have been language,” said David Armstrong, who has retired from Gallaudet University. 

Novelist Victor Hugo may have been inspired to create the character Quasimodo when he came across a French stone carver nicknamed M. Le Bossu, or hunchback, while they were both known to be in Paris in the early nineteenth century.  

A mass grave holding the remains of Irish immigrants who had been working on a section of railroad track near Philadelphia has been found. It had been thought that the 57 men in the camp all died of cholera in 1832, but bones uncovered at the site show signs of trauma. Anti-Irish prejudice, tension between residents and railroad workers, or fear of cholera may have prompted the murders.  

Two skeletons were uncovered by workers digging a gas line in Ontario. “If there are additional burials, then they may have to move the pipeline to a different location,” said archaeologist Martin Cooper.  

Archaeologists are excavating Moku’ula, a man-made sacred island used by Hawaii’s royal family. The ponds and canals around the island were drained and filled in by sugar planters in the early twentieth century. “From what we’ve found, it’s pretty intact,” said Janet Six of the University of Hawaii-Maui College.  

There’s more information on the robots that will investigate the interior of the Great Pyramid of Giza. “All the robots were designed from scratch to do as little damage to the shafts as possible,” said Shaun Whitehead, who is managing the project.  

Scientists from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute will create a 3D computer model of the RMS Titanic wreckage. “We’re going to treat it like an archaeological dig, and that’s never been done before at these depths,” said David Gallo.  

Retired archaeologist Alexandra Miller is examining a cluster of nineteenth-century buildings in San Antonio, Texas. She thinks one was fortified against Indian attacks, one may have served as a stagecoach stop, and one was a dancehall.

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

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