A campsite in southern Jordan that was used by Lawrence of Arabia’s army during the 1916-1918 Great Arab Revolt has yielded two tobacco containers, bullets, cartridges and their clips, and British military buttons.

The skeleton of a person who suffered from a rare bone disease has been uncovered at a monastery hospital in east Iceland. “We have found many cases of syphilis and tuberculosis but this one is different as the disease causes overgrowth and deformation of the bones,” said archaeologist Steinunn Kristjansdottir. The hospital was in use between 1490 and 1550.  

Sit in on a class at the University of Wisconsin-Madison with archaeologist Jonathan Mark Kenoyer. He helps his students to understand ancient technologies by encouraging them to experiment with making stone and metal tools, beads, oil lamps, pottery, arrows, and more.  

Karina Croucher of the University of Manchester says that the arrival of Westerners caused the destruction of Easter Island civilization. “There is little archaeological evidence to support the history of internal warfare and collapse before contact with the outside world,” she said.  

Recent work at Ohio’s Fort Ancient, including new computer models of the 2,000-year-old earthworks, indicate that its gateway was aligned with the rising sun on the summer solstice. At the center of the mounds, archaeologist Robert Riordan has found evidence of rings of wooden timbers, a circle of reddish burned soil, pottery fragments, and signs that someone lived there. “I think this was the ceremonial center of Fort Ancient for a period of time,” he said.  

Photographs of the Moche sacrificial chamber discovered at Peru’s Huaca Bandera site are available at National Geographic Daily News.  

Using a magnetometer, Parks Canada archaeologists have found the three graves belonging to crew members of HMS Investigator on Banks Island. The men died during the two years that the ship was trapped in the ice at Mercy Bay while searching for the lost Franklin Expedition. The archaeologists have also located a cache of provisions from the ship’s stores.  

A total of more than 36,000 artifacts have been recovered and returned to Iraq in the past seven years.  

Excavations on St. Ivan Island, a Bulgarian island in the Black Sea, have unearthed a reliquary built into the altar of a church. The reliquary is presumed to hold bones of the Christian saint John the Baptist.

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

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