A royal garden dating to the seventh century B.C. has been discovered near Jerusalem. The garden was irrigated and decorated with carved stone gutters, open channels, closed tunnels, and waterfalls.

An article in Historical Archaeology tells how railroad officials diverted a new rail line around New Philadelphia, Illinois, the first town in the U.S. to have been “planned, platted and legally registered by an African American” in the early nineteenth century. “The last explanation standing is that PCRC officials, who were based in Hannibal, a slave-market town, did not want to see New Philadelphia thrive as a depot town,” said lead author Christopher Fennell of the University of Illinois.  

Scott Dawson of Hatteras Island is a descendant of the Croatoan, the American Indian group often blamed for the disappearance of the English “Lost Colony” in the sixteenth century. Dawson has his own ideas about what happened to the colonists, and his research has prompted an archaeological investigation. “The two drops of Croatoan blood that I have have boiled over. I want the history of this tribe and this island to stop being ignored,” he exclaimed.  

The private family cemetery where Confederate General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson’s left arm was supposedly buried in 1863 is now open to the public as part of Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park in Virginia.  

Conservators from Poland are working at the Hama Museum in Syria to restore frescos from a temple of Mithras.  

Red, yellow, and orange pigments have been detected on 5,000-year-old buildings at a Neolithic village in Orkney. “We have found seven stones in this ritual center. Some of them were covered in paint and others appear to have had designs such as chevrons and zig zags painted on,” elaborated Nick Card of the Orkney Research Center for Archaeology.  

A tomb complex thought to be 5,000 years old has also been discovered on Orkney. “Potentially these skeletons could tell us so much about Neolithic people,” said Orkney Islands Council archaeologist Julie Gibson. The tomb was accidentally damaged during landscaping work.  

Metal objects packed away in a pottery container were removed intact from a field in Essex, England. 

Bulgarian scholars say that the statue removed from a backyard belonging to treasure hunters is not of Aphrodite, as the police thought at first, but a Roman sculpture of an ordinary woman.  

Archaeologists in Connecticut used ground-penetrating radar to search a historic cemetery for “wolf stones,” which were used to protect fresh graves from the hungry predators.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Monday, November 1, 2010. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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