After years of dispute, Yale University has reportedly agreed to return to Peru more than 4,000 artifacts taken from Machu Picchu by Hiram Bingham between 1911 and 1915. “We are very pleased that Yale University has responded so positively,” said Peru’s President Alan Garcia. 

A pool that was part of a bath house built by Rome’s Tenth Legion has been discovered in Jerusalem. “It is very important because in all the excavations in the Jewish quarter (we have) never found a building from the second and third century,” said Ofer Sion, director of all excavations in the Jewish quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City.  

Cave art in Wisconsin may offer a clue to the disappearance of the Effigy Mound people 1,000 years ago. The images of hunters with bows and arrows shooting at deer, some with fawns in their abdomens, could indicate that the human population outstripped their primary food source.  

A 3,000-year-old pit containing apricot and melon seeds has been uncovered in southeast China. The cellar was probably used to preserve fruits for aristocrats, according to Sun Zhouyong of the Shaanxi Provincial Institute of Archaeology.  

Fragments of guns thought to date to the fifteenth century have been found in North Yorkshire, England, at a War of the Roses battlefield. It was not uncommon for such early guns to explode in the user’s hands. “We have fragments of handguns that exploded during the Battle of Towton – how rare can you get? It’s unbelievable,” exclaimed archaeologist Tim Sutherland.  

Jamaica’s government has not signed the 1972 UNESCO Convention prohibiting the illicit trade of antiquities, and artifacts are leaving the country without any way to protect them. The Archaeological Society of Jamaica wants to heighten awareness of the importance of artifacts to the country’s heritage. “There are persons out there, in the farms, etc, who’re digging up artifacts, they don’t know what they are. They just think these are things that are bothering their crops, so they just throw them away. If they understood that this was a part of their heritage, then they would say, ‘wow,’” explained Ivor Conolley, head of the Archaeological Society of Jamaica.  

The recent auction of a bronze Roman cavalry helmet in England has people asking questions about The Treasure Act, which defines treasure in terms of the value of the metal. “It is strange that a national treasure can be sold at public auction by an anonymous vendor to an anonymous buyer,” said Lord Renfrew of Kaimsthorn, a former professor of archaeology at Cambridge University.  

Nushin Arbabzadah argues in The Guardian that a fifth-century Buddhist monastery unearthed to the north of Kabul should be preserved in order to help provide the Afghan people with a secular identity based upon a pre-Islamic past. “It is only through such evidence that Afghans can fully understand who they are in addition to being Muslims,” she writes.  It has been almost ten years since the Taliban destroyed the Buddhas of Bamiyan.  

Italy’s cinemas, concert halls, and theaters closed today in protest against cuts to the culture budget, after the collapse of the House of the Gladiators in Pompeii. “I would like to draw the government’s attention to another collapse that risks irreversibly disfiguring our country: that of live performances,” said Sergio Escobar, director of Milan’s Piccolo Theater.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Monday, November 22, 2010. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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