Yale University president Richard Levin and the Peruvian minister of foreign relations have signed a new memorandum of understanding, indicating that Yale will return all of the Machu Picchu artifacts collected by Hiram Bingham in the early twentieth century. “The new agreement … does designate that Peruvian law will apply, which is fitting, since all of the material will be moved to Peru on a short timetable,” said Yale vice president and general counsel Dorothy Robinson. 

The review committee of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act has ordered the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology to return 40 objects to the Hoonah T’akdeintaan clan of Alaska. Most of the sacred objects were purchased for the museum in 1924. “The next step is up to the University of Pennsylvania museum to decide whether they’re going to repatriate them or whether we’re going to have to end up taking them to federal court,” said Marlene Johnson, a T’akdeintaan elder.  

American troops headed to Iraq received a tour of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology from Archaeological Institute of America President C. Brian Rose. The soldiers have been instructed to thwart looters and preserve museums and mosques. “You are playing a fundamental role in keeping the culture of these nations alive, and therefore a fundamental role in keeping the nations alive,” Rose told them.  

The burials of 400 people have been uncovered on Egypt’s Giza Plateau. The graves lacked goods, and the skeletons show signs of poor nutrition, fractures, and dislocations.  

A new study of Queen Arsinoë’s crown suggests that she ruled Egypt as a pharaoh and high priestess, equal to her brother and husband, 200 years before her descendant, Cleopatra, wore the same crown.  

A seventeenth-century ship was unearthed in central Stockholm, at a site that was once a naval shipyard.  

Canadian archaeologists continue to look for the wreckage of the HMS Terror, which sank during the ill-fated Franklin expedition in the 1840s. The Terror also fought against the U.S. during the War of 1812.  

The hull of the seventeenth-century French ship La Belle will soon enter a freeze-dryer at Texas A&M University. La Belle was discovered in Matagorda Bay in 1995.  

The only remaining American battleship to have survived both World War I and World War II is rusting away in Texas. Preliminary tests are underway to try to preserve it. “We’ve got one shot, and we’ve got to do it right,” said project manager Neil Thomas.  

A small Neolithic farm has been unearthed in Scotland, at the site of a new bridge across the Firth of Forth.  

An archaeological investigation at Thomas Jefferson’s Poplar Forest will help conservators restore the house to Jefferson’s original vision. “He writes about it but never actually sketched it like he did at Monticello,” said Jack Gary, director of archaeology and landscapes at Poplar Forest.  

New Jersey’s lieutenant governor wants a colonial-era archaeological site on the statehouse grounds filled in because she says it is an eyesore. Archaeologist Richard Hunter, who directed the dig in 2008, declined to comment on the issue, although Richard Patterson, director of the Old Barracks Museum, defended keeping the site open, saying “It is a very compelling location and fascinates the hell out of the public.”  

Here’s more information of the budget cuts faced by archaeologists in the United Kingdom. 

The Bishop Museum will make its online database of Hawaiian archaeological sites available to the public.  

In the humans vs. climate-change arguments for the extinction of megafauna, a Russian father-and-son team living in northern Siberia says that humans interrupted the region’s ecological balance by hunting mammoths, eventually driving them to extinction 10,000 years ago. “We don’t look at animals just as animals. We look at them as a system, with vegetation and the whole ecosystem. You don’t need to kill all the animals to kill an ecosystem,” explained Nikita Zimov.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Monday, November 29, 2010. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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