Archaeologist Bill Kelso announced that the location of the 1608 church at Virginia’s Jamestown fort has been found. His team has excavated the deep holes where its timber columns stood, and discovered a row of graves in the area that would have been the church’s chancel. “That’s when we started high-fiving,” he said.

It had been thought that Christopher Columbus and his crew carried syphilis back to Europe from the New World, but seven skeletons discovered in Britain show signs of the disease long before his transatlantic voyage. “We’re confident that Christopher Columbus is simply not a feature of the emergence and timing of the disease in Europe,” said Brian Connell of the Museum of London.  

A new study published in PLoS ONE suggests that high temperatures killed the residents of Pompeii within ten seconds of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius 2,000 years ago. “Field and laboratory study of the eruption products and victims indicate that heat was the main cause of death of people previously supposed to have died by ash suffocation,” the scientists wrote.  

Urban resorts, industrial development, and sport divers are damaging Turkey’s underwater cultural heritage, says Ufuk Kocabas of Istanbul University. He thinks that the country’s penalties for plundering historic shipwrecks are insufficient.  

An 8,000-year-old skeleton has been discovered in Bulgaria.  

Human remains, stone tools, and pottery dating to the 1300s have been unearthed at an U.S. Army corps of Engineers’ building project in Mississippi.  

Stone flakes estimated to be 10,000 years old are being excavated from a campsite in Maine. “The materials that Native Americas used for stone tools are sort of distinctive. It’s just not any sort of rock, it’s not granite typically, but it’s stone that would break in a certain way that would allow spearheads to be made and other scraping tools,” said Ellen Cowie of the Northeast Archaeology Research Center.  

An inscribed stone slab estimated to be 1,000 years old was unearthed at the site of a proposed cricket stadium on the eastern coast of Sri Lanka.  

A shortage of raw glass in late Roman Britain prompted the recycling of large quantities of it, according to a new study published in the Journal of Archaeological Science.  “Indeed, further investigation using trace elements analysis and isotopes is necessary to identify potential manufacture regions,” said Caroline Jackson of the University of Sheffield.  

Robert Krulwich writes about early photography in this installment of his NPR blog, “Krulwich Wonders.” Could these images be the first pictures taken of human beings?

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Monday, October 25, 2010. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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