An expert in Elizabethan script and the use of enhanced imagery have shed some light on the slate tablet discovered at Jamestown last summer. Some of the characters may be from an alphabet created to help the English speak the language of the Virginia Indians, while different drawings hint at the owner of the slate. “We have only begun to bleed the secrets out of this extraordinary object,” said William Kelso, director of the site.

Imaging technology will also be used to investigate an Egyptian mummy housed at the Barnum Museum in Bridgeport, Connecticut. The female mummy was a prized circus exhibit in the 1890s. Scientists want to pinpoint her age, and determine whether or not there is a bird mummy hidden in her abdominal cavity.  

British police seized Roman coins and medieval artifacts from a home in Broadstairs, Kent.  

A public appeal has been launched to raise the £3m it will take to keep the Staffordshire Hoard in England’s West Midlands. “It won’t go abroad because an export bar would be put on it, but the worst case scenario is that it might be sold on the open market and split up and that can’t be allowed to happen. It is not just the quantity of the find that is remarkable, it is the quality and the story that it tells,” said historian David Starkey.  

Join the conversation in the U.K. with Guardian columnist Zoe Williams about “archaeological truths.” She writes, “We never discover that our antecedents were actually less intelligent than we gave them credit for. They never have graves that are surprisingly primitive, or artifacts that are unexpectedly crap.”    

The first of the 250 World War I soldiers exhumed from a mass grave in northern France will be reburied on January 30, in a new military cemetery near the village of Fromelles. Each body will be interred with full military honors.  

In Kuala Terengganu, Malaysia, construction workers have uncovered hundreds of Arabic, Chinese, and Indian coins and artifacts. “Many of these artifacts were found when we started earth excavation in February last year, but the workers concealed their find from us at first,” said the site manager.  

Here’s an update on what has been unearthed to date in the Hindu temple complex discovered at Indonesian Islamic University in Jogjakarta.  

The Netherlands will return a 4,000-year-old clay tablet found on a Dutch auction website to Iraq. “The owner voluntarily gave it up after being informed that it was illegal to trade in Iraqi cultural artifacts,” according to a statement from the culture ministry.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Thursday, January 14, 2010. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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