The Israel Antiquities Authority has announced that discovery of a 2,000-year-old incense altar at an ancient cemetery site in Ashkelon. Protesters claim the graves are Jewish and should not be moved to make way for a hospital emergency room, but the archaeologists say that the site is pagan.

Erosion threatens archaeological sites along Alaska’s Arctic coast. “The problem is that these things are revealed so fast. Some of these materials are so fragile that if you don’t get to them and recover them within a year or so, you can’t preserve them,” said state archaeologist Dave McMahan.  

An employee of the Guam State Historic Preservation Office is concerned that photographs of skeletal remains on the Guam Preservation Trust website are offensive. Archaeologists for the Trust responded that photographs of the grave goods without the remains would be “displayed out of context,” and could “lose their meaning and become just things to many people.”  

A memorial service was held for more than 1,000 people whose bones were exhumed from a mass grave in Ireland’s County Kilkenny in 2005. The victims died from hunger and disease while living in a workhouse during the Great Famine of the mid-nineteenth century.  

The team that has excavated China’s army of terracotta warriors from the tomb of the country’s first emperor has been awarded Spain’s prestigious Prince of Asturias prize for scientific and technical research.  

He may not have told a lie, but George Washington did have a very overdue library book. The first president checked out The Law of Nations by Emer de Vattel from the New York Society Library on October 5, 1789. Yesterday, the staff at Mount Vernon, Washington’s Virginia plantation, replaced the book with another copy of the same edition.  

Excavation at the home of Rev. John Rankin, an abolitionist who lived in Ohio, has turned up a cellar that may have been used to house runaway slaves, in addition to nails, dishes, pottery, bones, bricks, and a prehistoric pit.   

There’s more on the search for Cleopatra’s tomb at the Temple of Taposiris Magna at National Geographic Daily News.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Thursday, May 20, 2010. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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