What should the government of Indonesia do with the 271,000 artifacts that were salvaged from a 1,000-year-old South Asian ship? The debate heats up after no one showed for an auction earlier this week.

The French government has approved the return of the heads of Maori warriors kept in French museums to New Zealand. “From a ritual showing the respect of a tribe and family toward their dead, the mummified heads became the object of a particularly barbaric trade due to the curiosity of travelers and European collectors,” said Parliamentary Relations Minister Henri de Raincourt.  

The people of Ixcateopan produced cotton thread that they shipped to Tenochtitlan, Texcoco, and Tlacopan. “In some of these rooms was spun the cotton used to create the warrior garments. This information helps us determining the close relation between this site and the center of Mexico,” said archaeologist Raul Barrera.  

A team from the University of Buffalo has discovered a system of beachfront and inland fortifications made of stone foundations and mud brick walls at the Minoan town of Gournia. The walls would have been strong enough to stand on, and would have been manned by armed guards.  

The current mayor of Bideford, England, wants to know if people who left Bideford in 1587 with Sir Walter Raleigh may have survived the “lost colony” long enough to produce offspring. “What we now need is to establish if there are any living family descendants of those lost colonists living here in the UK and from them produce a reference library of DNA to match the American results against,” he said. 

Kenneth Robinson of Wake Forest University is investigating an eighteenth-century public well and an associated structure in Salisbury, North Carolina.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Thursday, May 6, 2010. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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