Excavation of the Avenue of the Sphinxes in Luxor, Egypt, has uncovered a fifth-century Coptic church and a Nilometer, a cylindrical structure that was used to measure the level of the Nile River during floods. The church had been built with limestone blocks taken from Ptolemaic and Roman temples.

Archaeologist Mike Morwood and rock art specialist June Ross hired a helicopter and flew across the remote Kimberley region of Western Australia, searching for rock art sites made by the first Australians. They found 54 potential sites. Flooding has washed away any traces of debris from cave floors, but the pictures themselves are well preserved. “The paint remains in the rock as a stain. And the rock surfaces are dense quartzite and sandstone, which are hard, very resistant to weathering and break down very, very slowly,” said Ross. 

In Guatemala, archaeologists have unearthed a jadeite mosaic miniature ceremonial head at the Maya city of Tak’alik Ab’aj.  

Archaeologists Arlen F. Chase and Diane Z. Chase of the University of Central Florida have used an advanced version of lidar (light detection and ranging), or airborne laser signals that can penetrate jungle cover, to map the Maya site of Caracol over an area of 80 square miles. “We know the size of the site, its boundaries, and this confirms our population estimates, and we see all this terracing and begin to know how the people fed themselves,” said Arlen Chase.  If you aren’t registered at the New York Times you can read about the laser mapping project at UCF Today.  

Underground construction in the densely populated Netherlands means that it is not always possible to preserve archaeological finds in situ. “We are heading towards a situation in the Netherlands in which there’s no more archaeology to be done here. That worries Dutch archaeologists,” said Jasper de Bruin of Leiden University.  

Ph.D. candidate Ann Raab is investigating the Civil War in Bates County, Missouri, where Union troops forced civilians off their land and burned their homesteads. 

Here’s more information on the chunk of ancient plaster that fell of Rome’s Colosseum, through the 30-year-old wire safety net, and to the ground on Sunday. 

What would you look like as a Neanderthal?   And Clive Finlayson, director of the Gibraltar Museum, has some thoughts about recent Neanderthal research.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Tuesday, May 11, 2010. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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