A two-day conference begins in Cairo today. Antiquities officials from various countries will discuss “the protection and restitution of cultural heritage,” according to Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities.  The BBC also has an article on the conference.

The name of the Roman emperor Octavian Augustus has been found inscribed in a cartouche on a victory stele in the Temple of Isis at Philae. Such an inscription would indicate that Augustus was treated as a pharaoh by the Egyptians after his defeat of Cleopatra. “The priests needed to see him as a pharaoh otherwise their understanding of the world would have collapsed,” said Martina Minas-Nerpel of Swansea University in Wales. 

Volunteers are working to free a sixteenth-century shipwreck from the sands of North Carolina’s Outer Banks. This article documents their efforts with photographs, video, and an article. 

The state of Rhode Island wants to preserve a tract of land containing an intact Narragansett Indian village as an archaeological park, but it doesn’t have a fund to purchase the $10 million property from its current owner. “Our position is that the government can take land for parks and roads, but they have to pay for it,” said William R. Landry, a lawyer for Downing Salt Pond Partners, which owns the land and wants to develop it. The company’s permit to build was revoked after an archaeological survey in 2006.  

A 500-year-old Maori adze and the bones of an extinct moa were found in a large fire pit. Such “first settlement” sites are rare in New Zealand.  

The Neolithic skeletal remains of “Charlie,” a three-year-old child, will remain on display at the Alexander Keiller Museum in Avebury, England. The Council of British Druid Orders had requested that English Heritage rebury the bones for religious reasons. 

Archaeologists and volunteers are restoring a garden where Lord Nelson and Lady Emma Hamilton took tea in 1802. 

A team from Exeter University wants to analyze the tree rings of the enormous kauri trees preserved in New Zealand’s peat bogs. The trees could act as 30,000-year-old records of climate changes.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Wednesday, April 7, 2010. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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