An intact Roman lantern made of bronze has been found in England by a man with a metal detector. “What is particularly amazing about the lantern is that the chains it was suspended from still look and move like any modern chain and had not corroded into a metal lump,” said Emma Hogarth of the Colchester and Ipswich Museums. The man has donated the lamp to the museum.

A massive freeze dryer at Texas A&M University will be used to preserve the wreck of the French explorer ship La Belle, which sank in Matagorda Bay in 1686. “It is a much gentler process than straight dehydration, and it is slightly revolutionary in that no one has tried it before,” said Peter Fix of the Center for Maritime Archaeology and Conservation.  

BBC News has posted video from the new expedition to map the wreck of the Titanic.  

Meanwhile, the Holland 5, a submarine which sank off the coast of England in 1912, has been damaged by looters. The sub was one of the first to have been used by the British Navy.  

Rock art in Arizona’s Kaibab National Forest has been vandalized.  

A Moabite temple dating to the eighth century B.C. has been discovered at Khirbat ‘Ataroz, according Ziad al-Saad, head of the Jordanian Antiquities Department.  

Archaeologist Önder Bilgi has found 4,000-year-old obsidian blades and skulls with cut marks that match them. “We know that patients lived at least two to three years after the surgery, because the skull has tried to close the wound,” he said.  

Protesters are still trying to prevent the construction of the Ilisu Dam in southeastern Turkey, which would flood the ancient city of Hasankeyf. The Turkish government has said that the ancient city will be moved to an archaeological park, but activist Güven Eken says that it is impossible to separate Hasankeyf from the Tigris River and its people.  

Here’s more information on the supposed Paleolithic funeral feast uncovered in a cave in northern Israel.  

And there’s a little more information on the 1,600-year-old burial of a teenage boy discovered in northern Peru. “We are excavating in the same platform on the same royal mausoleum of the Lord of Sipan where they [the Mochicas] buried all the high ranking people from lords to priests and of course people in the noble Mochica families,” explained archaeologist Walter Alva.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Wednesday, September 1, 2010. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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