More than 3,000 tiny gold ornaments have been unearthed in a seventh-century B.C. grave on the Greek island of Crete, near the ancient town of Eleutherna. The gold was attached to a shroud that wrapped the body of a woman. “The whole length of the grave was covered with small pieces of gold foil – square, circular and lozenge-shaped. We were literally digging up gold interspersed with earth, not earth with some gold in it,” said archaeologist Nicholas Stampolidis. 

In France, archaeologists have uncovered a third-century A.D. temple dedicated to Mithras.  

Forensic archaeologists are assisting in the search for people murdered by republican paramilitaries in Northern Ireland during the Troubles.  

In Ontario, Canada, archaeologists have unearthed a small prehistoric pot that is “probably the result of a young child being taught how to make pottery,” said Monica Fleck of the Ministry of Transportation’s West Region.  

Egyptologist Mark Lehner and Zahi Hawass, Secretary General of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, discuss the latest research on the Sphinx in Cosmos.  

President Alan Garcia has given Yale University a deadline for the return of the Machu Picchu artifacts collected by Hiram Bingham between 1911 and 1915. “We don’t want a half-Machu Picchu, we don’t want a Machu Picchu piece by piece, we want a Machu Picchu with everything it had on July 7, 1910,” he explained.  

The USS Emmons, a World War II destroyer scuttled by the U.S. military in 1945, has been plundered by scuba divers off the coast of Okinawa. The Naval Criminal Investigative Service is considering taking the case.  

The wooden box recovered from a cairn in the Arctic does not contain records from the ill-fated Franklin Expedition, nor from a 1905 expedition led by Roald Amundsen, as suggested by local oral history. “The remains of a cardboard box lined the bottom and sides of the interior of the wood box. Pieces of newspaper and what appeared to be tallow were discovered beneath the sand and rocks that filled the box,” reported the Canadian Conservation Institute.  

Here’s more information on the Give a Quid to the Bid campaign to keep a recently discovered Roman parade helmet in Cumbria, England. “I cannot emphasize how important this artifact is to the story of the Romans in Cumbria and indeed Britain. It would represent the most important object in the city’s archaeology collections and arguably the finest artifact held in public ownership in Cumbria,” said Mike Mitchelson, leader of the Carlisle City Council.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Wednesday, September 29, 2010. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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