A Neolithic site on the shore of Egypt’s Lake Qarun could be spared from becoming a tourist resort. The government of toppled President Hosni Mubarak had awarded the land to a developer, but the deal is now off. “We have the evidence of the earliest agriculture activity in Egypt. So it’s before the Pharaohs, it’s before the early dynastic period when Egypt becomes a state,” said Willeke Wendrich of the University of California in Los Angeles.

The spots on the painted walls of Tutankhamun’s tomb were made by long-dead microbes, according to Ralph Mitchell of the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. “We’re guessing that the painted wall was not dry when the tomb was sealed,” he said.

Colin Renfrew of Cambridge University first started excavating archaeological sites on the Aegean island of Keros in 1963. “I was amazed to find fragments of marble bowls and marble figurines,” he recalls. He thinks that Cycladic villagers ritualistically deposited the objects on Keros at regular intervals. “No doubt it was a ceremony of renewal – a new generation of icons being used and a new generation of people growing up,” he explained.  Renfrew has more to say about the figurines at Cambridge News.

Five suspects have been arrested for damaging a cave and the landscape around it in Oregon’s Deschutes National Forest.

The state of New Jersey plans to backfill the excavation of an eighteenth-century industrial site in Trenton in an effort to cut costs. “Filling in this site would not only mean throwing away a significant amount of money, but it would literally equate to burying history,” argued Assemblywoman Bonnie Watson Coleman.

On private land in northern France, British, French, and German researchers will begin a new project by using ground-penetrating radar to map tunnels dug by miners during World War I. “Finding out about these men has become an obsession, and although we know a great deal about the lives of soldiers in WWI, these men have left very few clues as to their experience or feelings,” said historian Simon Jones.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Friday, June 10, 2011. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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