Giulio Magli of the Milan Polytechnic Institute and Robert Hannah of the University of Otago have shown that a shaft of light shines through the oculus of the Pantheon and illuminates its entrance on two important days when the emperor Hadrian would have visited the temple. “The emperor would have been illuminated as if by film studio lights. It would have been a glorification of the power of the emperor, and of Rome itself,” explained Magli.

A Bronze Age tomb in Syria contained luxury grave goods and the skeletons of a tall, well-muscled man and a robust woman. Two healed cuts on the man’s upper right arm indicate he may have been a warrior.

A chess piece carved from a piece of herringbone was unearthed in Iceland, at the farm of one of the first settlers.

Ken Tankersley of the University of Cincinnati says that the earthwork in Mariemont, Ohio, is a 2,952-foot-long serpent mound, making it more than twice the length of Great Serpent Mound. A satellite image revealed its squiggly shape.

Excavation at the site of Fort William Henry in Lake George, New York, continues this summer. “The fort was built on thousands of years of Native American settlements, and that’s the story we’d like to tell here more clearly in the exhibits,” said David Starbuck of Plymouth State University.

Turkey’s Culture and Tourism Minister  Ertugrul Günay is shaking up archaeology. “Some of the foreign-run excavations are going well, but some groups only come here, work for 15 days and leave. We are not going to allow that. If they don’t work on it, they should hand it over,” he said.

A shipwreck revealed by drought in a Louisiana bayou has been tentatively identified as the steamboat Big Horn, which caught fire and sank in 1873.

Four human burials turned up during the expansion of the emergency room at Yale New Haven Hospital. “It turns out that there was a cemetery there that had 550 people in it,” said Howard Eckels, a retired state police detective.

Jim Page of Springfield, Tennessee, wants the remains of 11 American soldiers thought to have been killed in Mexico in 1846 to be returned the U.S. The bones were uncovered during a construction project.

Earlier this year, the University of New Mexico’s Maxwell Museum received an anonymous donation of prehistoric artifacts from Mexico. It turned out that the collection had been stolen.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Monday, August 1, 2011. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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