New CT scans of Ötzi the Iceman, whose frozen body was found in the Italian Alps 20 years ago, show that he suffered a deep cut over his right eye. “Maybe he fell down or maybe he had a fight up there, nobody knows. With this cut alone, at 3,250 meters, it would have been a deadly wound up there,” explained Wolfgang Recheis of the University of Innsbruck.

The remains of 44 young children thought to have belonged to the Kolla culture have been found at the site of Sillustani in southern Peru. Each child had been buried with a volcanic stone on its chest, and was surrounded by offerings. They are thought to have been sacrificed some 600 years ago during a period of war or conflict.

Human remains were uncovered from beneath a 103-year-old house in Sitka, Alaska. “Erring on the side of caution, we determined that we better treat them as if they might be culturally significant, and we determined that we wanted to contact the Sitka Tribe of Alaska, and that’s what we went ahead and did,” said Forest Service archaeologist Jay Kinsman.

What are the current prospects for archaeology in Libya? “The Department of Antiquities has neither the staff nor the resources to combat the tidal wave of development. Everything is vulnerable. There’s a need to develop, from a standing start, a cultural-resource management in Libya that doesn’t really exist at the moment,” said Paul Bennett, head of mission at the Society for Libyan Studies in London.

Michael Barton of Arizona State University thinks that colder temperatures may have required early humans and Neanderthals to travel farther to find food, providing them with more opportunities to mingle their genes. “One thing we’re seeing with large-scale globalization today is that there are local cultures that disappear. The same thing happened in the past,” he said.

Tony Pollard of Glasgow University found and reopened two of the tunnels dug during World War II by British prisoners of war held by the Germans at Stalag Luft III in Poland. The tunnels were made famous by the 1963 movie, The Great Escape.  

Graffiti made by punk-rocker Johnny Rotten in the mid-1970s has been examined by archaeologists. The results of their study have been published in the current issue of Antiquity.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Monday, November 21, 2011. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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