A Roman amphitheater has been found in northern England by a Cambridge University archaeologist who grew up hearing about the lost structure from her grandfather. “It was under our noses. I used to come here as a girl with my friends because the slope and terracing made it Aldborough’s sledging hill,” said Rose Ferraby. The area was probably busier and more prosperous than previously thought.

There’s evidence of a planned town near Silchester in southern England. “They did this all before the Romans had arrived,” said Mike Fulford of the University of Reading.

Do you have any ideas about how the Romans might have used this hole-covered jar?

Scroll down to reach the discussion of the first permanent villages in Western Canada in this report from Voice of America News. At a village site on Galiano Island, the Coast Salish people built large structures some 1,500 years ago, fished, hunted, and collected plants and shellfish.

A summer kitchen has been excavated at Dill’s Tavern in York, Pennsylvania. “This building would not have been standing long – the ground tells us it was built in the late eighteenth century. But it was likely torn down by 1819 because the 1819 addition to the tavern building sits about a foot from where these ruins were found,” said Steve Warfel of the State Museum of Pennsylvania.

The sunflower was domesticated once, in the eastern United States, according to genetic evidence gathered by Benjamin Blackman of Indiana University. “Although current archaeological finds indicate that ancient Mesoamericans cultivated sunflower before Spanish colonists arrived in the New World, more discoveries are needed to understand where and how quickly sunflower crop development spread in Mesoamerica and eastern North America,” he explained.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Thursday, August 25, 2011. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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