Some 5,000 nineteenth-century artifacts have been unearthed on historic Fulton Street in lower Manhattan. Archaeologist Alyssa Loorya thinks a wealthy family once lived at #40.

Excavation for a new parking garage in Santa Fe, New Mexico, revealed an early twentieth century cess pit lined with bricks. “What this cess pit represents is flushable toilets – water closets inside the households,” said state archaeologist Matt Barbour. The receptacle probably serviced two wealthy homes until it was replaced by the city sewage system in the 1930s.

Renovations at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill revealed a cellar and an early nineteenth-century drainage system.

A building in Ireland’s County Clare could be the country’s oldest surviving timber-framed house.

Ancient books taken from Korea by occupying Japanese forces between 1910 and 1945 have been returned. About half of the books will be housed in the National Palace Museum in Seoul; some may be returned to the Woljeong Buddhist Temple, where they were originally kept.

A genetic study of ancient and modern mitochondrial DNA suggests that the American Indian population was at an all-time high 5,000 years ago, and then hit its lowest point a few years after the arrival of Europeans in the New World. “The bottleneck was fairly short-lived and, while significant, didn’t appear to eliminate many lineages that were present before Europeans arrived,” explained researcher Brendan O’Fallon.

Here’s a brief history of board games, beginning with “The Royal Game of Ur,” discovered in Iraq, and ending with games played in the U.S. during the early nineteenth-century.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Tuesday, December 6, 2011. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

Comments posted here do not represent the views or policies of the Archaeological Institute of America.