Petroglyphs along the banks of Egypt’s Nile River have been dated to 15,000 years ago, using a technology called optically stimulated luminescence. The rock art could be the oldest in Egypt. “The Palaeolithic rock art at Qurta reveals that the well-known cave art of the late Pleistocene in Europe was not an isolated phenomenon. Qurta puts North Africa firmly in the world of the earliest surviving artistic tradition,” said John Coleman Darnell of Yale University.

Human bones that have been housed in an English museum for more than 100 years could be much younger than previously thought. The label on their storage box suggested the bones had been recovered from a Neolithic long barrow, but radiocarbon dating indicates the bones date to between 1523 and 1799.  “Or it could be the bones are contaminated,” explained David Rice of the Gloucester City Museum.

A 4,000-year-old burial cist containing cremated human remains, a woven bag or basket, and amber beads has been excavated in Dartmoor, England.

Bullets fired in the seventeenth century were uncovered in Newbury, England. “Most of the bullets are consistent with use of a carbine rifle, a weapon that would have been a popular choice in the First Battle of Newbury, which we know took place on this street in September 1643,” said archaeologist Mike Lang Hall.

Two inscriptions, one in Latin and one in Arabic, were left behind in the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II’s castle in Jaffa, near the end of the sixth crusade. The Arabic inscription has been translated by scholars from Hebrew University of Jerusalem and is the only known inscription of its kind.

Computer software developed by Lior Wolf and Nachum Dershowitz from Tel Aviv University has been sorting through scraps of documents from the Cairo Genizah for the past two years. Now, more than 1,000 pairs of pages have been joined and confirmed by scholars.

Excavation of  the 1608 church at James Fort, the first permanent English colony, continues. The church is best known as the site where Pocahontas was baptized and married to John Rolfe in 1614.

Construction crews digging in New Orleans’ French Quarter found graves dating to the 1700s.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Tuesday, November 15, 2011. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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