The third-century gladiator school  recently discovered in Austria was first seen as a white spot in an aerial photograph of the Carnuntum archaeological site. Ground-penetrating radar has revealed a well-preserved complex of buildings, including 40 tiny sleeping cells for the gladiators, a bathing area, a training hall, administrative buildings, and a cemetery.

The Turkish Ministry of Culture has asked London’s Victoria and Albert Museum to return a 1,700-year-old sculpture of a child’s head. The marble head was separated from the Sidamara Sarcophagus by archaeologist Sir Charles Wilson in 1882, and is now held in the museum’s stores.

A model of Nonsuch Palace has been constructed based upon 50 years’ worth of research by Martin Biddle, Emeritus Professor of Medieval Archaeology at Oxford. Henry VIII began construction of the palace in 1538; Biddle excavated the site in 1959.

An examination of 340 skeletons exhumed from three of England’s Royal Navy graveyards shows that many of the sailors who died between the mid-eighteenth and early nineteenth-century were teenagers.

Here’s more information on the Abyssinian Meeting House, the only African American National Underground Railroad Historic Site in Maine. Archaeologist Martha E. Pinello has uncovered nineteenth-century wooden pipes that channel water from a spring underneath the church to a cistern. “These are as if they were new, they’re very solid,” she said.

Excavation will continue at Fort Hawkins in Macon, Georgia. “It was on the frontier. It was a major headquarters for the commanding generals of the U.S. Army. There were wars, the first Seminole War and the War of 1812,” said archaeologist Dan Elliott.

CNN reports on the condition of Libya’s antiquities.

A Mississippian village in Illinois, known as the East St. Louis site, will soon be fully excavated ahead of the construction of the New Mississippi River Bridge Project. “How and when this urban commercial and ritual center all came together and what caused it to fall apart is what we want to answer,” said archaeologist Brad Koldehoff of the Illinois Department of Transportation.

Egypt’s Djoser Step Pyramid is undergoing restoration work.

The ancestors of modern humans may have mixed with other hominin species some 35,000 years ago in Africa, according to a new study by evolutionary biologist Michael Hammer of the University of Arizona in Tucson. He and his colleagues used computer models to simulate how genes from different populations might have affected the modern humans.

Did modern humans and Neanderthals interbreed in Europe? A new study of mitochondrial DNA challenges the results of studies using nuclear DNA.

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

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