A Swiss museum will return a 4,000-year-old limestone stele to Egypt this week.

An ancient First Nations cemetery has been discovered in British Columbia.

Archaeological data from 300 Australian rock shelter sites was used to estimate the population of Aboriginal people over the past 10,000 years. Christopher Johnson of the University of Tasmania and Barry Brook of the University of Adelaide say their mathematical model shows that the Aboriginal population grew about 40 percent every 1,000 years for the past 5,000 years, and about 10 to 15 percent for the 5,000 years before that.

A construction project in South Dakota revealed the bones of a woman thought to have lived between 800 and 1,500 years ago.

Students from the University of Yorkshire are mapping the remnants of Gawthorpe Hall, which was built in the thirteenth century and demolished in 1773. The last family to live in the medieval manor house owned sugar plantations on Barbados.

Pottery fragments excavated from England’s Glastonbury Abbey in the mid-twentieth century show that the site dates to the fifth century. “Scientific analysis has now established the precise origins of some of these finds; the most distant come from Italy, Spain, Portugal and France,” added John Allen of Reading University.

The search is on in a medieval convent in Florence for the grave of Lisa Gherardini, thought to be the model for Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. “We want to find the skull and make a portrait of the Mona Lisa,” said a spokeswoman for the team.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Wednesday, May 11, 2011. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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