More than 26,000 people have signed a petition supporting the protection of West Virginia’s Blair Mountain from a mountaintop-removal mining project. The Battle of Blair Mountain was fought between 10,000 coal miners and 3,000 law enforcement personnel over a span of five days in 1921. “The Battle of Blair Mountain helped start the middle class,” explained retired miner Joe Stanley.

Jason De León of the University of Michigan studies the archaeology of undocumented migration from Mexico to the United States. He collects objects left behind in the desert, and he sometimes finds the remains of those who didn’t make it.

Sixteenth-century Spanish glass beads and iron tools have reportedly turned up in an excavation in southern Georgia. Some think that the discovery suggests that Hernando de Soto and his horses, pigs, and 600 men ventured further east than had been previously thought.

Here’s a story on the possible use of Iceland spar, a transparent form of calcite, as a Viking solar stone, or tool to detect the position of the sun for navigation purposes. Such a stone was found on an Elizabethan shipwreck in the Channel Islands.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Wednesday, November 2, 2011. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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