Three sections of a mosaic floor were stolen from a Roman archaeological site in Spain’s Baños de Valderados. The site is locked during the winter, but no security personnel were on duty at the time of the theft.

Looters are stripping China’s historic tombs of their artifacts, often using bulldozers and dynamite to break open the buried chambers. The artifacts are then sold to international antiquities dealers. “Stolen cultural artifacts are usually first smuggled out through Hong Kong and Macao and then taken to Taiwan, Canada, America or European countries to be traded,” said Wei Yongshun, a senior investigator for the ministry of public security.

Excavations at the ancient city of Stratonikeia, which is located near Turkey’s Aegean coast, have revealed sections of the city’s walls, a street lined with columns, the bust of a king, and mosaics.

Archaeologists think the Neolithic buildings surrounded by a huge outer wall at the site at Ness of Brodgar may have been used for religious purposes at least 500 years before Stonehenge was built. The site is located on the Orkney Islands of northern Scotland. “At first we thought it was a settlement but the scale and complexity within the buildings makes you think along the lines of a temple precinct. It’s something you would associate with the classical world,” said project manager Nick Card.

Stone tools unearthed at the site of Roudias on the island of Cyprus suggest that hunters and gatherers  regularly visited the campsite for millennia.

The wreck of the USS Narcissus, a Civil War tugboat sitting on the bottom of Tampa Bay, will become an underwater archaeological preserve. All of the sailors on board the Narcissus were killed when it sank in 1866.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Monday, January 2, 2012. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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