Germany has returned 45 artifacts to Iraq, including a 6,500-year-old Sumerian gold jar, a Sumerian battle ax, and a stone from an Assyrian palace. The artifacts had been stolen from Iraqi museums in the wake of the U.S.-led invasion of 2003.

A kiln has been uncovered at Mexico’s Atzompa Archaeology Site in Oaxaca. The kiln is more than 1,300 years old and was used by the Zapotec.

Students have been looking for a nineteenth-century gallows at a jail site in Oatlands, Tasmania.

Here’s more information on Dan Sayers’ search for evidence of maroon communities on islands in Virginia’s Great Dismal Swamp. “Every little thing we find is a burst of information,” said the American University archaeologist.

A significant amount of pottery has been unearthed at the Taga Historical Site, which is located on the island of Tinian of the Northern Mariana Islands. Such pottery suggests that people living on the coasts of China, Vietnam, Thailand, and the Philippines migrated to islands in the Pacific between 3,000 to 3,500 years ago, when sea levels dropped.

Protective fencing, surveillance cameras, and a laser-scanning project are some of the measures being put into place to protect Tutuveni, a Hopi rock art site in northern Arizona. “They would stop at Tutuveni and camp there, and they would peck their clan symbols on those rocks to mark their participation in that pilgrimage. And they did this for four or five centuries at least,” explained Wes Bernardini of the University of Redlands.

National Geographic Daily News offers on overview of recent excavations at Scotland’s Ness of Brodgar. “Orkney is one of the keys to understanding the development of Neolithic religion,” said Nick Card of the Orkney Research Centre for Archaeology.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Monday, January 30, 2012. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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