Radiocarbon dating has been used to determine that charcoal drawings in the Northern Territory are the oldest in Australia. Bryce Barker of the University of Southern Queensland says that the rock art, which is located in the Nawarla Gabarnmang rock shelter, is 28,000 years old. Archaeological evidence suggests that the rock shelter had been occupied for 45,000 years.

A large boulder covered with 500-year-old petroglyphs has been moved out of the Museum of Vancouver and repatriated to the Stswecem’c Xgat’tem First Nation. A gold prospector uncovered the boulder in the 1920s, when it was moved to a park, and then it was transferred to the museum in 1992. Members of the Stswecem’c Xgat’tem First Nation and Bruce Miller of the University of British Columbia found the exact location where the boulder once sat along the Fraser River, but they decided it should be placed in a protected area. “It was taken during a time when we didn’t have a say and we had no rights, but now times are changing and we can help undo the wrongs of the past,” said Phyllis Webstad, who is coordinating the repatriation.

A skeleton estimated to be 12,000 years old has been discovered in Sri Lanka’s Fa-Hien Cave. The anatomically modern human is of a type known as Balangoda Man. Previous finds from the cave include two 37,000-year-old human skulls.

The remains of two severed heads uncovered during a gardening project in James Green, Kilkenny, Ireland, are thought to have belonged to Oliver Cromwell’s soldiers. Seven of his men were killed in County Laois in 1642, and their heads were hung in Kilkenny on the next market day. The heads were later buried. Archaeologists think that a pilgrimage church dating to the 1300s may also be located in the area.

A new study of soil cores taken in central and western Amazonia suggests that pre-Columbian people did not practice wide-spread clearing of the forest, nor intensive agriculture, as they did in the eastern regions. The soil cores contained bits of charcoal and phytoliths of burned grasses and other plants, but not of common crops. “If humans were in those areas, they didn’t stay very long, and they didn’t farm,” said archaeobotanist Dolores Piperno of the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Monday, June 18, 2012. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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