A team of scientists from Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History entered a 1,500-year-old tomb located within the XX Temple at the Maya site of Palenque for the first time. Because the temple is unstable, the chamber had only been viewed with a tiny video camera. This first room does not contain a sarcophagus, but it is decorated with murals. “The important part about the funerary sites of this epoch, the Early Classical period (400-550 AD), is the paintings; we are before one of the few examples of murals discovered in the funerary context of Palenque, which is why this work is so important,” commented archaeologist Arnoldo Gonzalez Cruz.

At an open-cast brown coal mine in Schöningen, Germany, archaeologists from the University of Tübingen have found eight spear heads that may have been crafted by homo heidelbergensis some 300,000 years ago. The artifacts are being touted as the world’s oldest weapons. The bones of a water buffalo, an aurochs, elephants, rhinoceroses, horses, and lions have also been excavated, along with traces of amphibians, reptiles, shells, insects, and plant remains.

Some researchers now think that Ice Age Europeans were creating ceramic works of art more often than previously thought. A collection of 36 fragments of fired clay has been recovered from the Vela Spila cave on an island off the coast of Croatia. Those pieces are estimated to between 15,000 and 17,500 years old. One of the fragments depicts the torso and foreleg of an animal. “It was overlooked because no one expected to find ceramics in the Paleolithic,” said Rebecca Farbstein of the University of Cambridge. The Venus of Dolni Vestonice, found in the Czech Republic, is about 30,000 years old. Olga Soffer of the University of Illinois adds that many unfired clay artworks may not have survived over time.

Nancy O’Malley of the University of Kentucky wants to figure out what really happened in 1778, when Shawnee warriors and French Canadians hired by the British laid siege to Fort Boonesborough for nine days. “You have this huge force against this very limited number of people who are holed up in a pretty rickety fort,” she said. And yet the attackers gave up and left. O’Malley will examine the remains of the fort and the conflicting accounts of the siege survivors. “There were just so many things about the siege that were very strange, and so many funny stories, that after a while you wonder what to believe,” she added.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Monday, September 17, 2012. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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