The $30 million restoration of the Roman Colosseum will get underway in December, funded by the billionaire Diego Della Valle. Rossella Rea, director of the Colosseum, thinks that the monument’s tilt, which was recently announced, happened in antiquity, possibly following an earthquake. “The monument is very stable, otherwise we wouldn’t have arranged for the kind of intervention that we are carrying out. We would have obviously opted for a very different course of action,” she said.

The headless remains of Ned Kelly, who was hanged for killing three policemen in Australia in 1880, will be handed over to his relatives. Kelly is seen by some as an outlaw and by others as a folk hero. After a long search, his headless bones were found in a mass grave at a former prison and were identified through DNA tests. “We also appeal to the person who has the skull in their possession to return it…so that when the time comes for Ned to be laid to rest his remains can be complete,” said Ellen Hollow, Kelly’s great-grandniece.

Union troops occupied the Williamsburg, Virginia, campus of the College of William and Mary during the Civil War, where they built ditches and palisades and dug a well. Archaeology students at the college have excavated a portion of the fortified area, where they found traces of the defensive structures, in addition to an unfired Minié ball, clay marbles, buttons, and a pen nib.

Students from the University of Idaho are at the Basque Block in downtown Boise, excavating a boarding house where the first Basque immigrants lived more than 100 years ago. The project is being carried out in cooperation with the Basque Museum and Cultural Center. Be sure to take a look at the photographs of everyday items that the students have recovered.

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

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