In southwestern Germany, archaeologist Bettina Arnold of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee has uncovered evidence of competitive feasting and clothing and adornments worn by Celtic people 2,600 years ago. By encasing blocks of earth in plaster and putting them through a CT scanner, she and her team members have been able to see the fine details of fragile metal hairpins, jewelry, weapons, and clothing fasteners. “You could tell whether someone was male, female, a child, married, occupied a certain role in society and much more from what they were wearing,” she said.

A cave in County Clare, Ireland, has yielded the skeleton of a teenager who died in the sixteenth or seventeenth century, and a hammerhead made from a red deer antler. “The discovery of the fabulous antler hammerhead is hugely exciting. I can’t find any other parallels in Irish archaeology,” said archaeologist Marion Dowd.

Road work in St. Andrews, Scotland, revealed what could be the skeletal remains of fifteenth-century Franciscan monks beneath just six inches of dirt. “A Franciscan friary is known to have existed somewhere in the near vicinity and because of the order they weren’t buried in the local cemetery but in their own little one,” said archaeologist Douglas Spiers.

A long-lost section of what could be the Great Wall of China has been spotted with Google Earth in southern Mongolia. Western scientists have investigated parts of the wall, which was made from mud, desert shrubs, and quarried black volcanic rock, in the Gobi Desert, sometime between A.D. 1040 and 1160.

There are new images  of the wreck of the Titanic at National Geographic.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Thursday, March 22, 2012. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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