Loren Davis of Oregon State University, who has also worked at Oregon’s Paisley Cave, is looking for traces of the first Americans at Coopers Ferry, which is located along Idaho’s lower Salmon River. According to the results of radiocarbon dating, stone tools discovered in Coopers Ferry are more than 13,000 years old. “If ultimately, the bottom part of the site ends up being 13,000 calendar years old or older, it will be as important as Paisley, if not more important because Paisley Caves doesn’t have a lot of artifacts,” he said. Coprolites from Paisley Cave have been found to be more than 14,300 years old. It had long been thought that the first Americans were the Clovis people, known for their distinctive stone points. The Paisley Cave coprolites are older than the oldest-known Clovis points, however.

An item thought to be a curse tablet has been uncovered at the site of a Roman farm in Kent, England. The thin piece of lead was inscribed with the names of 14 people, rolled up, and hidden, probably sometime in the third century A.D. Of the six still-legible names on the tablet, four are Roman, and two are Celtic. “If this is a curse tablet, which it seems to be, it is presumably a product of its local community—so it is a reasonable guess that the persons named on it lived there,” said Roger Tomlin of Wolfson College.

U.S. Federal Claims Judge Marian Blank Horn has dismissed a case filed by Christopher Kortlander, director of the Custer Battlefield Museum, who claimed that a government investigation into alleged artifact fraud destroyed his business prospects. The government seized artifacts such as American Indian war bonnets and medicine bundles, and possibly illegally obtained eagle feathers, during two raids on his property. Kortlander had been seeking $188 million in damages.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Tuesday, August 21, 2012. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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