Several unfinished millstones were found carved into slabs of granite in a boggy area of Ireland’s County Donegal by hikers. The circles of the stones had been marked and chiseled, but some had cracked before completely separated from the parent rock. Others had a hole bored into the center.

Fourteen large storage jars filled with 3,300-year-old burnt wheat have been found at Tel Hatzor, located in northern Israel. The jars had been placed in a storage room in palace-like building. “The water system built at Hatzor is one of the largest and most amazing that has been exposed in the country, and everyone who continues to explore the site finds more and more secrets and details about our past in Israel,” said Zvika Tsuk of the Israel Nature and Parks Authority. The excavation is a joint project between the Parks Authority and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

A team of archaeologists from the U.S. and Iran has been looking for the ruins of the 1,100-year-old port of Siraf in the Persian Gulf. “The U.S. archaeologists have brought special equipment necessary for underwater excavation as we do not have such gear in Iran,” said Mahmud Mireskandari of the Iranian Center for Archaeological Research. Siraf is thought to have been home to 300,000 people and a center of the pearl and silk trade. Much of the city sank into the sea, however, and is now a small town of 7,000.

Archaeologists will search a strategically important stretch of the Hudson River, between the village of Schuylerville and Saratoga National Historic Park, using side-scan sonar and other technologies. They will look for artifacts left behind by British and American soldiers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

There are photographs of “vampire” skeletons unearthed in Bulgaria earlier this year at National Geographic Daily News. Seven hundred years ago, one of the bodies had been stabbed in the chest with an iron rod, and its teeth had been pulled, before it had been buried in a church in Sozopol.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Tuesday, July 24, 2012. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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