In 1995, after a long search, the French supply ship La Belle was discovered in the waters of Matagorda Bay by a team from Texas A&M University. The ship sank during a storm in 1687, while explorer Rene-Robert Cavelier Sieur de La Salle was looking for the mouth of the Mississippi River with four ships and 300 French colonists. “When La Belle sank, that doomed La Salle’s colony and opened up the door for Spain to come in and occupy Texas,” said Jim Bruseth of the Texas Historical Commission. Now a giant freeze dryer at the old Bryan Air Force base is ready to accept the ship’s wooden timbers. Once the timbers have been safely dried out and preserved, La Bellewill be reassembled and put on display at the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum in Austin.

A Roman mosaic floor was uncovered during the repair of a Victorian sewer line in York, England. The new section of floor may be part of a mosaic that was recovered in the nineteenth century. “It had been thought that the Victorian sewer had largely removed the earlier Roman remains here, but the work has demonstrated that some sections were tunneled and pockets of archaeology survive above these sections,” said archaeologist Richard Fraser.

Plans are being made to protect an undisturbed, high-altitude site in Colorado on private land. Tools and imported materials have been found, and they indicate that the site was repeatedly occupied over a period of 8,000 years. “The rarity of well-preserved archaeological sites in the mountainous settings such as in Pitkin County makes them particularly valuable for understanding this very interesting, yet still not well-known, aspect of our state’s prehistory,” wrote state archaeologist Richard Wilshusen in a letter to the county’s open space and trails director.

Musician and computer scientist Richard Brock wants to keep a massive replica Stonehenge standing on Ireland’s Achill Island. Constructed of concrete, Achill-henge, as it is known, was built without permission and is scheduled for demolition. Brock argues that the structure could be useful to the study of archaeoacoutics.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Wednesday, August 15, 2012. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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