The timber roof and wooden coffered ceiling of part of a Roman villa thought to have once belonged to Marcus Nonius Balbus, a wealthy governor, has been reconstructed at Herculaneum. Some 250 roof pieces of the House of the Telephus Relief survived because they had been buried in wet beach sand and the hardened ash of Mount Vesuvius. “It’s the first-ever full reconstruction of the timberwork of a Roman roof,” said Andrew Wallace-Hadrill of the Herculaneum Conservation Project. Even some of the paint and gold leaf have survived.

A 5,000-year-old funerary boat belonging to King Den of Egypt’s First Dynasty has been discovered in the cemetery at Abu Rawash, which is located to the northeast of the Giza Plateau. Such boats were believed to carry the king’s soul to the afterlife. This boat’s 11 large planks were unearthed within a flat-roofed burial structure by French archaeologists, and will be displayed at the new National Museum of Egyptian Civilization.

In eastern Croatia, archaeologists have excavated a set of 6,500-year-old antlers that hung on the wall of a prehistoric house. “We have the oldest deer hunting trophy in Croatia,” said Marcel Buric of the Department of Prehistoric Archaeology of the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb. The size of the antlers indicates that the deer would have been large, fast, and hard to catch.

Excavation for a waterline in Winnipeg uncovered the skull of a teenaged pioneer from the nineteenth century. The bones were found in a gravesite that was once part of a large cemetery. “We put the remains back to where they were and moved the waterline,” said archaeologist Brian Smith.

This video clip shows the excavation of a third skeleton at an abandoned convent in Florence. One of the graves is thought to hold the remains of Lisa Gherardini, the proposed model for Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. Gherardini is known to have been buried in the convent in 1542. “I’d say that we’ve got to the really exciting part for researchers,” said Silvano Vinceti, head of the research team.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Wednesday, July 25, 2012. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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