Antiquities collector Oded Golan has been found not guilty of forging an artifact by a Jerusalem court. Scholars have not been able to agree on the authenticity of the so-called “James Ossuary,” which Golan claims to have purchased from Arab traders in East Jerusalem.

A rare wooden statue of a pharaoh discovered last summer in Abydos may represent Hatshepsut. Few depictions of the female pharaoh remain because her successor destroyed or defaced so many of them.

An eighteenth-century stone wall has been uncovered by utility workers digging in Lower Manhattan. Last year, thousands of nineteenth-century artifacts turned up in the same location. “It’s rare to see so many structures in one area of Lower Manhattan,” said archaeologist Alyssa Loorya.

In England, five Roman burial urns found in what was once the Roman town of Verulamium have been examined with CT scanners before an osteoarchaeologist removes their contents. “Two of the urns contained bones which could be human,” said conservator Kelly Abbott.

Volunteer excavators helped archaeologist Ken Robinson dig test holes at the site of a Confederate prison in Salisbury, North Carolina. He wants to know if anything remains of the 1861 prison.

Timothy Fenstermacher began studying Egyptology and communicating with scholars while incarcerated at California’s Tehachapi State Prison. “The extent of this guy’s self-taught scholarship is mind-boggling,” said Hershel Shanks, editor of Biblical Archaeology Review.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Wednesday, March 14, 2012. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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