LiDAR equipment was used to map seven Neolithic horned cairns in Caithness, Scotland. “They are essentially burial and ritual monuments, much like the chapels and shrines of more recent times, and each of them is likely to have been used exclusively by individual local groups or communities,” explained archaeologist Graeme Cavers.

A French couple was arrested at the Cambodian-Thai border earlier this week with what appeared to the border officials to be ancient statues. The two people told the officials that they bought the statues, which they thought were modern reproductions,  from a market after visiting Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom.

Research into the artifacts recovered from the Dritt Mansion, built in York, Pennsylvania, in the eighteenth century, suggests that some of the items, including shoes found in the walls, a flattened toad, and a cat, may have been intended to protect the home from witches.

Tell-tale butcher marks on a ground sloth bone dated to between 13,435 and 13,738 years ago suggest that people migrated into northern Ohio earlier than the Clovis people by about 700 years. “There is a variety of other pre-Clovis evidence that has accumulated slowly and surely in recent years,” said Haskel Greenfield of the University of Manitoba.

Students at Montana State University were excited to learn that stone tools in the school’s collection had been sent there from Kenya for dating by Louis Leakey in the 1950s.

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

Comments posted here do not represent the views or policies of the Archaeological Institute of America.