A wooden vessel has been washed ashore in Alabama by Hurricane Isaac. Some think it may be a Confederate blockade runner, or a rum runner from the Prohibition era. “Either way, it’s quite interesting. This is the most visible it has been in recent years. Eventually the shifting sands will pull it back under the beach,” said a local resident.

An excavation in waterlogged ground on the French Riviera has uncovered timbers from a second or third-century Roman ship. It is thought to have been a small merchant vessel, which sank in what was once the Roman port of Antipolis. “We can’t be absolutely sure, but it’s possible, as sometimes happened, that it was deliberately scuttled to serve as a landing stage. It may also have been swamped by a freak wave,” said Isabelle Daveau of France’s Rescue Archaeology Research Institute. Saw and adze marks are still visible on the well-preserved wood.

Two headless statues have been unearthed at Aphrodisias, which is located in southwestern Turkey. One of the statues is holding a roll in its left hand with its right hand on its chest. A packet of documents rests behind its feet. The other figure is also shown with documents, but it is missing its hands.

Ertugrul Gunay, Turkey’s Minister of Culture and Tourism, announced that more than 4,000 artifacts have been returned to Turkey from museums and collections around the world as a result of his policies. The country’s archaeological museums are being refurbished, and new ones are being built, in order to house the collections. But journalist Ozgen Acar is not satisfied with this approach. “This looting anarchy in Turkey is getting bigger and bigger, at the same time they are trying to retrieve the items from different museums in the world. But the government is not taking care of this kind of looting at home,” he said.

In fact, the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology has agreed an indefinite loan of the “Troy gold” to Turkey. In 1970, the museum decided to only acquire artifacts of known provenance, after having purchased these earrings, pendants, and pins in 1966 from an art dealer. In 2009, a speck of dirt on one of the artifacts suggested that the jewelry could have come from the site of ancient Troy. According to the agreement, the jewelry will be displayed at a new museum at Troy, and the University of Pennsylvania will receive a loan of artifacts for an exhibition in 2016 and Turkish support of Penn excavations at Gordion.

Archaeologists have tracked the origin and trade routes for obsidian, a highly desirable volcanic glass for tool making, unearthed at the site of Tell Mozan in Syria. Most of the obsidian at Tell Mozan originated in eastern Turkey, but some of the tools–those found in a royal palace courtyard–were made of obsidian obtained from a volcano in central Turkey, which is much farther away. Ellery Frahm of the University of Sheffield thinks the change reflects the economic and political upheaval that occurred when the Akkadian Empire invaded Syria during the Bronze Age. “A mountain insurgency could have resulted in a blockade of natural resources, and the colonizers may have been forced to instead seek resources from more distant sources and forge alliances with other regional powers,” he explained.

An Egyptian New Kingdom stele listing offerings to the gods was discovered at a construction site in northern Cairo, near the ancient city of Matariya. The offerings included geese, vegetables, fruit, bread, and cattle.

An entire settlement in the Italian countryside that was abandoned 1,500 years ago has been mapped using geophysical methods. It had been thought that Interamna Lirenas was a small, rural village, but the street plan, and the size of the marketplace and the theater show that it was an urban center. “Having the complete street plan and being able to pick out individual details allows us to start zoning the settlement and examine how it worked and changed through time,” said Martin Millett of the University of Cambridge.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Wednesday, September 5, 2012. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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