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Friday, November 18
November 18, 2011

A man has been arrested for bulldozing the Priddy Circles, a set of Neolithic earthworks in southwestern England. “What has happened is outrageous, this sort of vandalism is shocking. It is serious, we will never be able to get this back,” said MP Tessa Munt.

In northeastern Poland, skeletal remains of some 350 people have been found in a forgotten cemetery during the construction of a new road. Some are thought to have been soldiers who died after Napoleon marched on Moscow in the early nineteenth century.

A large kitchen area stocked with over-sized cooking tools has been unearthed at the Maya site of Kabah in southeastern Mexico. “We think large quantities of food were cooked in palaces,” said Lourdes Toscano of Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History.

A seal stone made of red jasper was uncovered at the Minoan sanctuary at Vrysinas on the Greek island of Crete. It is carved on all four sides with Minoan hieroglyphs.

The search for a colonial-era tavern in south-central Pennsylvania yielded more than 30,000 artifacts, including copper and silver coins, a religious medal, pottery, plaster, window glass, and iron nails.

In 1962, Philip Smith of the University of Toronto discovered rock art on the banks of the Nile River while looking for ancient Egyptian settlements ahead of the construction of the Aswan Dam. “They were everywhere on the rock. But we weren’t able to date it directly. At that time there was no way of dating art on the cliffs themselves,” he recalls. American and Belgian scientists recently dated that rock art to between 15,000 and 19,000 years old.

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Thursday, November 17
November 17, 2011

Time offers an update on the excavations at Afghanistan’s ancient Buddhist temple complex known as Mes Aynak. The site will eventually be destroyed when a Chinese mining company begins to extract copper from the land. The article also discusses the link between the black market in antiquities and terrorism.

At the ancient city of Metropolis in western Turkey, Serdar Aybeck of Trakya University has unearthed a second-century B.C. Roman bath decorated with mosaics and sculptures.

An early Roman cemetery has been discovered in Cirencester, which is located in England’s Cotswold Hills. Two bracelets made of glass beads, jet beads, shale, and copper alloy were also found.

Luxury goods have been uncovered at a fortified settlement at the Pictish site of Rhynie. “This means that what we thought was a backwater in this part of Britain may well be much more significant and that Rhynie can take its place as an important force in the power politics of early medieval Scotland,” explained Gordon Noble of Aberdeen University.

In 1941, archaeologist Glenn A. Black of Indiana University excavated the grave of two infants at Angel Mounds. He speculated that the babies were conjoined twins. But recent DNA analysis of the infants’ bones shows that they were not even maternal siblings.

Discovery News has assembled seven photographs of Stone Age cave paintings. The captions summarize recent research into what can be known about early artists.

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