Here's to a happy and prosperous 2011!!!!!

WASHINGTON: Neanderthals were not just meat-eaters, say researchers who believe the ancient near-human creatures cooked a variety of plants.

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By Rossella Lorenzi

Broken pieces of clay pottery have revealed the names of dozens of Egyptian priests who served at the temple of a crocodile god, Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) announced.

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by Daniel Estrin

JERUSALEM – Israeli archaeologists said Monday they may have found the earliest evidence yet for the existence of modern man, and if so, it could upset theories of the origin of humans.

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(CNN) -- An overlooked female pinkie bone put in storage after it was discovered in a Siberian cave two years ago points to the existence of a previously unknown prehistoric human species, anthropologists say.

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Mason Inman in San Francisco
for National Geographic News

An ancient mummified forest, complete with well-preserved logs, leaves, and seedpods, has been discovered deep in the Canadian Arctic, scientists say.

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by Laura Allsop

(CNN) -- Over 1,000 years before Pythagoras was calculating the length of a hypotenuse, sophisticated scribes in Mesopotamia were working with the same theory to calculate the area of their farmland.

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By Maria Cheng

LONDON—After nine months of tests, researchers in France have identified the head of France's King Henry IV, who was assassinated in 1610 aged 57.

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By Theunis Bates

Wondering what to do with those slowly molding Thanksgiving leftovers festering at the back of your fridge? Well, if you let them rot for another few thousand years, they could become an important archaeological treasure.

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(Reuters) - A Roman statue that had been buried for centuries has been unearthed by the winter gales that have raked Israel's coast. The white-marble figure of a woman in toga and sandals was found in the remains of a cliff that crumbled under the force of winds, waves and rain at the ancient port of Ashkelon, the Israel Antiquities Authority said on Tuesday.

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An intact, sealed, jar has been discovered at Qumran, the site where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found in nearby caves.

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LONDON (Reuters) – Maybe being a serf or a villein in the Middle Ages was not such a grim existence as it seems. Medieval England was not only far more prosperous than previously believed, it also actually boasted an average income that would be more than double the average per capita income of the world's poorest nations today, according to new research.

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The fight to save the Roman Museum has been won thanks to public support and better marketing. Canterbury council sparked outrage last year when it said three of the city’s museums, including the Roman Museum in Butchery Lane, would have to close as part of a round of budget cuts.

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Luke Salked

Standing proudly on the side of an English hill, its religious roots go back 2,000 years. But a single night of vandalism has left an ancient site of pilgrimage in splinters.

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Scientists are still trying to explain how the gray wolf could evolve into over 400 breeds of dogs, ranging from the pug to the pinscher. One aid in solving this riddle has been found in an unlikely place: a giant animal shrine from ancient Egypt.

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A burial took place in Reykjanesbaer municipality in southwest Iceland yesterday. The news wouldn’t have had any special significance if not for the fact that the person buried, an ancient heathen, passed away 1,100 years ago and the ceremony took place inside the Viking World museum.

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A temple built by Ptolemy II Philadelphus has been discovered at the ancient city of Thmuis (also known at Tell Timai) on the Nile Delta in Egypt.

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At the end of ancient times, Corinth, one of the most famous cities in the Greek world, lay partly in ruins. “The mid 6th century city fell victim first to bubonic plague, with high mortality levels, and subsequently a deep economic recession that lasted, according to the archaeological finds, for 500 years,” write archaeologists from the American School of Classical Studies at Athens in an overview on their website. The school has been excavating Corinth since 1896.

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Syria (Suwaida) - The Syrian archaeological mission working at al-Gharia village unearthed nine cemeteries and a number of findings from the Byzantine and Roman eras.

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ScienceDaily — A unique queen's crown with ancient symbols combined with a new method of studying status in Egyptian reliefs forms the basis for a re-interpretation of historical developments in Egypt in the period following the death of Alexander the Great. A thesis from the University of Gothenburg (Sweden) argues that Queen Arsinoë II ruled ancient Egypt as a female pharaoh, predating Cleopatra by 200 years.

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PARIS – A retired French electrician and his wife have come forward with 271 undocumented, never-before-seen works by Pablo Picasso estimated to be worth at least 60 million euros ($79.35 million), an administrator of the artist's estate said Monday.

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Recent finds at the Ventarrón archaeological site have revealed some of the oldest examples of ancient Peruvian domestication of animals.

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A 2,000-year-old intact skeleton of an elderly woman was unearthed from a tomb from the early Western Han dynasty at the construction site of an industrial park in the north of Zhuchengjie, a satellite city of Wuhan, capital of east-central China's Hubei Province, on Nov. 19.

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LONDON.- An archivist at the National Portrait Gallery has found relics from the tomb of King Richard II while cataloguing the papers of its first Director Sir George Scharf (1820-1895). Among the hundreds of diaries and notebooks left behind in boxes not opened for years were contents from the coffin of a medieval English king, and sketches of his skull and bones.

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An ancient Egyptian temple to the god Ptah in the village of Meet Rahina near Memphis, just south of Cairo, now sits submerged in sewage. The temple, which was built during the reign of Pharaoh Ramses II (1279 BC - 1213 BC) and was once a major tourist attraction, now serves as a home for stray dogs. According to local residents, sanitation authorities never removed the piles of garbage dumped around the temple by villagers.

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Forget the tricycle — your kid needs a metal detector.

James Hyatt, then 3, found $4 million worth of medieval gold on a trip with his father and grandfather while scouring the Essex countryside with their device.

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By Shira Medding

Jerusalem (CNN) -- Israeli archaeologists have discovered an ancient Roman bathhouse that was probably used by the soldiers who destroyed the Second Temple in Jerusalem, the Israel Antiquities Authority announced Monday.

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Rome's National Museum of Oriental Art has displayed the reconstructed face of a female skeleton which was found in Iran's Burnt City wearing an artificial eyeball. The reconstructed version of the 5,000-year-old skeleton was unveiled during a ceremony attended by head of Iran's Cultural Heritage, Handicrafts and Tourism Organization Hamid Baqaei and Iran's ambassador to Italy Seyyed Mohammad-Ali Hosseini.

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by Loren Grush

An accidental discovery by a bulldozer driver has led to what may be the find of the century: an ice-age burial ground that could rival the famed La Brea tar pits. After two weeks of excavating ancient fossils at the Ziegler Reservoir near Snowmass Village, Colorado, scientists from the Denver Museum of Natural Science returned home Wednesday with their unearthed treasures in tow -- a wide array of fossils, insects and plant life that they say give a stunningly realistic view of what life was like when ancient, giant beasts lumbered across the Earth.

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London, England (CNN) -- Archaeologists have uncovered an ancient Roman landscape beneath a park in west London, with a Roman road, evidence of a settlement, and unusual burials among the finds.

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(CBS/AP) Astronomer Tycho Brahe uncovered some of the mysteries of the universe in the 16th century - and now modern-day scientists are delving into the mystery of his sudden death. On Monday, an international team of scientists opened his tomb in the Church of Our Lady Before Tyn near Prague's Old Town Square, where the famous Dane has been buried since 1601.

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A "sensational" discovery of 75-century-old copper tools in Serbia is compelling scientists to reconsider existing theories about where and when man began using metal. Belgrade - axes, hammers, hooks and needles - were found interspersed with other artefacts from a settlement that burned down some 7,000 years ago at Plocnik, near Prokuplje and 200 km south of Belgrade.

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Archaeologists have unearthed twelve ancient sphinx statues at Luxor, Egypt. The sculptures were found at a newly discovered part of the Avenue of Sphinxes, an ancient road stretching from the temple at Karnak to the temple of the goddess Mut at Luxor.

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Rebecca Jenkins
ABC

DNA evidence suggests that immigrants from the Ancient Near East brought farming to Europe, and spread the practice to the region's hunter-gatherer communities, according to Australian-led research.

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London, England (CNN) -- A Chinese vase found during a house clearout in London has sold at auction for what is believed to be a world record £43 million ($68 million).

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by Max-Planck-Gesellschaft

Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany have documented species differences in the pattern of brain development after birth that are likely to contribute to cognitive differences between modern humans and Neanderthals.

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By Liam Sloan

VIKING skeletons buried beneath an Oxford college were the victims of brutal ethnic cleansing 1,000 years ago, archaeologists have discovered. Experts were mystified when they discovered a mass grave beneath a quadrangle a St John’s College, St Giles, in 2008.

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ScienceDaily— Evolutionary divergence of humans and chimpanzees likely occurred some 8 million years ago rather than the 5 million year estimate widely accepted by scientists, a new statistical model suggests.

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by Richard Parkinson

Ancient Egypt rarely escapes our stereotypical view of it: an exotic place full of pyramids crammed with cursed treasure, waiting to be discovered by adventurous archaeologists. As in René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo's comic Asterix and Cleopatra, it is often presented as a land of spooky tombs and people speaking in hieroglyphic pictures. These stereotypes are themselves quite ancient – even to the ancient Greeks, Egypt was a quintessentially different culture. But they trivialise a complex society.

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Maria Cristina Valsecchi in Rome

The famous lifelike poses of many victims at Pompeii—seated with face in hands, crawling, kneeling on a mother's lap—are helping to lead scientists toward a new interpretation of how these ancient Romans died in the A.D. 79 eruptions of Italy's Mount Vesuvius. Until now it's been widely assumed that most of the victims were asphyxiated by volcanic ash and gas. But a recent study says most died instantly of extreme heat, with many casualties shocked into a sort of instant rigor mortis.

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Furthermore, Osbourne's got a genetic sliver that once belonged to homo sapiens' extinct cousins, the Neanderthals. "For a long time we thought that Neanderthals didn't have any descendents today, but it turns out that Asians and Europeans have some evidence of Neanderthal lineage – like a drop in the bucket," Pearson said. "We found a little segment on Ozzy's chromosome 10 that very likely traces back to a Neanderthal forebear."

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Indeed, the identity of the strange breed of 'horse' that has been discovered in 2004, at Pompeii, has been cleared out by a Cambridge University researcher, who realized it was actually a donkey. Back in 2004, when academics unearthed skeletons found at a house in the ancient Roman town that was covered in ashes in 79 AD, they thought it belonged to an extinct breed of horse.

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(CNN) -- Protection from the Sahara's howling dust storms may have helped the Sphinx maintain its steady gaze over the millennia.

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Deep in the mountainside near the Ariege river in France, ghostly images of long ago still dance across the rock walls of tunnels, overhangs, and vast caverns.

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MYSTIC — When a young Israel Putnam climbed into a craggy den on a snowy afternoon in 1743 and killed the last wolf in Connecticut, colonists could breathe a sigh of relief.

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Archaeologists have unearthed a collection of Bronze Age axe heads, spear tips and other 3,000-year-old metal objects buried in an Essex field.

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AP: YEREVAN, Armenia -- An Armenian archaeologist says that scientists have discovered a skirt that could be 5,900-year-old.

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By Charles Q. Choi, LiveScience Senior Writer

A delicate, sophisticated way to craft sharp weapons from stone apparently was developed by humans more than 50,000 years sooner than had been thought.

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Cairo, Egypt (CNN) -- Just imagine: a world without cancer. It's a tantalizing thought, recently floated by researchers at Manchester University in the UK.

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THE question of whether Christopher Columbus and his crew were responsible for bringing syphilis to Europe from the Americas appears to have been answered by the discovery of a collection of knobbly skeletons in a London cemetery, experts have revealed.

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by Owen Jarus

Acrobats from Burma, workers from Central or West Asia, and a mausoleum design inspired by work in the Middle East – the Mausoleum of China’s First Emperor was a cosmopolitan place says Dr. Duan Qingbo, the man in charge of excavating it.

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by Jennifer Viegas, Discovery Channel

Carved pumpkins abound this Halloween season, but a decorated gourd dated to 1793 may be the spookiest of them all. New research determines it may contain the blood of Louis XVI, who was executed by guillotine that same year.

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Her life has been celebrated in song, story and a Disney cartoon, but no one knew where Pocahontas tied the knot with a tobacco farmer—until now. Archaeologist Bill Kelso and his team were digging this summer in a previously unexplored section of the fort at Jamestown, Va., the country's oldest permanent English colony, when they uncovered a series of deep holes.

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by Rich Calder

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They are unusual because they are all believed to be male, most are adults – and more than half had been decapitated. When these 30 bodies were buried some got their heads in the right place – on their shoulders. Others saw their heads placed between their knees, on their chests or down by their feet. In one double burial the two bodies even had had their heads swapped over.

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Archaeologist Ramon Fernandez explains the significance of the finds

It has been 100 years since excavations started on the Madinat Al Zahra, the magnificent 10th century palace city near Cordoba in southern Spain. Although only 11% of the city - built by the powerful caliph Abd Al Rahman III - has been uncovered, it is unlikely that it will take another century to unearth the remainder of the site given the rapid advances in excavation technology.

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Jennifer Viegas

Neanderthal youngsters that made it to the "terrible two's" were large, sturdy and toothy, suggests a newly discovered Neanderthal infant. The child almost survived to such an age, but instead died when it was just one and a half years old.

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ZURICH – Archaeologists in the Swiss city of Zurich have unearthed a 5,000-year-old door that may be one of the oldest ever found in Europe.

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Egyptian archaeologists discovered a 4400-year-old tomb, south of the cemetery of the pyramid builders at Giza, Egypt. In a statement, Egyptian Minister of Culture Farouk Hosny, said the ancient Egyptian tomb was unearthed during routine excavations supervised by the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) near the pyramid builder's necropolis.

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By Ian O'Neill

According to all the ridiculous hype surrounding Dec. 21, 2012, the Mayans "predicted" the end of the world with one of their calendars. On this date, doomsayers assert that Earth will be ravaged by a smorgasbord of cataclysmic astronomical events -- everything from a Planet X flyby to a "killer" solar flare to a geomagnetic reversal, ensuring we have a very, very bad day. As we all know by now, these theories of doom are bunkum.

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by Phil Gast

(CNN) -- Add cannibalism to the fearsome attributes of Tyrannosaurus rex, the big-headed dinosaur that roamed North America 66 million years ago and took no prisoners.

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By Fiona Macrae

Cancer is a man-made disease fuelled by the excesses of modern life, a study of ancient remains has found. Tumours were rare until recent times when pollution and poor diet became issues, the review of mummies, fossils and classical literature found.

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A former New Jersey high school science teacher has discovered something that would have wowed his students: a three-toed Jurassic dinosaur footprint embedded in a slab of rock at a construction site near his home.

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AFP:

MADRID — Scientists said Monday they had uncovered evidence suggesting cave dwellers who lived in northern Spain some 500,000 years ago took care of their elderly and infirm.

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James Meikle

It is one of Britain's most-loved ancient hill figures, careering across the downland. Now vets are being urged to question whether the White Horse of Uffington was meant to be a horse at all.

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ScienceDaily — New research suggests that climate change following massive volcanic eruptions drove Neanderthals to extinction and cleared the way for modern humans to thrive in Europe and Asia.

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For two weeks we had been tunnelling beneath the surface of the acropolis hill at the ancient Maya city of Waká in Guatemala's Petén rainforest. It was the spring of 2006, and we knew that under the surface of the acropolis was a virtual layer cake of earlier structures. The acropolis had been one of the city's enduring spiritual centers before it was abandoned around A.D. 820.

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By KARIN LAUB (AP)

JERICHO, West Bank — Visitors to ancient Jericho got a rare glimpse Sunday of a massive 1,200-year-old carpet mosaic measuring nearly 900 square meters (9,700 square feet), making it one of the largest in the Middle East.

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A VIKING treasure pendant, which has laid buried for more than 1,000 years, has been unearthed by an amateur archaeologist.

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by Melissa Klein

This unfinished painting of Jesus and Mary could be a lost Michelangelo, potentially the art find of the century. But to the upstate family on whose living-room wall it hung for years, it was just "The Mike."

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By Henry Samuel
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Pioneering new research by archaeologists at the University of York suggests that Neanderthals belied their primitive reputation and had a deep seated sense of compassion.

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The most well-preserved pottery from the Stone Age ever found in Norway has turned up in an unspoiled dwelling site not far from Kristiansand. The find is considered an archaeological sensation. The discovery of a “sealed” Stone Age house site from 3500 BC has stirred great excitement among archaeologists from Norway’s Museum of Cultural History at the University in Oslo. The settlement site at Hamresanden, close to Kristiansand’s airport at Kjevik in Southern Norway, looks like it was covered by a sandstorm, possibly in the course of a few hours.

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Archaeologists think they have found two more Viking ships buried in Vestfold County south of Oslo. The biggest may be 25 metres long, larger than any found so far.

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BEAUFORT, N.C. – Archaeologists seeking ancient pirate booty are heading back to sea off North Carolina's coast -- a continuing effort to recover artifacts from the wreck believed to be Blackbeard's flagship.

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In the current Journal of Archeological Science, a team led by Maria Anna Pabst of Austria's Medical University of Graz, "describe tattoos from two body areas of a mummy from Chiribaya Alta in Southern Peru." The team looked at the tattoos on the hands and neck of the mummy using various microscopic techniques.

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By Kendra Noyes Staff Writer The Salem News Thu Sep 30, 2010, 06:00 AM EDT

MANCHESTER — What a builder thought was a quarter has turned out to be a 2,000-year-old shekel, the kind of coin Judas was paid to betray Jesus.

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CAIRO - Archaeologists have unearthed the upper part of a double limestone statue of a powerful pharaoh who ruled nearly 3,400 years ago, Egypt's Ministry of Culture said Saturday.

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By Katia Moskvitch Science reporter, BBC News

Neanderthals were keen on innovation and technology and developed tools all on their own, scientists say. A new study challenges the view that our close relatives could advance only through contact with Homo sapiens.

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By Nandini Sukumar

Unilever is researching the Stone Age diet with a view to new products, The Times in London reported. "We’re going to be doing interesting, cutting-edge science but it has a hard business nose too,” Mark Berry, the Unilever scientist leading the project told the Times.

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By Khayoun Saleh

The Antiquities Department says French archaeologists have recently unearthed a new Sumerian temple in the southern Province of Dhiqar.

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A rare bronze signet ring with the impression of the face of the Greek sun god, Apollo, has been discovered at Tel Dor, in northern Israel, by University of Haifa diggers. “A piece of high-quality art such as this, doubtlessly created by a top-of-the-line artist, indicates that local elites developing a taste for fine art and the ability to afford it were also living in provincial towns, and not only in the capital cities of the Hellenistic kingdoms,” explains Dr. Ayelet Gilboa, Head of the Department of Archaeology at the University of Haifa, who headed the excavations at Dor along with Dr. Ilan Sharon of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

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A dig in search of Anglo-Saxon skeletons has instead unearthed signs of a sprawling Roman settlement. The discovery was made last week, on the grounds of Cambridge's Newnham College.

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Fossils of two new species of horned dinosaurs closely related to the Triceratops have been discovered in southern Utah, scientists revealed Wednesday.

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Chinese archeologists have found new evidence of international cultural exchange on the ancient Silk Road. Four European-looking warriors and lion-like beasts are engraved on an empress's 1,200-year-old stone coffin that was unearthed in Shaanxi Province, in northwestern China.

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LIMA – A team of Peruvian archaeologists have discovered two ceremonial temples more than 4,000 years old in Peru’s northern jungle, which makes them the most ancient in the country and identifies them with the Bracamoros culture, the daily El Comercio said on Saturday.

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Investigations into the mysterious death of a Bronze Age man are helping to paint a picture of life on the Isle of Man over 3,000 years ago.

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LONDON (Reuters Life!) - Ancient human infant and animal remains believed to be more than 2,000 years old have been unearthed during the construction of a school in London. Archaeologists say the discovery, one of the most important in the British capital in recent years, points to evidence of an Iron Age and early Roman farming settlement.

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By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent

JUVFONNA, Norway (Reuters) - Climate change is exposing reindeer hunting gear used by the Vikings' ancestors faster than archaeologists can collect it from ice thawing in northern Europe's highest mountains. "It's like a time machine...the ice has not been this small for many, many centuries," said Lars Piloe, a Danish scientist heading a team of "snow patch archaeologists" on newly bare ground 1,850 meters (6,070 ft) above sea level in mid-Norway.

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Berlin - New finds at a well-preserved ancient battlefield in the north of Germany are not only rewriting geo-political history, but also revealing some of the secrets of Rome's military success.

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by Miral Sattar


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NARA (Kyodo) An ancient tomb in Asuka, Nara Prefecture, has been identified as that of a reigning empress and her daughter built in the seventh century, as an octagonal stone paving was newly discovered, researchers at the local education board said Thursday.

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Conservation experts almost gave up when they first saw the severely damaged wall paintings they had come to rescue in the ancient city of Petra -- a site made famous in the final scene in the film, "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade."

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Archaeologists digging at a site in south Wales have uncovered an entire suit of Roman armour and some weapons. The rare discovery was made during an excavation at the fortress of Caerleon in south Wales, one of Britain's best known Roman sites.

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by Ma Lie

China-Germany alliance has helped keep the glow on warriors' cheeks. Ma Lie reports from Xi'an.The earth in the ancient city of Xi'an continues to astound archaeologists.When excavation work to find more terracotta relics restarted for the third time last year in Xi'an, archaeologists admitted they did not expect to make any groundbreaking discoveries.

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KANSAS CITY, Mo -- A powerful image of the face of a 2,500-year-old Egyptian mummy at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art has been created by special agents/forensic artists from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), as unveiled today at the Museum.

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By Shanta Barley

In 130 BC, a ship fashioned from the wood of walnut trees and bulging with medicines and Syrian glassware sank off the coast of Tuscany, Italy. Archaeologists found its precious load 20 years ago and now, for the first time, archaeobotanists have been able to examine and analyse pills that were prepared by the physicians of ancient Greece.

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A Saxon boat has been found during flood defence work on a Norfolk river. The boat, which is about 9.8 ft (3m) long and had been hollowed out by hand from a piece of oak, was found at the bottom of the River Ant.

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ScienceDaily — As the last ice age was ending, about 13,000 years ago, a final blast of cold hit Europe, and for a thousand years or more, it felt like the ice age had returned. But oddly, despite bitter cold winters in the north, Antarctica was heating up. For the two decades since ice core records revealed that Europe was cooling at the same time Antarctica was warming over this thousand-year period, scientists have looked for an explanation.

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By David Keys, Archaeology Correspondent

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Recently, archaeologists found prehistoric hats of human beings who lived 4,600 years ago from an ancient tomb site at Tongliao City of Inner Mongolia. Experts said it was the first time this kind of hats, which were made from bones, have been found in the same period of prehistoric culture.

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University Park, Pa. -- A new turn in the debate over explanations for the odd features of LB1 -- the specimen number of the only skull found in Liang Bua Cave on the Indonesian island of Flores and sometimes called "the hobbit" -- is further evidence of a continued streak of misleading science regarding the development of a new species, according to researchers.

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The papyrus in the lining of the Egyptian-style leather cover of the 1,200-year-old manuscript, "potentially represents the first tangible connection between early Irish Christianity and the Middle Eastern Coptic Church", the Museum said.

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By Jamie Stiehm

A mistake has been made in the Oval Office makeover that goes beyond the beige. President Obama's new presidential rug seemed beyond reproach, with quotations from Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. woven along its curved edge.

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(CNN) -- First there was the discovery of dozens of bottles of 200-year-old champagne, but now salvage divers have recovered what they believe to be the world's oldest beer, taking advertisers' notion of 'drinkability' to another level.

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By Katie Alcock Science reporter, BBC News

The remains of a huge 12,000 year old feast have been found in a cave in Northern Israel. Archaeologists working in Hilazon Tachtit found what they thought was a late Palaeolithic campsite, when they discovered tools and animal bones.

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At an early Bronze Age settlement called Ikiztepe, in the Black Sea province of Samsun in Turkey. The village was home to about 300 people at its peak, around 3200 to 2100 BC. They lived in rectangular, single-storey houses made of logs, which each had a courtyard and oven in the front.

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by Rosella Lorenzi

Ultra millionaire sponsorship deals such as those signed by sprinter Usain Bolt, motorcycle racer Valentino Rossi and tennis player Maria Sharapova, are just peanuts compared to the personal fortune amassed by a second century A.D. Roman racer, according to an estimate published in the historical magazine Lapham's Quarterly.

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by Carly Silver

Of the religions that expanded rapidly in the 1st-century Roman Empire, worship of Mithras was particularly popular among Roman soldiers, who spread his cult during their far-flung travels.

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Israeli archeologists unveiled a 2,000 year old semi-precious cameo bearing the image of Cupid on Monday, which the Israel Antiquities Authorities (IAA) said was among several items located in the City of David archeological area in Jerusalem's Old City in the last 12 months.

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Archaeologists have discovered a 4,500 year old settlement, on the Ausable River, near the shore of Lake Huron in Canada.

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by Trevor Cox

Just after sunrise on a misty spring morning last year, my fellow acoustician at the University of Salford, Bruno Fazenda, and Rupert Till of the University of Huddersfield, UK, could be found wandering around Stonehenge popping balloons. This was not some bizarre pagan ritual. It was a serious attempt to capture the "impulse response" of the ancient southern English stone circle, and with it perhaps start to determine how Stonehenge might have sounded to our ancestors.

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By Matthias Schulz

For a century, archeologists have been looking for a gate through a wall built by the Vikings in northern Europe. This summer, it was found. Researchers now believe the extensive barrier was built to protect an important trading route.

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by Jonathan Brown

They gave the world decent roads, indoor plumbing and some of the goriest spectator sports known to man, but now it appears that the Romans made a hitherto secret contribution to global civilisation by pioneering the wearing of socks with sandals.

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Since 2009, researchers from Bonn and Mexico have been systematically uncovering and mapping the old walls of Uxul, a Mayan city. "In the process, we also came across two, about 100 m square water reservoirs," explained Iken Paap, who directs the project with Professor Dr. Nikolai Grube and the Mexican archaeologist Antonio Benavides Castillo.

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Archaeologists have unearthed the remains of a Roman "industrial estate" in North Yorkshire.

The site includes remains of a water-powered flour mill used to grind grain and produce food. Clothes, food remains and graves were also uncovered.

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by David Willey

Tuesday marks the 1,600th anniversary of one of the turning points of European history - the first sack of Imperial Rome by an army of Visigoths, northern European barbarian tribesmen, led by a general called Alaric.

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Greek archaeologists have claimed they have found the palace of Odysseus during excavations on the Ithaca island in the Ionian Sea.

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by Dalya Alberge

Spectacular 2,000-year-old Hellenistic-style wall paintings have been revealed at the world heritage site of Petra through the expertise of British conservation specialists. The paintings, in a cave complex, had been obscured by centuries of black soot, smoke and greasy substances, as well as graffiti.

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by Jay Moreno
THE third phase of the Big Dig at Brading Roman Villa may well have been one of the toughest excavations eminent archaeologist Sir Barry Cunliffe had ever undertaken but it has yielded some treasures and a greater understanding of Brading’s history up to its Roman occupation.

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A 4,000-year-old skeleton, known as the Queen of the Inch, is to be re-interred in the tiny island of Inchmarnock in the Firth of Clyde.

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Mark Stead

ARCHAEOLOGISTS have revealed how they discovered more than they bargained for when a York excavation unearthed the remains of a “forgotten” army’s soldiers.

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Dr Will Bowden with the skeleton discovered at Caistor St Edmund during the last excavations.

Archaeologists are set to unearth further secrets of a Roman town on the outskirts of Norwich - and are hoping to discover evidence linking the settlemt to East Anglia's Iceni queen Boudica.

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ScienceDaily — The most robust statistical examination to date of our species' genetic links to "mitochondrial Eve" -- the maternal ancestor of all living humans -- confirms that she lived about 200,000 years ago. The Rice University study was based on a side-by-side comparison of 10 human genetic models that each aim to determine when Eve lived using a very different set of assumptions about the way humans migrated, expanded and spread across Earth.

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A large cache of ancient stone statues outnumbering the Qin Terracotta Warriors was found in the depths of the Nanling Mountains located in Dao County of Yongzhou City, according to the Xiang Gan Yue Gui Archeology Summit Forum held in Yongzhou, Hunan Province on Aug. 17.

Read the rest here.

Archaeologists have discovered several large buildings at the fortress of Caerleon in south Wales, one of Britain's best known Roman sites.

Read the rest on the BBC.

by James Williams

On July 12 the remains of an 18th-century ship were found buried 20 feet below street level at the site of the World Trade Center in New York City. The question is -- how did they get there?

Read the rest on Discovery.

by Pierre Le Hir

Excavations near the antique city of Vindunum (now Le Mans) have revealed a vast religious site dating from the first to the third centuries AD with remarkably well-preserved offerings.

Read the rest on The Guardian.

LIMA.- Archaeologists have discovered, 16 meters from the tomb of the Great Lord of Sipan, the remains of a teenager belonging to the Moche society who was buried over 1600 years ago in Peru.

Read the rest on Art Daily.

Hradiste - Czech archaeologists were surprised at uncovering an unharmed hen´s egg at the burial site of Hradiste, a 9th-century Great Moravia settlement, chief researcher Bohuslav Klima has told CTK.

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Jennifer Viegas

Fossilized bones scarred by hack marks reveal that our human ancestors were using stone tools and eating meat from large mammals nearly a million years earlier than previously thought, according to a new study that pushes back both of these human activities to roughly 3.4 million years ago.

Read the rest on Discovery.

By Victoria Gill Science reporter, BBC News

A linguistic mystery has arisen surrounding symbol-inscribed stones in Scotland that predate the formation of the country itself.

Read the rest on the BBC.

Kate Ravilious in York, U.K.

Long dismissed as accidental additions to Viking graves, prehistoric "thunderstones"—fist-size stone tools resembling the Norse god Thor's hammerhead—were actually purposely placed as good-luck talismans, archaeologists say.

Read the rest on National Geographic.

by Clara Moskowitz

The site of an ancient city called Aüza, the earliest African city of the Phoenician civilization that existed 3,500 years ago, may have been in a different spot than experts have thought, archaeologists report.

Read the rest here.

Read the rest here.

It's vacation time again, so I won't be able to update the blog until August 15th. I hope everyone has a WONDERFUL summer. And happy travels for all of you on the move :)

by Mohammed Almasri

Egypt (Abu Qir) - Ninety-nine Sunken pieces of antiquities were salvaged by the European marine archaeological institute mission in association with the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) in the areas of Eastern Port and Heracleum in Abu Qir.

Read the rest here.

ScienceDaily — Your mother was right: Fish really is "brain food." And it seems that even pre-humans living as far back as 2 million years ago somehow knew it.

Read the rest on Science Daily.

by Pat Brennan

It might have been a treasured pet, or the victim of traditional destruction of property after its owner's death. The reason for its burial remains a mystery.

Read the rest here.

By Tom Watkins, CNN

Get a kick out of this: Researchers reported Wednesday finding the world's oldest leather shoe in a cave in Armenia.

Read the rest on CNN.

The origin of insects found in clay beehives in the Jordan Valley, the oldest known commercial beekeeping facility in the world, suggests extensive trading and complicated agriculture 3,000 years ago.

Read the rest in the LA Times.

London, England (CNN) -- Heads hacked off, a bite from a lion, tiger or bear, massive muscles on massive men -- all clues that an ancient cemetery uncovered in northern England is the final resting place of gladiators, scientists have announced after seven years of investigations.

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Archaeologists digging at a cathedral in Kent have unearthed evidence of a previously unknown building. An excavation project was started at Rochester Cathedral to conserve a Roman city wall.

Read the rest on the BBC.

Waiting in line at the drive-through may be a drag, but it sure beats what our ancestors had to do for fast food. Try take-out lion. A Spanish team reports Neanderthals likely hunted and ate a big cat at a cave site.

Read the rest on USA Today.

Martin Wainwright

The haunting mystery of Britain's headless Romans may have been solved at last, thanks to scars from a lion's bite and hammer marks on decapitated skulls.

Read the rest here.

By Rossella Lorenzi

Tantalizing new clues are surfacing in the Amelia Earhart mystery, according to researchers scouring a remote South Pacific island believed to be the final resting place of the legendary aviatrix.

Read the rest on Discovery.

Debra Black

A 9,000 year old beer made of rice, honey and hawthorn may give a whole new meaning to cracking open a cold one.

Read the rest here.

Beth Hale

They may appear to be marvels of modern science. But organ transplants, satellite navigation and cosmetic surgery can actually be traced back - in idea form at least - to a 17th century scientist with a big imagination.

Read the rest on the Daily Mail.

by Sid Perkins

Oyster shells excavated from a well in Jamestown, Va., the first permanent British settlement in North America, bolster the notion that the first colonists suffered an unusually deep and long-lasting drought.

Read the rest on Science News.

MEXICO CITY.- Created under the orders of Bernardino de Sahagun by 20 tlacuilos or painters and 4 Indigenous masters, Florentine Codex is one of the greatest expressions of the Renascence in America.

Read the rest on Art Daily.

Crystal skulls have long had a fringe following, and the most famous of them is one named for the explorer-author Frederick A. Mitchell-Hedges (see “Legend of the Crystal Skulls”). Mitchell-Hedges claimed to have found the skull somewhere in Central America in the 1930s, but his adopted daughter Anna later said she found it under a fallen altar or inside a pyramid at the Maya site of Lubaantún in British Honduras (now Belize) some time in the 1920s. Neither of their contradictory accounts is true. In fact, like all the other crystal skulls thus far examined, it is a modern creation, despite its nearly mythical place in the minds of devotees.

Read the rest here.

By Taylor Luck

AMMAN - Archaeological finds in the northern Jordan Valley are forcing experts to rethink the patterns of the earliest civilisations. In Tabqat Fahel, 90 kilometres north of Amman, recent finds indicate that the ancient site of Pella, which spans across the earliest pre-historic times to the Mameluke era, may have been a part of the cradle of civilisations.

Read the rest on the Jordan Times.

by Chris Watt

It was an age when reindeer roamed the Scottish landscape, competing for territory with human raiding parties from what is now the North Sea. The country lay under glaciers as far south as the Highland Line, and a mini ice-age was fast approaching.

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MEXICO CITY.- As part of most recent studies at Tonina Archaeological Zone, in Chiapas, a technique known as RTI (Reflection Transformation Imaging) is being applied for the first time in Mexico on Maya sculptures, with the aim of documenting the ancient monuments and having more details of inscriptions.

Read the rest on Art Daily.

Almost two million years ago, early humans began eating food such as crocodiles, turtles and fish – a diet that could have played an important role in the evolution of human brains and our footsteps out of Africa, according to new research.

Read the rest on Science Alert.

Francis Wenban-Smith from the University of Southampton discovered two ancient flint hand tools used to cut meat at the M25/A2 road junction at Dartford, Kent, during an excavation funded by the Highways Agency.

Read the rest on the Telegraph.

BERLIN, June 1 (Reuters) - A World War Two bomb found in central Germany exploded on Tuesday, killing three people, as disposal experts were about to defuse it, local authorities said.

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CAIRO (AP) — Archaeologists have discovered the 3,300-year-old tomb of the ancient Egyptian capital's mayor, whose resting place had been lost under the desert sand since 19th century treasure hunters first carted off some of its decorative wall panels, officials announced Sunday.

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JERUSALEM.- The development work for the construction of a fortified emergency room at Barzilai Hospital, which is being conducted by a contractor carefully supervised by the Israel Antiquities Authority, has unearthed a new and impressive find: a magnificent pagan altar dating to the Roman period (first-second centuries CE) made of granite and adorned with bulls’ heads and a laurel wreaths. The altar stood in the middle of the ancient burial field.

Read the rest here.

A monument marking an official battle site in the Cotswolds might be in the wrong place, historians have claimed. The memorial to the Stow-on-the Wold battle stands about three miles (4.8km) north-west of the town, on a hill outside Donnington.

Read the rest on the BBC.

ScienceDaily— Researchers from the Cartif Foundation and the University of Valladolid have created full color plans in 3-D of places of cultural interest, using laser scanners and photographic cameras. The technique has been used to virtually recreate five churches in the Merindad de Aguilar de Campoo, a region between Cantabria, Palencia and Burgos which boasts the highest number of Romanesque monuments in the world.

Read the rest on Science Daily.

XI'AN - Archeologists in northwest China's Shaanxi province said Wednesday they had found a primitive "icebox" dating back at least 2,000 years in the ruins of an emperor's residence.

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By Paul Bennett

In A.D. 143 or 144, when he was in his early 20s, the future Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius set out for the country estate of his adoptive father, Emperor Antoninus Pius. The property, Villa Magna (Great Estate), boasted hundreds of acres of wheat, grapes and other crops, a grand mansion, baths and temples, as well as rooms for the emperor and his entourage to retreat from the world or curl up with a good book.

Read the rest on Smithsonian Mag.

Grosseto (AKI) - An ancient Etruscan home dating back more than 2,400 years has been discovered outside Grosseto in central Italy. Hailed as an exceptional find, the luxury home was uncovered at an archeological site at Vetulonia, 200 kilometres north of Rome.

Read the rest here.

by Jennifer Viegas

Today at Discovery News you can read about the earliest recognized species of Homo, the first known member of our genus. This latest addition to the human family, Homo gautengensis, was from South Africa and measured just 3 feet tall. It spent a lot of time in trees and had big teeth suitable for chewing plant material. H. gautengensis emerged over 2 million years ago, but died out at around 600,000 years ago.

Read the rest on Discovery.

For some families tomb raiding became a business, earning the equivalent of a year’s salary for one night's digging. An ancient tomb discovered last week in Protaras has led archaeologists to believe that the site may be part of an ancient cemetery.

Read the rest on Cyprus Mail.

Last Saturday was a very strange day. At Taposiris Magna, where the ruins of the Osiris Temple and few Graeco-Roman tombs emerge from the sand, a dozen journalists, photographers and TV cameramen gathered to witness the revelations of the latest search there carried by an Egyptian-Dominican team.

Read the rest on Al-Ahram Weekly.

By SOUREN MELIKIAN

PARIS — Agatha Christie could have invented the story. Imagine another Egypt, with a marked black African component. This is Meroe, in present-day Sudan. In art, ancient Egyptian deities appear alongside others, unknown elsewhere. The Meroitic cursive script has been deciphered, revealing that it transcribes an African language. It is related to others spoken today, like Taman in parts of Darfur and Chad, Nyima in the Sudanese Nuba mounts, or Nubian in upper Egypt and Sudan. For the moment though, it is only beginning to be partially understood. Go see the latest on “Méroé, un empire sur le Nil” at the Louvre until Sept. 6.

Read the rest on the NYT.

AP: CAIRO – Archeologists have unearthed 57 ancient Egyptian tombs, most of which hold an ornately painted wooden sarcophagus with a mummy inside, Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities said Sunday.

Read the rest on Yahoo.

by An Wilson

On June 9, 1865, the 'tidal train', as the Victorians called the train which picked up cross-Channel passengers, was making its way from Folkestone to London, rattling through Kent at 50 miles per hour.

Read the rest on Daily Mail.

by Rossella Lorenzi

King Tutankhamun's mummy was wrapped in custom-made bandages similar to modern first aid gauzes, an exhibit at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art reveals. Running in length from 4.70 meters to 39 cm (15.4 feet to 15.3 inches), the narrow bandages consist of 50 linen pieces especially woven for the boy king.

Read the rest on Discovery.

Tests carried out on a skeleton discovered at an archaeological dig in Derbyshire have found it was that of a pregnant woman.

Read the rest on the BBC.

by Andrew Bossone in Cairo for National Geographic News

A massive, headless statue of a Greek king has been found in the ruins of an ancient Egyptian temple, adding to evidence that the structure could be the final resting place of Marc Antony and Cleopatra, excavation leaders say.

Read the rest on National Geographic.

AP: JERUSALEM — Israeli archaeologists say workers have uncovered an ancient pagan altar while clearing ground for construction of a hotly disputed hospital emergency room.

Read the rest on Google.

Paris, France (CNN) -- Five paintings, including a Matisse and a Picasso, were stolen overnight from a Paris museum, the Paris mayor's office said Thursday.

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AP: Police in southern Greece have seized a rare twin pair of 2,500-year-old marble statues and arrested two farmers who allegedly planned to sell them abroad for euro10 million ($12.43 million), authorities said Tuesday.

Read the rest on NPR.

by JOHN NOBLE WILFORD

Last month, in their second season at the site of an ancient settlement in southern Mexico, archaeologists digging into the ruins of a pyramid came upon a row of large, flat stones — the wall of a tomb. Inside, they found skeletons of a prominent man, possibly a ruler, and two human sacrifices. Another apparently elite adult was on a landing just outside the tomb.
Read the rest on the NYT.

Dani Cooper: ABC

Not content with managing the household it appears women in Ancient Egypt were also keeping the budget in the black with some home-based manufacturing.

Read the rest here.

Archaeologists excavate a tomb confirmed to belong to Cao Xiu, a noted general from the Three Kingdoms period (220-280 AD), in Mangshan county, Luoyang city, Central China's Henan province on May 17, 2010. The 50 by 21-meter tomb, which was found at the end of 2009, has a similar structure to that of Cao Cao, King Wu of Wei kingdom in the Three Kingdoms period (AD 208 to 280). A newly unearthed bronze seal engraved with Cao Xiu's name reveals the tomb owner's identity, and the Henan provincial bureau of cultural relics confirmed it at a press conference held in Luoyang on May 17. Cao Xiu is recorded in Chinese history books as a courageous fighter and high-ranking officer. History books also say Cao Cao took Cao Xiu as a son, even though the two were not related by blood. [Photo/Xinhua]

Read the rest on China Daily.

This is a reconstruction of the knight's face. Forensic experts believe the scar on his forehead would have been caused by an blow from an axe. His skeleton was found under the floor of a chapel at Stirling Castle
Read the rest on the Daily Mail.

AP: A worker at a furniture liquidation business found bundles of cash hidden in the back of an armoire.

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By Ann Wuyts

Image courtesy the Supreme Council of Antiquities

Read the rest on the Independent.

By Frank Kuznik

If everything goes according to plan, sometime in November a group of about a dozen Czech and Danish scientists will descend on the Church of Our Lady Before Týn on Old Town Square. Soon thereafter, a man who has been dead for more than 400 years will say hello to the 21st century.

Read the rest here.

Read the rest here.

by Rex Dalton

The worlds of ancient and modern DNA exploration have collided in spectacular fashion in the past few months. Last week saw the publication of a long-awaited draft genome of the Neanderthal, an archaic hominin from about 40,000 years ago. Just three months earlier, researchers in Denmark reported the genome of a 4,000-year-old Saqqaq Palaeo-Eskimo that was plucked from the Greenland permafrost and sequenced in China using the latest technology.

Read the rest on Nature.

Submitted by owenjarus

Dr Michel Baud of the Louvre Museum in Paris gave an interesting lecture last week about his excavations of a pyramid at Abu Roash. The monument was badly preserved and its stone had been quarried in Roman times, but the certain details, such as its apparent solar connections, were still discernable. Earlier, Vassil Dobrev stated that the pyramid may actually be a solar temple. However, Baud dismisses these claims....

Read the rest on Heritage Key.

XI'AN - A company of Terracotta Warriors - most painted in rich colors - have been unearthed at the largest pit within the mausoleum complex of the emperor who first unified China.

Read the rest on China Daily.

The very latest laser technology combined with old fashioned pedal power is being used to provide a unique insight into the layout of Nottingham’s sandstone caves — where the city’s renowned medieval ale was brewed and, where legend has it, the country’s most famous outlaw Robin Hood was imprisoned.

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A flyover of Belize's thick jungles has revolutionized archaeology worldwide and vividly illustrated the complex urban centers developed by one of the most-studied ancient civilizations -- the Maya.

University of Central Florida researchers led a NASA-funded research project in April 2009 that collected the equivalent of 25 years worth of data in four days.

Read the rest on Eurekalert.

By Ann Wuyt

Archaeologists working at the Avenue of Sphinxes in Luxor, Egypt, have uncovered the remains of a fifth century Coptic church and a Nilometer, a structure used to measure the level of the Nile during floods.

Read the rest on the Independent.

Thom Kennedy

The remains of a Roman fort at Papcastle have been open for several years, but nobody has ever known the shape of local roads, the size of the civilian settlement attached to it, where the river Derwent ran and where it was crossed, or where the site’s cemetery was located.

Read the rest here.

by Mark Patton

WIESBADEN, Germany — American history buffs are teaming up with German archaeologists to unearth remnants of an ancient Roman settlement before construction crews begin work on an Army housing project adjacent to Wiesbaden Army Airfield.

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It has been hidden under the the sands and waves since it crashed off the coast of Wales in 1942. But now this wreckage of a rare World War fighter plane may soon be back on dry land. Described as 'one of the most important WWII finds in recent history', the location of the Lockheed P38 Lightning has been kept a secret to keep the amazing find safe.

Read the rest on the Daily Mail.

By Owen Jarus

Read the rest on The Independent.

By Ruaa al-Jazaeri



Idleb Antiquities Department has unearthed a Roman-era cemetery dating back to the 3rd century AD in al-Massasia Valley, north of Darkoush town, in the northern Province of Idleb (Northern Syria).

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Two complete skeletons thought to date back to medieval times have been dug up by workmen in Gloucester. The team was working on a £7m project to improve access between the city centre and the new Quays complex when the remains were unearthed on Tuesday.

Read the rest on the BBC.

Military warmongers took over the Roman Empire in the third century. The senate, the administrative elite of the Roman empire watched from the sidelines. Dutch researcher Inge Mennen investigated the balance of power in Imperium Romanum during the 'crisis of the third century'. Conclusion: senators lost their military power but retained their status. Meanwhile military emperors pulled the strings.

Read the rest on Alpha Galileo.

It is the first time that human skeletons dating from the end of the Neolithic period to the Bronze Age have been discovered in Morocco, said archaeologists.

Read the rest here.