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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

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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.

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

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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.

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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.
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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.

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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]

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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
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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

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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.

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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.

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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....

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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By Owen Jarus

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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.

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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.

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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.

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by Steven Morris

A mayor in north Devon is attempting to help rewrite American history by proving that people from his small port town settled in the US 30 years before the Pilgrim Fathers set sail.

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An inscription on stone, with three big Indus signs and possibly a fourth, has been found on the Harappan site of Dholavira in Gujarat. The discovery is significant because this is the first time that the Indus script has been found engraved on a natural stone in the Indus Valley. The Indus script has so far been found on seals made of steatite, terracotta tablets, ceramics and so on. Dholavira also enjoys the distinction of yielding a spectacularly large Indus script with 10 big signs on wood. This inscription was three-metre long.

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Neanderthal man is alive and well - and living on every high street in Britain, scientists say. An astonishing study has discovered that the ancestors of white Europeans and Asians bred with Neanderthals tens of thousands of years ago - and their genes have been passed down the millennia ever since.

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University of Ulster divers have been passing on their expertise to maritime archaeologists in the historic Egyptian port of Alexandria. Staff from the UU's maritime archaeology centre conducted a 10-day training workshop for 15 archaeologists from north and east Africa who wanted an insight into the challenges of working underwater.

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Archaeological remains of the Punic-Roman fortress of Melite have been discovered during works on the Mdina bastions by the Resources Ministry.

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Archaeologists recently made a potentially exciting discovery at an estate in Albemarle County. Buried artifacts found show that Native Americans possibly settled in the area 3,000 years ago on what's known now as Morven Farm. The University of Virginia Foundation owns Morven and last summer began phase one of the archaeological dig. The findings are giving researchers a better idea of who lived here a long time ago.

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ScienceDaily — A water feature found in the Maya city of Palenque, Mexico, is the earliest known example of engineered water pressure in the new world, according to a collaboration between two Penn State researchers, an archaeologist and a hydrologist. How the Maya used the pressurized water is, however, still unknown.

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by Roseella Lorenzi

A headless granite statue of a Ptolemaic king has emerged from the ruins of an ancient Egyptian limestone temple believed to be the burial site of Queen Cleopatra and her lover Mark Antony.

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Professor Alan Cooper is pictured here with a mammoth bone. (Credit: University of Adelaide)

ScienceDaily — A team of international researchers has brought the primary component of mammoth blood back to life using ancient DNA preserved in bones from Siberian specimens 25,000 to 43,000 years old.

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MEXICO CITY.- More than 130 burials, most likely from the 16th century, were found at the Great Base of Tlatelolco Archaeological Zone, in Mexico City, during the recent exploration season. The remains are being analyzed to determine their age.

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by Eliza Strickland

We Homo sapiens consider ourselves pretty special, with our symbolic art, abstract thinking, and highly organized societies. But evidence is mounting that these hallmarks of modern human behavior may have existed in earlier hominids.

In Spanish caves once occupied by Neanderthals, archaeologist João Zilhão of the University of Bristol unearthed punctured scallop shells crusted with mineral pigments: Neanderthal jewelry.

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By Clara Moskowitz

Humans today could be part Neanderthal, according to a new study that found our ancestors interbred with an extinct hominid species some millennia ago... The researchers looked at DNA samples from humans living today, and found signs of leftover Neanderthal genes introduced from this interbreeding. They looked at genetic data from almost 2,000 people around the world, and calculated how much genetic variation existed between samples. The results indicate that some extinct group of hominids mixed their genes with ours at two points in history, Hunley said.

One period of interbreeding probably occurred shortly after Homo sapiens migrated out of Africa around 60,000 years ago. The researchers found an excess of genetic diversity in all modern people except Africans, suggesting that the influx of Neanderthal-like DNA came after the exodus from Africa.

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There's a real crocodile behind that mask, according to new computed tomography (CT) scans of a 2,000-year-old Egyptian mummy. The 8-foot-long (2.4-meter-long) artifact—wrapped in once colorful linen and outfitted with a stylized mask—is one of two crocodile mummy bundles scanned this month at the Stanford School of Medicine in California.

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WORK on the £11.6 million revamp of Canterbury's prestigious Beaney Institute has ground to a halt – because of Roman pornography. Archaeologists are racing against time to recover lost evidence beneath the city's streets before the builders return.

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