Stone Pages Archaeo News: May 2010 Archives

May 2010 index:

4 May 2010: Ancient Tasmanian artifacts threatened by highway construction; A recently discovered Tasmanian aboriginal site is at the center of a dispute between the government on one hand and archaeologists and members of Tasmania's Aboriginal community on the other....
: Secrets of human history extracted from ancient DNA; The genes of individuals who lived thousands of years ago is providing information not only about them, but about the history of their species and ours. Genome sequencing of DNA...
: Melting ice islands in Canadian mountains reveal ancient tools; In 1997, sheep hunters in the southern Yukon discovered a 4,300 year old dart in caribou dung in a patch of melted ice. As the site was investigated, it was...
: Farming sites in Syria date to the 10th millennium BCE; Assistant Director of the Syrian Department of Archaeology and Museums, Thaer Yerte, said excavations at the site of Tel al-Abar, Syria revealed information about the communities that settled on the...
: Mesolithic cave discovered in North Sumatra; The three storey cave, which is located in a hilly, densely forested are of North Sumatra's South Dempo sub-district, has two distinct entrances, seven rooms, as well as human footprints....
: Fort Jackson 9000 year history revealed; A large scale excavation at Fort Jackson, South Carolina (USA) has revealed evidence of archaeology dating back 9000 years before the US Army took up residence. Artifacts from the 'Archaic'...
: Megalithomania 2010; The annual Megalithomania event will be held in Glastonbury (Somerset, England) on the 8th and 9th of May 2010 at the Glastonbury Assembly Rooms. Organizers are sorry to announce that...
: 16,000-year-old rockshelter in Pennsivlanya reopened; Meadowcroft Rockshelter and Historic Village, a National Historic Landmark located in Avella, Pennsylvania (USA), reopened last Saturday, May 1. Meadowcroft features a 16,000-year-old Rockshelter, the oldest site of human habitation...
: Archaeologists explore ancient site in Wisconsin; Traffic will one day race over an archeological treasure trove off Highway 26 near Lake Koshkonong (USA), where a group of Milwaukee archaeologists believe they've found remnants left by some...
10 May 2010: 5000 year-old skeletons unearthed in Morocco; Archaeologists in Khemisset, Morocco, working on a dig that began in 2006, announced Friday that they have uncovered an ancient burial ground in a cave 18 kilometres east of the...
: Bronze Age cemeteries discovered in Syria; Archaeologists working at Tal al-Ashari in Daran, southern Syria, have found 13 Middle Bronze Age cemeteries so far this year. Hussein Mashhadawi, the Head of Dara Archaeology Department, revealed that...
: Neanderthal genes survive in modern humans; The results of an international research project lasting over five years and involving some 56 scientists led by Svante Pääbo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and Richard...
: Ancient artifacts found in Virginia; A potentially exciting discovery was as recently made Archaeologists at an estate in Albemarle County (Virginia, USA). They discovered buried artifacts that may indicate that Native Americans possibly settled in...
: Menhir with petroglyphs found in India; A menhir with rock engravings, called petroglyphs, carved on it has been discovered on an open field on the left bank of Nagaleuru, a tributary of the Krishna at Karampudi,...
: Ancient rock paintings discovered in China; Archaeologist Ma Baoguang recently found some 1,000 hieroglyphic rock paintings in Yangce Town, Biyang County of east-central China's Henan province. Ma went to Yangce with his students for an archaeological...
: Stone bearing an Indus inscription found; An inscription on stone, with three big Indus signs and possibly a fourth, has been found on the Harappan site of Dholavira (Gujarat, India). The discovery is significant because this...
: Rock Art Meeting 2010 - North Yorkshire; Next Sunday, 23rd May 2010 the Rock Art Meeting will be held at Howldale Moor and Brow Moor / Fylingdales Moor, North Yorkshire (England). Rendezvous is at Howl Moor car...
: Irish National Monuments Bill in final stage; A new National Monuments Bill for Irleand that will introduce a single licensing regime for all archaeological activities is in the final stages of being drafted. Heads of the Bill...
16 May 2010: Ancient hunters' campsite found in Wyoming; A construction crew digging a water pipeline to supply the town of Pinedale (Wyoming, USA) halted work after archaeologists from Current Archaeological Research, hired to monitor the project for cultural...
: Indian stone circles and burial cists destroyed in development; Amateur archaeologists including Ashvin Rajagopalan and Raman Sankaran from Chennai, in Tamil Nadu, India, report the destruction of stone circles and burial cists in the nearby town of Thiruporur. Following...
: Exhibition: London before London; London Before London is a new permanent exhibition at the London Museum that explores the story of the Thames Valley and the people who lived here from 450,000 BCE to...
: Lecture: The green treasures from the magic mountains; A lecture entitled, The green treasures from the magic mountains: the 'life story' of the magnificent Neolithic axehead from Breamore, will be given by Alison Sheridan at Devizes Town Hall,...
: 'Orkney Venus' is back home; Westray schoolchildren met Scotland's oldest face - the Orkney Venus - at the Westray Heritage Centre. The children were the first visitors to the Westray exhibition, which opened to the...
: Burial mounds saved from bulldozers in Bahrain; Demands to bulldoze historic burial mounds in northern Bahrain have been put on hold, giving heritage chiefs time to properly excavate the 4,000-year-old site. Councillors have already secured a budget...
: Bat: a 5,000-year-old cemetery in Oman; The story of the archaeological site of Bat (Oman), a cemetery consisting of around 400 ancient tombs, dates back 5,000 years. Bat is a circular building of square-shaped hard rocks,...
17 May 2010: Shedding light on North Carolina's first inhabitants; A unique rock and nearby artifacts discovered by a local captain and his crew might help reveal how the first people came to Southeastern North Carolina (USA) thousands of years...
: Universal common ancestor theory upheld by new study; A broad-based, statistical study of genes from all three domains of life on Earth has found Darwin's UCA theory to be millions of times more probable than the competing hypothesis...
: Ancient Aboriginal rock art sites documented; Last year, archeologist Mike Morwood and rock art specialist June Ross took the ride of their lifetime across the northwest Kimberley (Australia). They hired a helicopter and flew across largely...
: Prehistoric cairn field discovered in North Yorkshire; Discovered on the afternoon of May 13, 2010, by Robert Hopkins, Dave Hazell and Paul Bennett, was a previously unrecognised cluster of prehistoric cairns near the middle of Askwith Moor,...
24 May 2010: Extinctions linked to climate change; A group of scientists, lead by Dr David Nogues-Bravo, of the Centre for Macroecology, Evolution and Climate, at the University of Copenhagen, have found a link between climate change and...
: Irish tombs given reprieve as development is put on hold; Plans for the development of the Drogheda deepwater port in the North of County Dublin (Ireland) have been put on hold until planning permission has been given. Drogheda Port in...
: New science project on the historical heritage of the Pyrenees; The Pyrenees Work Community (CEPAP, headquartered in Jaca, Huesca, Spain) aims to strengthen the economic and social integration of the cross-border area between Spain, Andorra and France at a total...
: Iron Age site in England yields bones of pregnant woman; An excavation at the ancient Fin Cop hill fort in Peak District National Park, Derbyshire (England) has unearthed the bones of a pregnant woman who was 21 to 30 years...
: Tracks in Mexican ash field are not ancient human footprints; In 2005, a team lead by Silvia Gonzalez from John Moores University in Liverpool, (England) announced that they had found human footprints in a dry lake bed in Mexico, and...
: Zoque pyramid burial - the oldest in Mexico?; A team of archaeologists lead by Bruce Bachand of Brigham Young University have excavated what may be the oldest pyramid burial in Mesoamerica at Chiapa de Corzo, southern Mexico. According...
: Sophisticated prehistoric astronomers in Scotland; Douglas Scott has recently confirmed the complexity and sophistication of the astronomical observations that could be made from megalithic constructions at the Temple Wood and Nether Largie complex in Kilmartin...
: Human sacrifices discovered at a Bronze Age site in China; A team of researchers excavating a 3,300 year old Shang Dynasty palace-temple complex at the ancient city of Huanbei (China) have discovered that it was burned down after only 50...
: Where the ancients Macedonians studied the sun and moon; Macedonia is is full of relics of times past: the country has an estimated 4,485 archaeological sites from all historical periods, according to Pasko Kuzman, of the country's Cultural Heritage...
: Ancient copper furnaces unearthed in Vietnam; Ancient copper furnaces recently unearthed at an archaeological site in Dong Anh, in the north of Ha Noi (Vietnam), have shed important light on the Metal Age, according to archaeologists....
31 May 2010: Missing ancient bones returned to Irish museum; Human remains taken from the site where they were recently discovered have been returned to the Donegal County Museum in Letterkenny (Ireland). Assistant Curator Caroline Carr made an emotional appeal...
: Digs in Anatolia reveal ancient prisons; Crime has never paid. As far back as 4000 years in fact, according to Professor Fikri Kulakoğlu, who is currently in charge of excavations at Kültepe in Kayseri (Turkey). The...
: Cave of the Beasts holds clues to dawn of Egypt; The 'Cave of the Beasts', filled with prehistoric rock drawings of headless beasts and dancing figures, was discovered in 2002 by amateur archaeologists and is now being further studied by...
: Geneticists track origins of maize; 10,000 years ago a revolution occured. Humans began to domesticate animals and plants and move from hunter-gatherer societies to permanent settlements. Nine of the major food crops were developed in...
: Research yields younger age for oldest Japanese stone tools; Last September, a team from Doshisha University in Kyoto (Japan), lead by Kazuto Matsufuji announced the discovery of 20 stone tools in a layer of earth dated to 120,000 years...
: Survey of 500 estate agents value Stonehenge at £51m; Sell Stonehenge? A survey of 500 British estate agents has placed the price of the ancient stone circle at a cool £51 million. It's a drop in the ocean of...
: Outing to the Rollright Stones; On Saturday, 07 August, 2010, the Witshire Heritage Museum will organize an outing to the Rollright Stone Circle and the unspoilt Jacobean Chastleton House in the Oxfordshire Cotswolds, led by...
: Bronze Age vessel discovered in Macedonia; A unique vessel from the Mid-Bronze Age was discovered by archaeologists at the Tsarevi Kuli site near the town of Strumica in eastern Macedonia. According to the archaeologists, these latest...
: At war with the blots on Irish landscape; Long established as one of Ireland's most courageous guardians of the built and natural environment, Ian Lumley has been An Taisce's (Ireland's National Trust) heritage officer for 10 years. To...
: 1200 prehistoric flint stones discovered in Syria; 1200 pieces of flint stones dating back to 250,000 years ago were unearthed at al-Sharar Valley near Daraa, Southern Syria. The pieces were discovered by the expedition of Damascus University...
: Jordan Valley - cradle of civilisations?; 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...
: Ancient cemetery found in Iran; Construction workers have stumbled upon an ancient cemetery in the southwestern city of Yasouj in Iran's Kohkilouyeh and Boyer-Ahmad Province. "The site has been found in the east of the...
: Paleolithic camp reveals secrets of Scottish hunters; Alan Saville, of National Museums Scotland, joined archaeologist Tam Ward at a national conference in Glasgow to discuss ongoing work at Howburn Farm, an ancient human campsite discovered by amateur...
: Australian archaeologists study rock art at secret site; Some of the world's top rock art archeologists are seeking to uncover the heritage of the Indigenous traditional owners of a remote part of the Northern Territory's Arnhem land (Australia)....