News Round Up

QUINTANA ROO, MEXICO—BBC News reports that an eight-foot cannon, anchor, and pig-iron ingots thought to have been used as a ship’s ballast were spotted by a fisherman in the Caribbean Sea off the coast of southern Mexico. The wreckage rests in…

Archaeologists with the Egyptian-Italian Mission at West Aswan have digitally restored fragments of a very fragile painted leopard’s head from a 2nd century BC sarcophagus, discovered at the Egyptian necropolis last year. The leopard is a common…

Location The city of Athens lies in the plain of Attica, the large peninsula that forms the southernmost tip of the Greek mainland, jutting out into the Aegean Sea. Being sheltered on all sides by mountains, the city has a pleasant climate with hot…

LINCOLN, ENGLAND—Lincolnshire Live reports that forensic artist Hew Morrison has recreated the face of a 900-year-old skeleton unearthed on the grounds of Lincoln Cathedral. The man was buried with a chalice and paten, items associated with…

NORFOLK, ENGLAND—BBC News reports that a brooch estimated to be 1,100 years old was found in a landscaped field in the East of England. The Saxon artifact is thought to have been transported to the field in a load of topsoil, where it was discovered…

HENAN PROVINCE, CHINA—China.org reports that a 2,200-year-old tomb has been excavated in central China, at an ancient city site situated along the route between the two ancient capitals of Xi’an and Luoyang. According to Zhu Xiaodong of the…

NEGRAR, ITALY—According to a report in The Guardian, a well-preserved mosaic floor and foundations of a Roman villa first discovered in 1922 have been uncovered in a vineyard in northern Italy by archaeologists from the Superintendency of…

BURGAS, BULGARIA—According to a BNR Radio Bulgaria report, a Greek inscription found on a limestone sarcophagus dated to the second or third century A.D. is the first written evidence that the Roman colony of Deultum had a port. Researchers from the…

KRAKÓW, POLAND—Science in Poland reports that Piotr Wojtal of the Polish Academy of Sciences identified butchered wolf bones among a collection of 30,000-year-old flint and bone artifacts and tools unearthed in the Czech Republic. “Until now,…

EXETER, ENGLAND—Archaeologists led by Timothy Insoll of the University of Exeter suggest residents of the sites of Harlaa, Harar, and Ganda Harlaa in eastern Ethiopia began to eat a halal diet some 400 years before major mosques and burial sites…

How should we date material that is millions of years old? Looking at the predictable rates of the breakdown of proteins from an organism found in fossils is one possibility, and a technique that goes well beyond the range of radiocarbon dating.…

University of the Highlands and Islands Archaeology Institute postgraduate student Hannah Genders Boyd updates us on her continuing MRes research into the Bronze and Iron Age landscapes of Gairloch on the west coast of Scotland. Hannah takes up her…

VALLADOLID, SPAIN—The Irish Times reports that a team of researchers led by archaeologist Óscar Burón have uncovered human remains at what may be the burial place of Red Hugh O’Donnell, an Irish nobleman who led a rebellion against the government in…

MEXICO CITY, MEXICO—According to an Associated Press report, the remains of some 60 mammoths have been unearthed at a construction site in central Mexico, about six miles away from two pits dug about 15,000 years ago to trap the giant beasts. Bones…

SAKURAI, JAPAN—The Asahi Shimbun reports that archaeologist Yasuo Yanagida of Kokugakuin University examined 150 stone artifacts unearthed in western Japan and dated to the Yayoi Pottery Culture period (ca. 1000 B.C.–A.D. 250) and the Kofun Period,…

The Wind River Range in the Rocky Mountains stretches 100 miles across northwestern Wyoming and the Continental Divide, extending from the thick pine forests of Yellowstone National Park toward the vast grasslands of the Great Plains. From the river…

If there was one thing that Time Team excelled at during its 25-year run, it was bringing communities together to share in the story of their local area. And it is community that lies at the heart of this new book by the popular archaeology TV…

DCMS advice for searching for archaeological objects during COVID-19

BUSAN, SOUTH KOREA—According to a statement released by the Institute for Basic Science (IBS), a team of researchers led by Axel Timmermann of the IBS Center for Climate Physics created a supercomputer model to simulate possible scenarios for the…

SCHÖNINGEN, GERMANY—Live Science reports that a nearly complete 300,000-year-old elephant skeleton (Palaeoloxodon antiquus) has been unearthed near the site of a large lake in northwestern Germany. Researchers led by Jordi Serangeli of the…