archaeology

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• 10/10/2021
  

  Tracing World War 2's Impact on Sicily's Cultural Heritage Sites and Museums

  by Antonino Crisà

  World War II profoundly affected museums and antiquities in Sicily; a new research project is examining this underappreciated destructive consequence of war.

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• SOURCE: New York Times
  9/23/2021
  

  Discovery of Human Footprints Pushes Back Date of Earliest Humans in Americas

  Discovery of preserved human footprints is another element of evidence to challenge the "Clovis" hypothesis that humans populated the Americas only at the end of the last ice age. The footprints are estimated at about 10,000 years older than Clovis tool artifacts. 

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• SOURCE: Daily Beast
  9/12/2021
  

  Why are Historians Facing Online Abuse Over Whether Atlantis Existed?

  Archaeologists who debunked a popular television series interpreting Plato's references to Atlantis as fact instead of allegory soon discovered the affinity many eugenicists, neonazis and white supremacists have for the myth. 

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• SOURCE: NPR
  9/14/2021
  

  Osage Nation Denied Purchase of Cave With Ancient Drawings at Auction

  Serving both as a sacred burial site and the location of 290 prehistoric glyphs, the cave holds cultural significance for the Osage Nation, which called the sale "heartbreaking." 

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• SOURCE: New York Daily News
  8/31/2021
  

  Don't Buy Egyptian Antiquities – Even Fakes

  by Erin L. Thompson

  Buying antiquities without due diligence into their provenance feeds a black market for looted archaeological objects. 

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• 8/29/2021
  

  New Discoveries Chip Away at Myths about Viking Shipbuilding

  by Nancy Marie Brown

  Recent archaeological work, and field-testing of replica boats, is overturning the common image of the Viking warship. 

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• SOURCE: Inverse
  8/4/2021
  

  Proto-Geometry Found in Babylonian Tablet, a Thousand Years Older than Pythagoras

  "It’s generally thought that trigonometry — a subset of geometry and what’s displayed on the tablet in a crude sense — was developed by ancient Greeks like the philosopher Pythagoras. However, analysis of the tablet suggests it was created 1,000 years before Pythagoras was born."

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• SOURCE: New York Times
  8/3/2021
  

  Iraq Reclaims 17,000 Looted Artifacts, Its Biggest-Ever Repatriation

  "The institution that held about 12,000 of the items was the Museum of the Bible, a four-year-old Washington museum founded and funded by the Christian evangelical family that owns the Hobby Lobby craft store chain."

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• 7/18/2021
  

  1920s "Tutmania" and its Enduring Echoes

  by Gill Paul

  A remarkable confluence of events and circumstances launched a cultural mania for ancient Egypt in Britain and the US with the 1922 discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun. 

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• SOURCE: History.com
  7/12/2021
  

  Why the Nile River Was So Important to Ancient Egypt

  Read an overview of the centrality of the river to Egyptian civilization and the history of efforts to harness the life-sustaining and destructive capacity of the Nile. 

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• SOURCE: Chronicle of Higher Education
  6/29/2021
  

  A Scholarly Screw-Up of Biblical Proportions

  by Ariel Sabar

  The author of a book on the high-profile forgery of papyrus fragments indicating Jesus had a wife discusses how an article based on those fraudulent documents passed peer review. 

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• SOURCE: Smithsonian
  6/14/2021
  

  Is This Florida Island Home to a Long-Lost Native American Settlement?

  The dig is part of the UNF Archaeology Lab’s ongoing Mocama Archaeological Project, which seeks to shed light on the Indigenous people who lived along northern Florida’s coast prior to Europeans’ arrival in the region in 1562.

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• SOURCE: Washington Post
  5/11/2021
  

  It’s a Golden Age for Chinese Archaeology — And the West is Ignoring It

  by Rowan K. Flad

  Recent discoveries in Egypt have overshadowed more significant finds in China. This may reflect the romanticized popular culture image of colonial-era tomb-raiders, or the prevalent sense that Western civilization is derived from the Mediterranean world. It's time for a broader view of why the ancient world matters. 

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• 5/9/2021
  

  Mudlarking: Searching for Lost Treasure – and History – on the Banks of the Thames

  by Jason Sandy and Nick Stevens

  The Thames River's silty bottom and tidal patterns make its banks a repository of historical artifacts. Today's "mudlarks" have turned the old tradition of scavenging the banks for subsistence into a public archaeology project. 

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• SOURCE: New York Times
  4/24/2021
  

  What Doomed a Sprawling City Near St. Louis 1,000 Years Ago?

  New research shows little evidence that the civilization centered around Cahokia in the Mississippi valley caused its own demise by environmental mismanagement, indicating that perhaps "stories of great civilizations seemingly laid low by ecological hubris may say more about our current anxieties and assumptions than the archaeological record."

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• SOURCE: New York Times
  4/20/2021
  

  What Should Museums Do With the Bones of the Enslaved?

  The Smithsonian is considering how to deal with its natural history collection of human remains, including those of enslaved people. Secretary Lonnie Bunch III suggests that the museum must be guided by the imperative "to honor and remember."

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• SOURCE: Washington Post
  4/20/2021
  

  Harriet Tubman's Lost Maryland Home Found, Say Archaeologists

  State archaeologists discovered remains of a cabin that evidence suggests belonged to Ben Ross, and where the woman who would be known as Harriet Tubman lived for a period of time as a child. 

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• SOURCE: New York Times
  3/16/2021
  

  Israel Reveals Newly Discovered Fragments of Dead Sea Scrolls

  These are the first new parchment fragments unearthed in Judea in 60 years. 

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• SOURCE: New York Times
  3/11/2021
  

  She Was Buried With a Silver Crown. Was She the One Who Held Power?

  The double burial at La Almoloya and other Argaric graves are making archaeologists reconsider life in ancient Iberia. Was she the one wielding the power?

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• SOURCE: New York Times
  2/25/2021
  

  Searching for Our Urban Future in the Ruins of the Past

  Annalee Newitz's book on lost cities debunks the idea of sudden, catastrophic collapse. But the death of cities does show that humanity is vulnerable to change that makes centuries-old ways of life untenable.