News Round Up

PERTH, SCOTLAND—Conservators at Perth Museum and Art Gallery found paintings of Imentet, an Egyptian goddess who welcomed the dead to the afterlife, inside the lid and the base of a 3,000-year-old coffin belonging to Ta-Kr-Hb, a priestess or…

PHNOM PENH, CAMBODIA—The Phnom Penh Post reports that the United States handed over two Cambodian statues seized by Homeland Security Investigation at a ceremony held at Cambodia’s National Museum. The first sculpture, recovered in San Francisco in…

I am very excited to become a Trustee of the British Museum (after some hiccoughs along the way). And I am realistic that there is going to be quite a lot of work involved. In part I see this as a way of paying back my debts to the Museum. I first…

KENT, ENGLAND—A new study of the internal structure of two fossil leg bones from South Africa’s Sterkfontein Cave suggests that either Paranthropus robustus or an early member of the genus Homo continued to climb trees while walking upright some two…

CICHOBÓRZ, POLAND—Science in Poland reports that more than 1,700 coins discovered in a field in southeastern Poland last year have been identified as 2,000-year-old Roman coins. Mariusz Dyl was looking for shed antlers when he spotted some scattered…

GUILDFORD, ENGLAND—According to a statement released by UCL Institute of Archaeology, decorated niches, writing, and other markings estimated to date to the late fourteenth century have been found in a small sandstone cave in southeastern England.…

Excavations at Auckland Castle, County Durham, have discovered a long-lost 14th-century chapel associated with the influential Bishop Bek. Historical records document the construction of the chapel in the early 1300s. They describe it as a large…

BRISBANE, AUSTRALIA—According to a statement released by Griffith University, scientists led by Rainer Grün of Australian National University have used radiometric dating methods to obtain new dates for the Broken Hill (Kabwe 1) skull discovered by…

CHICAGO, ILLINOIS—A new study of fossils from Ethiopia suggests that more than three million years ago, Australopithecus afarensis children needed care for an extended period of time, according to a Science News report. It had been previously…

GAINESVILLE, FLORIDA—According to a statement released by the Florida Museum of Natural History, a team of researchers employed remote sensors, sediment cores, and excavations to examine two fish holding pens built between A.D. 1300 and 1400 by the…

JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA—BBC News reports that the remains of three groups of hominins found at the Drimolen Cave Complex have been dated with electron spin resonance, paleomagnetism, and uranium-lead dating, and determined to all date to between…

Analysis of the Tulloch Stone, a Pictish monolith discovered in eastern Scotland and engraved with a human figure holding a spear, has shed light on the ‘warrior ethos’ believed to have been prevalent in the late- and post-Roman period.  The post…

STOKE-ON-TRENT, ENGLAND—According to a Live Science report, researchers led by Caroline Sturdy Colls of Staffordshire University investigated the site of Sylt, the forced labor camp built by the Nazis on the Channel Island of Alderney in 1942.…

BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS—According to a statement released by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Dorothy Hosler of MIT and Johan Garcia Zaldua of the University of Porto suggest that Spanish explorers relied on local miners and smelters…

COPENHAGEN, DENMARK—Science Magazine reports that geneticist Enrico Cappellini of the University of Copenhagen and his colleagues used mass spectrometry to analyze proteins extracted from a sample of Homo antecessor tooth enamel. The remains of this…

NOTTINGHAM, ENGLAND—Analysis of an ice core from the Colle Gnifetti glacier in the Swiss-Italian Alps by Christopher Loveluck of Nottingham University and his colleagues suggests that a spike in the amount of lead in the air can be linked to the…

In this column Joe Flatman looks at the diverse array of sites and landscapes that CA has visited in Cornwall over the years. The post Excavating the CA archive: Cornwall appeared first on Current Archaeology.

With their public spaces closed, museums have been taking to social media to share their collections – here’s what we liked this week on Twitter There are some excellent museum and heritage Twitter accounts that we love here at Museum Crush; the…

We take a closer look at the carved wooden kings’ heads you can find on the wonderful Royal Armouries online collections website One of the oldest and most visited museum displays in the world, The Line of Kings in the White Tower of the Tower of…

The wonderful world of medieval seals and seal matrices is explored through the collection at York Museums Trust Seals were a common part of everyday life of Medieval England. They were used by a variety of social classes to authenticate documents…