News Round Up

CARDIFF, WALES—Cardiff University announced that researcher Philip Staudigel and his colleagues at the University of Miami and Valencia College studied possible cooking techniques used by the first residents of the island of Puerto Rico some 2,500…

BUCKINGHAMSHIRE, ENGLAND—BBC News reports that four hen’s eggs and other items were recovered from a watery pit in central England by a team of researchers led by archaeologist Edward Biddulph of Oxford Archaeology. All but one of the extremely…

Orkney archaeologists unearth a fascinating series of anthropomorphic stones… Each year the ongoing archaeological excavations on Orkney bring more insight into the multi-layered history of an archipelago in the Northern Isles of Scotland that…

It has long been thought that Alfriston Clergy House, Sussex, was built in the mid-14th century, but recent analysis of its timbers has revealed the true date of the house’s construction. The post Age of Alfriston Clergy House revealed appeared…

EINDHOVEN, THE NETHERLANDS—According to a report in The Guardian, a population study conducted by Krist Vaesen of Eindhoven University of Technology and his colleagues suggests the arrival of modern humans in Europe may not have triggered the demise…

MADISON, WISCONSIN—Chemistry World reports that environmental health scientist Sean Scott of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and his colleagues analyzed the amount of lead in bones recovered from three cemeteries in Britain’s Roman settlement of…

PORT STEPHENS, FALKLAND ISLANDS—BBC News reports that the wreckage of the SMS Scharnhorst, an Imperial German Navy armored cruiser, has been found under more than 5,000 feet of water near the Falkland Islands by a team of researchers including…

MUSCAT, OMAN—The Times of Oman reports that an Egyptian Eye of Horus amulet has been discovered at an archaeological site near the northern tip of the eastern Arabian Peninsula on the Gulf of Oman by a team of researchers from Oman’s Ministry of…

A team from ORCA Archaeology has discovered an amazing series of half-metre tall stone-carved objects while completing exploratory archaeological excavations connected with the development of an electrical substation on behalf of SSEN Transmission…

A number of previously unrecorded archaeological features, spanning prehistory to the present day, have been identified in Birmingham’s Sutton Park. The post New discoveries in Sutton Park appeared first on Current Archaeology.

ROME, ITALY—According to an Inside Science report, analysis of planks discovered in the waterlogged foundation of an ancient villa unearthed near the Tiber River in central Rome indicates that the wood was imported from France. Dendrochronologist…

NORWICH, ENGLAND—A manuscript in Lambeth Palace Library has been identified as a work produced by Queen Elizabeth I, according to an announcement released by the University of East Anglia. Researcher John-Mark Philo was looking for translations of…

ZHENGZHOU, CHINA—Xinhua reports that researchers led by Zhao Feng of the China National Silk Museum developed a technique called enzyme-linked-immunosorbent assay (ELISA) to detect the presence of silk in carbonized residue in a burial at the…

CAMBODIA: Workers searching through a pile of debris for fallen roof stones from the Ta Nei Temple in Angkor unexpectedly unearthed the head of an ancient bodhisattva statue. The sculpture, which is around 2 feet tall and dates to the late 12th or…

SRI LANKA: It was much harder for early humans to fashion small, delicate stone tools such as arrowheads than it was to make large, substantial ones like axes. Yet, by around 45,000 years ago, a community living in the rain forests of Sri Lanka had…

UNITED ARAB EMIRATES: A wealth of biological material from two islands in the Persian Gulf demonstrates how well Neolithic communities exploited marine resources. For example, thousands of fish bones from the islands of Marawah and Dalma indicate…

IRAQ: Assyrian astronomers gazing at the sky almost 2,700 years ago were the first people to document the colorful cosmic phenomena known as auroras. These light shows, known in the Northern Hemisphere as the northern lights, appear when waves of…

RUSSIA: Between the 14th and 18th centuries, the Black Death killed as much as 60 percent of Europe’s population. The bacterium that caused the plague has now been traced to the town of Laishevo, near the Volga River. Scientists reconstructed the…

GREECE: In 1802, the ship Mentor was sailing to England when it sank off the island of Kythira. Seventeen boxes of ancient treasures, including the famous Parthenon Marbles, went down to the seafloor. Most of the precious objects were quickly raised…

ENGLAND: Parts of a Shakespeare-era theater were unearthed under London’s Whitechapel neighborhood. The Boar’s Head Playhouse is known from historical documents, but its ruins were brought to light for the first time during a recent construction…