News Round Up

Rosamund Lily West, Research Curator at the Royal Society of Sculptors, on the ‘Pioneering Women’ research project uncovering the lives, careers and legacies of women sculptors in the early to mid-twentieth century Sculptor Rose Gwyneth Holt, one of…

On the hundredth anniversary of the first non-stop transatlantic flight these six museum objects tell the story of Alcock and Brown’s amazing achievement in 1919 On the morning of June 15 1919, employees of the Marconi wireless station at Clifden,…

A delicate example of British Impressionsim is discovered hidden behind a painting at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter Exploring how the light played upon the landscape and the flickering of lamps amidst dusky environments were just two of…

The Roman Conquest of Britain in AD 43 brought with it our first roads and towns, our calendar and our first nationwide currency. The sites they left behind are now some of the country’s best-loved heritage sites, some of which have remained in…

BEIJING, CHINA—The Washington Post reports that evidence of the ritual use of cannabis some 2,500 years ago has been discovered at a burial site near the route of the Silk Road, in the mountains of western China. Gas chromatography–mass spectrometry…

CAMBRIDGE, ENGLAND—According to a Gizmodo report, a new study of Must Farm suggests the well-preserved Bronze Age settlement was destroyed by fire just one year after it was built. Located in eastern England, the site includes the remains of at…

YORK, ENGLAND—The York Press reports that a piece of leather thought to date to the medieval period was unearthed during work to replace a high-voltage cable near the center of the city of York. Toby Kendall of the York Archaeological Trust said the…

University of the Highlands and Islands Archaeology Institute archaeologists Dan Lee, Dr Sarah Jane Gibbon and Dr Jen Harland will be holding a day of informal talks, workshops and field walks celebrating the rich archaeology of the Orkney island of…

PLOVDIV, BULGARIA—The Sofia Globe reports that fragments of engraved stone dating to the second century A.D. were unearthed in the ancient city of Philippopolis, at the site of the Great Basilica, which was built in the fourth or fifth century A.D.…

NORTHAMPTONSHIRE, ENGLAND—According to a BBC News report, archaeologists have investigated five skulls out of the remains of some 2,500 people held in a thirteenth-century crypt under the aisle of Holy Trinity Church, in England’s East Midlands.…

BRADFORD, ENGLAND—North Norfolk News reports that an international team of scientists aboard the Belgian ship RV Belgica created high-resolution images of the region known as Doggerland, and recovered a flint chip, a fragment of a stone hammer, and…

LIMA, PERU—Science News reports that Alejandro Chu of the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos and Gary Urton of Harvard University suggest that sets of colored and knotted strings discovered at Inkawasi, an Inca administrative center featuring…

Try saying “f” and “v” and pay close attention to your lower lip and upper teeth. Would it surprise you to learn that these sounds are relatively recent additions to human languages? Languages, of course, develop over time as usage, meaning, and…

Some 1,500 years ago, a hunter-gatherer in the canyon lands of the Lower Pecos region of southwest Texas made the unfathomable decision to gulp down a whole snake, fangs and all. Texas A&M University archaeologist Elanor Sonderman discovered…

LEBANON: Between the 11th and 13th centuries, hundreds of thousands of Europeans ventured to the Near East in a campaign to reconquer the Holy Land. A new study suggests that the Crusader army may have been more diverse than originally thought. DNA…

The discovery of a fourth-century B.C. Etruscan burial in Aleria, on Corsica, has yielded new details of the pre- Roman culture’s funerary practices. While excavating hundreds of graves dating from the third century B.C. through the third century A.…

FRANCE: Around 120,000 years ago, for a group of Neanderthals living in southeastern France, drastic times called for drastic measures. During a period of rapid warming, food became scarce, and, on at least one occasion, they were forced to eat…

An early nineteenth-century clay pipestem, one of many unearthed in the slave quarters at the former Belvoir tobacco plantation on Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay, has allowed archaeologists to rescue a lost history. DNA yielded by the seemingly…

At a 4,500-year-old necropolis in northern India, archaeologists discovered a grave containing the remains of a man and a woman who seem to have been buried at the same time. The burial is one of some 60 graves that have been recently unearthed near…

NICOSIA, CYPRUS—Tornos News reports that a team of archaeologists led by Nikos Efstratiou of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki investigated a Neolithic site in a remote area of the Troodos Mountains, a range located in the center of the island of…