Friday, November 6
by Jessica E. Saraceni
Photographs and more information from the excavations prompted by railroad construction in central Germany are posted at National Geographic News. Last month, archaeologists announced the discovery of burials spanning several thousand years, some of which contained shell beads, copper and amber jewelry, and hundreds of dog teeth.
Fort George Cay in the Turks & Caicos is uninhabited now, but in the late eighteenth century, it was home to planters loyal to Britain and their enslaved workers, and then British troops. Archaeologists are anxious to learn what they can about Fort George before it erodes away into the sea.
Although no ancient Roman easel paintings have survived, scholars have an ideal of what they were like from descriptions left by Pliny the Elder, images of easel paintings that appear in frescoes, the Fayyum portraits, and rare miniatures that were engraved and painted on gold and encased in glass.
Roman artifacts recovered from France’s Rhone River are on display in Arles. A bust of Julius Caesar, dated 46 B.C., and a six-foot statue of Neptune are among the 500 objects in the exhibition.
In 1875, gold prospectors used a diving bell to sit and pan for treasure on the bottom of Georgia’s Chestatee River. “As far as we know, this is the only existing bell from that time period,” a local Dahlonega resident told the City Council. Enthusiasts want to refurbish the bell and find a home for it in a park.
A 600-year-old ship has been recovered from Germany’s Lake Constance. “We believe it could be the oldest shipwreck ever found in the lake. There is one other boat we know is also from the fourteenth century, but we need more testing to know for sure,” said Peter Zaar, a spokesperson for the Stuttgart regional commission.
A new study of the cries of newborn babies suggests that the development of spoken language is rooted in melody. “Music and language might have co-evolved for a certain time during evolution and share a primordial form of communication system,” said medical anthropologist Kathleen Wermke of the University of Würzburg.
The mound of carefully arranged dugong bones unearthed near a Neolithic village, on an islet off the coast of Umm Al Quwain, may have been assembled during ancient fishing ceremonies.
