Archaeology Weekly Roundup! 3-29-13

An Internet sensation was touched off this week by Russian photographer Vadim Makhorov and a group of his friends — the group ignored regulations prohibiting the public from climbing on the Pyramids at Giza, Egypt, and came away with spectacular photos.

Bones which some believe could be those of Alfred the Great have been exhumed from an unmarked grave in Winchester to protect them from the enthusiasm of seekers for lost kings inflamed by reports of the rediscovery of the remains of Richard III in Leicester.

Archaeologists in Germany have done experiments on freshwater fish and found that they return C-14 dates hundreds to thousands of years older than the fish, leading to many possible problems in archaeological dating.

Saturn V moon rocket stages are beginning to return to land. On March 20th, in a blog post, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, announced that his project to bring some of the Saturn’s mighty F1 engines back to the surface had been successful. Is this the beginning of space archaeology?

New research into Thonis-Heracleion, a sunken port-city that served as the gateway to Egypt in the first millennium BC, is being examined at an international conference at the University of Oxford. The port city, situated 6.5 kilometres off today’s coastline, was one of the biggest commercial hubs in the Mediterranean before the founding of Alexandria.

Excavations are ongoing at the Hailongtun Castle in Zunyi, Guizhou Province, China, which was built in 1257 and destroyed in 1600.

While pawing through a stack of medieval manuscripts from Dubrovnik, Croatia, University of Sarajevo doctoral student Emir O. Filipović stumbled upon a familiar set of splotches marring the centuries-old pages. Years ago, a mischievous kitty had left her ink-covered prints on the book.

Archaeologists will be returning to Keros island in Greece to conduct a survey that will, they hope, shed additional light on the settlement and civilization that constituted the famous Keros hoard’s context.

A 14,000-year-old engraved reindeer antler is possibly the first piece of early human art ever found (though commenters on our Facebook page would disagree). The specimen was uncovered in the 1800s and has been in the vast collections of the Natural History Museum. Its scientific importance, and clues as to how it was made are only now being revealed, scientists report today.

In September 2012, researchers at the University of Georgia (UGA) began the The Orpheus Relief Project to determine how a 2000 year old marble relief was originally coloured based on the surviving pigments adhering to the marble, but the final results came as a shock to everyone.

In the middle of the Bronze Age, around 1000 BC, the amount of metal objects increased dramatically in the Baltic Sea region. Around the same time, a new type of stone monument, arranged in the form of ships, started to appear along the coasts. New research from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden shows that the stone ships were built by maritime groups.

Egypt’s revolution has not only brought political upheaval, but also lucrative opportunities for illegal diggers hunting for antique treasures and gold.

Go through to the linked page to see aerial photographs of Scottish hillforts in the snow.

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