Archaeology News: September 27, 2011

October Highlights at State Museum of Pennsylvania Include Archaeology Month, Great Pumpkin Day

Archaeology and Earth Science Day at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History: Meet Museum curators and staff; members of Museum-associated societies such as the Cleveland Geological Society and the Micromineral Society; as well as representatives from the Cleveland Archaeological Society and local universities.

Archaeology in York over the last two decades will be under the spotlight at a conference in the city. Experts in the field will be attending the three-day event at York St John University, which starts on Friday, to talk about what has been learned from excavations and how people have been able to get involved in uncovering the city’s hidden history.

Discovered in 1989, the Actun Tunichil Muknal cave holds evidence of the Classic Maya religion, in particular bloodletting rituals and human sacrifice related to the Maya rain god Chaac. The remains of 14 people were found within the cave, and archaeologists believe that some of the ritual activities may be in part a response to the severe drought at the end of the Classic period.

Georgia Southern University’s team of student and faculty archaeologists has been honored with the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Partners in Conservation award for their work in discovering a long-lost Civil War prison camp near Millen, Ga.

BBC News has revealed that a shipwreck containing 200 tonnes of silver has been found in the Atlantic Ocean, 500 kilometres off the west coast of Ireland.

His jaw must have dropped when he examined the material before him. It was a rare find. So rare, in fact, that, if what he was looking at was really what he thought it could be, it would be the first and only evidence of soft body tissue from an early hominin ever discovered.

Images of five of the Dead Sea Scrolls have been placed online by Google and Jerusalem’s Israel Museum. “Some of these images are appearing for the first time in Google – what no one has seen for 2,000 years and no scholar since the Dead Sea Scrolls were found,” said James Charlesworth, director of the Princeton Dead Sea Scrolls Project.

The skeletons of 42 children and 76 skeletons of either llamas or a have been discovered in a sand dune on Peru’s northern coast. The children and animals are thought to have been sacrificed some 800 years ago by the Chimú culture.