Friday, March 12, 2004

Sparks fly over rare axe head

A Fife man who discovered a rare Neolithic axe head while out walking near his home is facing prosecution for refusing to hand it over.

Under Scots Law such finds are Crown property but until now it is not thought anyone has faced court action.

Michael Kelly discovered the 6,500-year-old axe head, one of only 30 in the UK, in a field last year.

Mr Kelly, from Leslie, has been told that court proceedings will follow if he does not hand over the artefact.


Niya yields buried secrets

Long, long ago there was a king. He had 300 soldiers, 3,000 residents in his state and one gold camel, which was his dearest possession.

But he fell in love with a woman who was also loved by the king of another state, and thus a war was started. God, angered by the war, blew up a black sandstorm that lasted for 80 days and buried the entire kingdom, including the gold camel.

More than 2,000 years later, in 1901, a British explorer named Marc Aurel Stein (1862-1943) trekked into the ruins of the kingdom far out in the desert, and the world then heard for the first time the name of Niya - as dreamlike as the Uygur legend about it that you have just read.


See, I can't write this kinda stuff about what I do. "Long, long ago there was a group of mobile hunter-gatherers. They made a bunch of little stone tools. And then they all died."

Beit She'an artifacts go up in smoke

A fire caused severe damage Wednesday night to a structure housing antiquities unearthed at the Beit She'an National Park, according to Gabi Mazor, the Israel Antiquities Authority coordinator at the site.

The warehouse contained millions of artifacts, mainly ceramic shards, discovered during 18 years of excavations at the park, located in the northern Jordan Valley.

Investigators believe that the warehouse was deliberately set on fire, as they discovered that the lock was broken and found gasoline at the scene of the blaze. But the police have not yet arrested any suspects in the apparent arson attack.


There go the TL dates. . . .[inside joke]

Dozens of Inca Mummies Discovered Buried in Peru

Dozens of exquisitely preserved Inca mummies are being recovered from a barren hillside on the outskirts of Peru's bustling capital city, Lima. In a matter of months a highway will roar past the ancient cemetery.

"By now we have over 40 [mummy bundles] and the number increases every day," said Guillermo Cock, a Lima-based archaeologist.

Cock and his team were contracted by the city government to comb the hillside for any unknown archaeological remains prior to construction of the road, which is the final phase of a project to ease traffic congestion in Lima.

Three days after their excavations began on March 3, the team found the cemetery. The bundles—cocoons of one or more adult and child mummies wrapped together in layers of textiles—date back more than 500 years to the Inca Empire.


Mummy's Return to Egypt Spotlights Smuggling

Last September—after a 140-odd-year run in a Niagara Falls, Canada, sideshow—the 3,000-year-old mummy of Egyptian Pharaoh Ramses I returned home. The celebration was one for the ages.

"When he arrived, no living king [had] ever had such a reception," said Zahi Hawass, an archaeologist and secretary general of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities.

The mummy's return to Egypt was facilitated by the Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. While the museum had obtained legal rights to own and display the mummy, museum officials decided that the pharaoh's proper place was in Egypt.

"It just seemed the right thing to do for a lot of reasons," said Peter Lacovara, the museum's curator of ancient Egyptian, Nubian, and Middle Eastern art.


This is a good article, I think. I generally support the return of mummies to Egypt and it would be nice if they could be returned to their tombs, which they have done with Tutankhamun. The artifacts I don't think need to be returned, unless they were illegally obtained at the time.