Charleston City Hall stands on the site of the city's first marketplace and an archaeological dig has produced bones, bricks and shards of pottery.
Archaeologist Martha Zierden and students have dug several 5-foot-square pits beneath City Hall, one of the first phases of a $5 million renovation of the structure standing on the city's famed Four Corners of Law.
The dig revealed undisturbed layers of soil from the 1750s to the late 1600s, when the market opened at the northeast corner of Broad and Meeting streets. The intersection is known as the Four Corners of Law because structures there represent city, state, federal and religious law.
Kudos.SA archaeologist 'knighted'
Cape Town - Professor Christopher Stuart Henshilwood, Director of the African Heritage Research Institute in Cape Town and Professor of Archaeology at the University of Bergen, Norway has knighted by the French government.
Henshilwood is a graduate of the University of Cape Town and read for his PhD at Cambridge University. For the past five years he has been a research member at a national scientific centre in Bordeaux that does research into human origins.
He directs the Blombos cave project, a major archaeological research initiative near Still Bay about 300km from Cape Town. His research has contributed significantly to the international debate on the origins of "modern" human behaviour.
Graves Museum update Board OK's museum sale
A divided board of trustees agreed Tuesday to sell the Graves Museum of Archaeology and Natural History, signaling the end of longtime archaeologist and museum namesake Gypsy Graves' role with the institution.
Graves, 74, vowed to fight the decision, along with her daughter Kate Gaskill. Both women served on the board of trustees.
''It's a shame,'' said Graves, still looking fit despite her use of a cane. ``It's a travesty and an injustice.''
The American Maritime Officers is under contract to buy the Dania Beach museum.
''The battle has just begun,'' Gaskill said. ``We're going to fight like hell.''
Underground attractionsKentucky's Mammoth Cave attracts visitors eager to explore America's second-oldest tourist site.
Mammoth Cave doesn't have the colorful stalagmites and stalactites that make some caves famous. Lighting is minimal; signs are nonexistent, and there's no pipe organ playing "Shenandoah," like the one at Luray Caverns in Virginia.
Yet, Mammoth's claims to fame are many. It's the longest cave in the world, with more than 360 miles of connected tunnels. It's also the second-oldest tourist attraction in America, after Niagara Falls, with guided tours offered since 1816. Huts used by an 1840s tuberculosis colony still stand, as do mining pits from 1812.
Most amazing of all is how far back Mammoth's human connections stretch: Mummies have been found in the cave, and you still can see petroglyphs (cave drawings) that are thousands of years old.
Is it fake?Swindle suspected in relic sale
A Guilin city man appeared in Beijing court Monday, charged in connection to a swindle involving falsely identified cultural relics.
The case, which was heard in Beijing Yanqing County People's Court Monday, is centred around the 1.2-million-yuan (US$145,000) sale of a fake Song Dynasty porcelain.
Authorities believe that in early 2001, Li Shiyuan, a 54-year-old native of the city in South China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, took a porcelain artifact to Beijing. He claimed it was produced at the Ruzhou Kiln, in today's Linru County, in Central China's Henan Province, during the Song Dynasty (960-1279). The area is famous for quality Song Dynasty porcelain artifacts.
Rare tombs of Tang Dynasty unearthed in Sichuan
Chinese archeologists have unearthed two skeletons and over 1,000 ancient coins from five tombs of the Tang Dynasty (618-907) in Sichuan Province, southwest China.
The tombs, with well-preserved outer coffins inside that were built of stone, were found in early March at a construction site in Mianyang City and excavation work was completed last week, saidSong Jianmin, head of the city's archeological team.
He said the two skeletons, which were unearthed from two of thefive tombs, had remained intact, but the inner wooden coffins havedecayed over the years.
A jar full of ancient coins was found close to a smaller tomb that was only about one meter long, said Song.