A team of archaeologists has opened a window to an era when well-heeled industrialists Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller traveled to a young Miami, lured by a new hotel that was the gem of its age.
A handful of archaeologists have spent the last year gently digging under a downtown parking lot in the middle of high-rise hotels and the Interstate 95 on-ramps. They've uncovered parts of Miami founder and railroad magnate Henry Flagler's once magnificent Royal Palm Hotel -- from the ash pits where the boilers were fired up and the pathways that led to the workers' quarters, to patina-covered skeleton keys that once opened those rooms. They've also discovered evidence of the area's first settlers, the Tequesta Indians.
And look, you can buy some of it, too $100 buys you a brick of hotel built by Flagler
Take home a piece of the Royal Palm Hotel, a chunk of 19th century South Florida grandeur. The cost -- about $100.
Archaeologists working in the skyscraper shadows of downtown Miami are discovering, dusting and displaying ever-larger foundational sections of the once-magnificent hotel, opened by railroad magnate Henry Flagler in 1897 and razed in 1930.
Now, they plan to sell -- one by one -- 1,500 yellow and red bricks gently pried from the hotel's lower walls, newly unearthed from below the asphalt of a parking lot north of the Dupont Plaza hotel.
Archaeologists puzzle over skull mystery
Nobody knows how he got there or how he died.
But the human skull of an elderly man unearthed under a block of flats has given archaeologists a tantalising mystery to puzzle over.
The skull, which is more than 500 years old, was revealed during demolition work on the Canon's Walk flats in Thetford on Monday morning.
Mini gate tower of Han Dynasty unearthed in Chongqing
CHONGQING, April 21 (Xinhuanet) -- A mini gate tower of the imperial Han Dynasty (206 B.C. to A.D. 220), the smallest ever spotted, has been unearthed in the Three Gorges area, according to archaeologists.
Discovered in the Dengjiatuo ruins, located in Zhongxian county of southwest China's Chongqing municipality, the stone gate tower was 3.2 meters tall and was thin in shape. The delicately-built tower was engraved with rare birds and animals of ancient folkloreon its body and head, said archaeologists.
We don't go a single day without archaeological news out of China, for some reason.
Ancient pets Update Ancient bones may be those of royal pet
Corgis, the little dogs with the short legs, may have a long royal history. Archaeologists from Cardiff University said Wednesday that ninth century bones unearthed in Wales may be those of the first Welsh corgi to be kept as a royal pet.
They have been analyzing bones found at a ancient royal dwelling in a bog in the Brecon Beacons, a hilly area of southern Wales.
"We have the foreleg of a corgi-sized dog, which, dare we suggest, might be a much-favored ancestral royal companion," said Alan Mulville, of the university's School of History and Archaeology, who is leading the study.