USC archaeologists say they know more about what pre-historic animals liked to eat.
A rare study of fossil teeth provided researchers with diets and habits of animals that roamed through South Carolina.
Scientists say camels and white-tail deer were popular food choices. This gives researchers more insight about South Carolina's rich past.
Not much to that story.
Archaeologist hopes to germinate fossilized pine cone seeds
A state archaeologist hopes to germinate seeds from the cones of a fossilized spruce tree dating back thousands of years.
The spruce pine cones were found in April by a state Department of Parks and Recreation archaeologist who uncovered them in an area that was being excavated near the Bodega Head parking lot.
The tree has been radiocarbon-dated to 50-thousand years by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
If Parkman succeeds with the spruce pine cones from Bodega Head, the seeds will be the oldest known to be germinated.
That's the whole thing.
In Istanbul, a race against progress
Istanbul's deputy governor, Cumhur Guven Tasbasi, said the city would not hesitate to halt construction and reroute the subway "if we come across remains of an ancient city, or a theater or any ancient relics."
But it has not yet done so, despite what some archaeologists say is ample evidence of Roman and Byzantine ruins, including the cistern next to the governor's office.
Based on the excavation so far, Karamut said, there were no findings that would "change the archaeological history of Istanbul." A site's historical value, other archaeologists note, is in the eye of the beholder. Critics say that in its rush to complete a showcase project, Istanbul is being cavalier about its cultural heritage.
That should be familiar to anyone doing CRM in the US: The "historical significance" test of whether to record and destroy, conserve, or preserve. It's probably difficult to imagine anything that would stop the work now, other than a truly spectacular palace or lots of valuable (monetarily) stuff.
Olmec pottery update New analysis of pottery stirs Olmec trade controversy
In February 2005, chemical analyses of Olmec pottery were published that strongly suggested the pottery, with its attendant iconography and culture, had a single source: San Lorenzo, the earliest Olmec capitol built on a massive artificial mound near the Gulf of Mexico.
A chemical technique, known as neutron activation, was used to compare the elemental composition of Olmec pottery with pottery from several sites across central Mexico. The results of the tests were published in Science and their correlation seemed to strongly favor the mother culture school of thought -- that Olmec ceramics all came from one place.
Now, however, an old technique brought to bear by Stoltman on an array of pottery fragments from five formative Mexican archeological sites shows that the "exchanges of vessels between highland and lowland chiefly centers were reciprocal, or two way."
Too bad this didn't include any comments from the previous researchers. We suspect they will argue that their samples were not comtaminated or that any contamination was controlled for.
River of data decodes Nile cycles
Climatologists have already combed the abundant Nile River data and revealed a connection between patterns in the water-level cycles and Indo-Pacific Ocean patterns. But large gaps in the data, especially after A.D. 1470, have left this analysis incomplete. Now, Michael Ghil, a geophysicist at the University of California, Los Angeles, developed with colleagues what he calls an advanced technique to fill the gaps. Analysis of the data, published in the May 24 Geophysical Research Letters, turns up evidence for a seven-year cycle that researchers say may be influenced by the North Atlantic ocean.