archaeology 
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SOURCE: New York Times
12/9/2020
Lockdown Gardening in Britain Leads to Archaeological Discoveries
Locked-down Britons have unearthed many potentially valuable objects both modern and ancient, prompting consideration of expanding a law that would enable museums to claim such objects after compensating the finder.
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SOURCE: The Guardian
11/30/2020
Campaigners Launch Legal Challenge Over Stonehenge Road Tunnel
A plan to tunnel underneath the site of Stonehenge to expand a British highway is controversial and reflects different understandings of preservation.
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SOURCE: New York Times
11/25/2020
Grave Is Found at Site of Historic Black Church in Colonial Williamsburg
The excavation may have discovered the remains of a Baptist congregation dating to the late 18th century, and may prompt a rethinking of the place of African American history in the open museum of Colonial Williamsburg.
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SOURCE: CBS News
11/29/2020
Finding the Last Ship Known to have Brought Enslaved Africans to America and the Descendants of its Survivors
"The Clotilda was burned and sunk in an Alabama River after bringing 110 imprisoned people across the Atlantic in 1860. Two years ago, its remains were found."
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SOURCE: Discover
11/29/2020
The Complicated History of Religion and Archaeology
Modern archaeology has largely succeeded in instituting professionalization and historical rigor to the study of sites of theological significance, but the discipline has a long and continuing historical entanglement with efforts to find proof of religious doctrines.
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SOURCE: New York Times
11/15/2020
Egypt Unearths New Mummies Dating Back 2,500 Years
A recent excavation has produced the largest discovery of artifacts of the year at the Egyptian necropolis of Saqqara.
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SOURCE: New York Times
11/4/2020
How Do You Know When Society Is About to Fall Apart?
"Contemporary society has built-in vulnerabilities that could allow things to go very badly indeed — probably not right now, maybe not for a few decades still, but possibly sooner."
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SOURCE: Smithsonian
10/28/2020
Maryland Archaeologists Unearth Jesuit Plantation’s 18th-Century Slave Quarters
“The Jesuits were prolific in their record keeping, but very little survived on the enslaved African Americans who worked the fields and served the Catholic Church,” says Julie Schablitsky, the highway administration’s chief archaeologist, in the statement.
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SOURCE: ABC News
9/9/2020
Black Scuba Divers Document Slave Shipwrecks Forgotten For Generations
Columbia University professor Christopher Brown says the number of slave shipwrecks that researchers have been able to confirm are the absolute minimum, and that the true number of shipwrecked slave ships are likely much higher. The work of a Florida diving group hopes to change that.
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SOURCE: New York Times
8/24/2020
1,100-Year-Old Treasure Is Unearthed by Teenagers in Israel
The discovery offers clues to the relations between different empires that controlled the region centuries ago.
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SOURCE: Norfolk Virginian-Pilot
8/17/2020
‘The Mystery Is Over’: Researchers Say They Know What Happened To ‘Lost Colony’
“You’re robbing an entire nation of people of their history by pretending Croatoan is a mystery on a tree,” said Scott Dawson.
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SOURCE: Washington Post
7/25/2020
Ancient Teeth Show History of Epidemics is Much Older than we Thought
Scientists and archaeologists now believe that the plague bacteria, which caused the medieval Black Death, infected humans roughly 5,000 years ago in the Stone Age.
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SOURCE: Washington Post
7/13/2020
A Century After a Race Massacre, Tulsa Finally Digs for Suspected Mass Graves
The excavation at Oaklawn Cemetery, delayed for months by the pandemic, begins Monday morning.
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SOURCE: The New Yorker
6/29/2020
In Search of King David’s Lost Empire
The evidence of David’s life is sparse. Was he an emperor? A local king? Or, as Biblical archaeologist Israel Finkelstein claims, a Bedouin sheikh?
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6/7/2020
Contagion and Recovery in the Hittite Empire
by Eva von Dassow
The progress of an ancient plague shows that when faith--in gods or medical research--fails, it's a long road to safety.
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SOURCE: DCist
5/19/2020
The Bible Museum Has Another Epic Issue With One Of Its Artifacts
Federal prosecutors in New York filed a civil action to forfeit one of the museum's clay tablets containing an excerpt of the "Epic of Gilgamesh."
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SOURCE: Science
5/14/2020
From Black Death to Fatal Flu, Past Pandemics Show Why People on the Margins Suffer Most
Evidence from bioanthropology and history suggests that late medieval plagues (and other pandemics) are not levelling forces; they often reinforce the divisions in society.
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SOURCE: The Atlantic
5/13/2020
A Mystery at Oxford
A well-funded effort by American evangelical Christians to identify archaeological evidence for the New Testament is at the center of a scandal.
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SOURCE: New York Times
5/11/2020
The Elites Were Living High. Then Came the Fall.
Modern cities can learn from the fate of the collapsed civilizations at Ugarit and Mycenae.
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3/22/2020
Our Stories Will Carry Us to the Future. Can They Save Us Now?
by David Farrier
To avert a climate disaster, science is essential, but we also need stories. We know ourselves first and foremost in the tales we tell.
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