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The British government’s plans to construct a new two-mile underground tunnel near the Stonehenge UNESCO World Heritage site have been called off in what’s being framed as a major victory for preservationists. The BBC has more on the late budgetary decision, which ends a yearslong legal... View full entry
Egypt has scuttled a controversial plan to reinstall ancient granite cladding on the pyramid of Menkaure, the smallest of the three great pyramids of Giza, a committee formed by the country’s tourism minister said in a statement. [...]
The pyramids are the only one of the seven wonders of the ancient world that still remain.
— The Guardian
The initiative was announced in January by Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, Mostafa Waziri, calling it “the project of the century.” The project, led by a team of Egyptian and Japanese experts, would have commenced after at least a year of planning but has since drawn... View full entry
The A303 redevelopment proposal had originally garnered the attention of preservation advocates beginning in 2017 and eventually yielded a favorable ruling from the UK High Court in 2021, the same year UNESCO first threatened to add the site to its list of World Heritage in Danger. ... View full entry
In a biological preserve in Mexico’s Campeche State, a team of archaeologists has documented pyramids, palaces, a ball court and other remains of an ancient city they call Ocomtún. [...]
The Mexican institute described the site, in Campeche State, as having once been a major center of Maya life. During at least part of the Classic Maya era — around 250 to 900 A.D. — it was a well populated area.
— The New York Times
"These cities had been lost to time. Nobody knew exactly where they were," Dr. Ivan Šprajc, the Slovenian archaeologist who led the discovery of the previously unmapped 8th-century Maya city in the Mexican jungle, shared with BBC Travel. "But this [Ocomtún], was actually the last major black... View full entry
A new research project at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has produced a useful documentation of four hard-to-access multireligious architectural heritage sites in Afghanistan using a combination of digital renderings, satellite imaging, crowdsourced data, and XR technology. MIT... View full entry
Engraved between 7,000 and 9,000 years ago, these representations are by far the oldest known to-scale architectural plans recorded in human history, the team reported on Wednesday in the journal PLOS ONE. They also highlight how carefully planned the desert kites may have been by the ancient peoples who relied on them. — The New York Times
The “desert kites” in question are essentially large-scale slaughter pen-type catchalls used to herd and kill wild animal herds in the prehistoric regions known today as the Levant and Central Asia. Researchers will soon display the plans, which are engraved in stone slabs, in a special... View full entry
The museum, which is still in the planning stages, will replace a much smaller building that closed more than ten years ago. It is likely to follow in the museo de sitio (site museum) model found at other complexes managed by the federal Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e História (INAH).
Carlos Esperón, the director of the Maya Museum in Cancún, in the neighbouring state of Quintana Roo, tells The Art Newspaper that work on the museum “could take two years.”
— The Art Newspaper
Meanwhile, the Art Newspaper is reporting that several finds taken from the disputed new Maya Train project’s construction will be displayed at the new museum, which is the third most visited cultural site in Mexico. Some experts had feared it would eventually become at risk over the number of... View full entry
A hidden corridor nine metres (30 feet) long has been discovered close to the main entrance of the 4,500-year-old Great Pyramid of Giza, and this could lead to further findings, Egyptian antiquities officials said on Thursday. — Reuters
The discovery was made under the Scan Pyramids project, a program launched in 2015 that aims to explore and discover ancient Egyptian Pyramids using non-invasive and non-destructive techniques. The group, which includes Cairo University and the French Heritage Innovation Preservation (HIP)... View full entry
Pope Francis will send back to Greece the three fragments of the Parthenon Sculptures that the Vatican Museums have held for two centuries, in the latest case of a Western museum bowing to demands for restitution of artifacts to their countries of origin. — AP
The bequest was labeled a “donation” from the Vatican by Pope Francis, who also called it “a concrete sign of [his] sincere desire to follow in the ecumenical path of truth.” The British Museum, meanwhile, is also reportedly in talks with Greece to return parts of its argued-over... View full entry
A long-lost, rock-cut tunnel 43 feet underneath the ancient Taposiris Magna temple has been unearthed by archaeologists outside of Alexandria, Egypt. The passage was discovered by the Egyptian-Dominican archaeological mission of the University of San Domingo, led by archaeologist... View full entry
A massive Roman mosaic was unearthed in Syria, marking what some experts said was the most important archaeological discovery in the country in the last 20 years. The mosaic was found in the town of Rastan, outside Homs, Syria’s third largest city. Rastan was an important stronghold of anti-government forces and saw some of the fiercest clashes between the Syrian military and rebels. The region, which is rich in cultural heritage, was retaken by the Syrian government in 2018. — ARTnews
As reported by ARTnews, the mosaic was discovered within a site that dates back to the 4th century CE. Syria’s General Directorate of Antiquities and Museums had been excavating the location. The mosaic spans around 1,300 square feet, with each panel fashioned with small colorful stones that... View full entry
The January 2021 issue of Architectural Digest featured a remodeled $42 million San Francisco residence described as a Spanish Renaissance Revival palacio. [...] ...shows ancient Khmer sculptures resting on the same pedestals.
The Cambodian government says those stone relics, depicting the heads of gods and demons, match a set that was looted years ago from one of the nation’s sacred sites.
— The Washington Post
The tony $42 million Peter Marino-designed San Francisco manse was the subject of a multi-page spread in the January 2021 edition of the magazine. A spokesperson for Architectural Digest said that photoshopping was required by “unresolved publication rights around select artworks,” but an... View full entry
“A vast Anglo-Saxon burial site containing 138 graves has been unearthed by archaeologists working on the HS2 cross-country rail route under construction across the UK. The site, near Wendover in Buckinghamshire, contains the remains of more than 140 people, some of which were buried with jewellery, knives and a personal grooming kit. “It is one of the best and most revealing post-Roman sites in the country,” says the historian Dan Snow.” — The Art Newspaper
According to a statement by HS2, the site contained 138 graves, with 141 inhumation burials and five cremation burials, making it one of the largest Anglo-Saxon burial grounds ever uncovered in Britain. According to Rachel Wood, the lead archaeologist for Fusion JV, the company behind the... View full entry
Archaeologists of the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (Iphan, the Mexican federal bureau that oversees cultural heritage projects) have unearthed a remarkably well-preserved Maya city in the Yucatán peninsula near Merida while examining a construction site for archaeological artefacts. — The Art Newspaper
The site is called Xiol, which is believed to have been occupied by more than 4,000 people between 600 and 900 AD. It consists of nearly 100 structures with features related to the Mayan Puuc style, an architecture characterized by carefully-cut veneer stones set onto a concrete core, with... View full entry
Mysterious mounds in the southwest corner of the Amazon Basin were once the site of ancient urban settlements, scientists have discovered. Using a remote-sensing technology to map the terrain from the air, they found that, starting about 1,500 years ago, ancient Amazonians built and lived in densely populated centres, featuring 22-metre-tall earthen pyramids, that were encircled by kilometres of elevated roadways. — nature
According to archaeologists, this is the first clear evidence that urban societies existed in this part of the Amazon Basin, a region that was long believed to have only been wilderness before the arrival of Europeans. Researchers had previously thought that all Amazonians lived in small, nomadic... View full entry
