Philadelphia:

A venerable archaeology museum plans to lay off 18 researchers and focus on upgrading to its exhibits in an efforts to an attract more visitors and shore up its finances.
Several prominent scientists are among to the researchers being laid off from in the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, though some could keep to their jobs then if grant money to cover their salaries is found.
Museum director Richard Hodges said the institution’s finances are unsustainable, and that it must refurbish its “tired exhibits” and increase income.
“We were living beyond our means” Hodges said,
The 120 years old museum has a worldwide reputation for its scholarship and for supporting expeditions, from the tombs of Egypt to the temples of the Mayans to the remains of Babylon, Gordion and Troy.
Outside scholars questioned Hodges’ decision to cut so much research. One scientist slated for layoff, chemical archaeologist Patrick McGovern, has made headlines with his analyzes of stains on ancient vessels, some revealing the world’s oldest wines and beers.

“He is firing the very people who are making the university museum an important academic institution,” said Oscar Muscarella, a Penn museum trained archaeologist who is a retired curator from the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

The Penn museum‘s chief operating officer, Melissa Smith, said she could not disclose the size of the museum’s endowment or its deficits. She said the museum has had to dig into reserves, which are eroding fast.

The museum received $7 million from Penn to balance its $16.4 million budget in 2008, according to the annual report.

The layoffs were first reported by Penn’s student newspaper, The Daily Pennsylvanian.

Researchers announced today their discovery of the shipwrecked remains of an ancient trading vessel over 2,300 years old that sank in the Black Sea off the coast of present-day Bulgaria.
The vessel dates to the 5th to 3rd century B.C., an era known to scholars as the classical period of ancient Greece
the time of Plato when Athens reached the height of power and Zeus was believed to rule the celestial firmament.
The shipwreck is the oldest ever found in the Black Sea. It joins a relatively small handful of other known shipwrecks of the Greek period.
The first thing saw was this pile of amphora. There were probably 20 to 30 jars that were exposed on the surface layer.I knew right away that it was probably ancient, said Dwight Coleman, a marine geologist at the Institute for Exploration in Mystic, Connecticut.. Coleman served as chief scientist of the expedition together with Petko Dimitrov of the Bulgaria Academy of Science’s Institute for Oceanology, in Varna.

The expedition was the latest in a series of expeditions to the Black Sea initiated by National Geographic Society explorer-in-residence and Institute for Exploration president Robert Ballard, the oceanographer and undersea explorer famous for his discovery of the Titanic and other historic shipwrecks. Since 1997, Ballard has worked with archaeologist Frederik Hiebert at the University of Pennsylvania’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Philadelphia to investigate the ancient cultures and maritime trade routes of the Black Sea. Ballard and Hiebert joined Coleman in making today’s announcement.

Scientists at Penn State are leaders of a team that is the first provide reports to the genome wide sequence of an extinct animal, according to Webb Miller, professor of biology and of computer science and engineering and one of the project two leaders. The scientists sequenced the genome of the woolly mammoth, an extinct species of elephant that was adapted to living in the cold environment of the northern hemisphere.
The researchers suspect that the full woolly mammoth genome is over four billion DNA bases, which they believe is the size of the modern day African elephants genome. Although their dataset consists of more than four billion DNA bases, only 3.3 billion of them a little over the size of the human genome currently can be assigned to the mammoth genome. Some of the remaining DNA bases may belong to the mammoth, but others could belong to other organisms, like bacteria and fungi, from the surrounding environment that had contaminated the sample.
The team sequenced the mammoth nuclear genome using DNA extracted from the hairs of a mammoth mummy that had been buried in the Siberian permafrost for 20,000 years and a second mammoth mummy that is at least 60,000 years old. By using hair, the scientists avoided problems that have bedeviled the sequencing of ancient DNA from bones because DNA from bacteria and fungi, which always are associated with ancient DNA, can more easily be removed from hair than from bones. Another advantage of using hair is that less damage occurs to ancient DNA in hair because the hair shaft encases the remnant DNA like a biological plastic, thus protecting it from degradation and exposure to the elements.
Only after the genome of the African elephant has been completed will we be able to make a final assessment about how much of the full woolly mammoth genome we have sequenced, said Miller. The team plans to finish sequencing the woolly mammoth’s genome when the project receives additional funding.

An unknown prehistoric settlement has been revealed during archaeological work in East Taunton,
The dig was commissioned by Somerset County Council before construction begins on the Park and Ride scheme for the Cambria Farm site .
The remains of a prehistoric farm and surrounding fields reveal human occupation from the late Bronze Age to the Roman period (1000 BC to 400 AD).
Prehistoric archaeology is the study of the past before historical records began.
Prehistoric archaeology is one of those chewy definitions that not everybody agrees on. Mostly, as compared to historical archaeology, prehistoric archaeology refers to the archaeological remains of cultures that are primarily pre-urban and so, by definition don’t have contemporary economic and social records that can be consulted. The time depth varies across the planet; and some archaeologists consider any culture untouched by European colonization as prehistoric–but in a good way.
Councillor Justin Robinson said: “This is a fascinating piece of Taunton’s prehistoric heritage that provides us with a glimpse of everyday life during the Iron Age and helps to fill in the gaps in our knowledge of Somerset’s rural past.”

New scientific evidence, including DNA analysis conducted at one of the world’s foremost molecular genetics laboratories, as well as studies by leading scholars, suggests a 2,000-year-old Jerusalem tomb could have once held the remains of Jesus of Nazareth and his family.
The findings also suggest that Jesus and Mary Magdalene might have produced a son named Judah.
The DNA findings, alongside statistical conclusions made about the artifacts originally excavated in 1980 open a potentially significant chapter in Biblical archaeological history.
Albright and his followers believed that archaeology could and should be used to shed light on the Biblical narrative, particularly the Old Testament. The influential academic positions held by Albright and his followers, and their immense output Albright alone was the author of over a thousand books and articles made their work immensely influential, especially in America, especially among ordinary believers who wished to believe that archaeology had proved the Bible true.
A documentary presenting the evidence, “The Lost Tomb of Jesus,” will premiere on the Discovery Channel on March 4 at 9 p.m. ET/PT. The documentary comes from executive producer James Cameron and director Simcha Jacobovici.
In fact the members of the school were not biblical literalists, and their main concern was to discriminate between those parts of the biblical story which were true and those which were embellishments.