Queer & Khmer

THE STORY THAT GUY MELLGREN told about the curious silver coin began on the shores of Maine, where he met a stranger named Goddard. In the fall of 1956, Mellgren and Ed Runge, a pair of amateur archaeologists, had come in search of the most basic of coastal dig sites—a shell midden—when they happened onto a more unusual discovery.

Goddard had invited them to explore his shoreline property, and there, on a natural terrace about eight feet above the high tide line, they found stone chips, knives, and fire pits, along with an abundance of other unexpected artifacts. Each summer for many years, Mellgren and Runge returned to excavate the “Goddard Site,” with little help from professional archaeologists. In the second summer, they produced the coin.

The first analysis of a Neanderthal boy’s skull uncovered in Spain suggests that he grew much like a modern boy would, in another sign that our extinct ancestors were similar to us, researchers said Thursday.

The rare discovery of a child’s partial skeleton was found among the remains of seven adults and five other youths at the 49,000-year-old archaeological site of El Sidron.

The 7.7-year-old boy, known as El Sidron J1 according to the report in the journal Science, is the first juvenile Neanderthal to be studied from the area.

British and Iraqi archaeologists identify the first known settlement built under the enigmatic Sealand kings

The Kings of the Sealand sound like they come straight out of a fantasy novel but it’s the name given to a royal dynasty who ruled a swathe of Bronze Age Iraq for almost three centuries (ca. 1730-1460 BCE). Archaeologists know almost nothing about the Sealand Kings or their kingdom; all we have to go on are a tiny number of ancient texts, mostly written about them by other rulers. We know they controlled the swampy land around the head of the Persian Gulf, including several of the great ancient cities of southern Babylonia, and we know that they thoroughly annoyed the Kings of Babylon from whom they’d wrestled their kingdom.

The faces of Bayon.

Bayon is a richly decorated Khmer temple, located at Angkor, Cambodia. “The serenity of the stone faces” (Glaize, 1993) strikes one while walking through Bayon.