Think about this when you're relaxing in Central Park over the weekend: An entire community once lived there, with homes and several churches and at least one school, right in the park (before it was the park). We're talking about Seneca Village, a largely African-American community of some 260 people that existed from the 1820s until 1857, when they were evicted so that Central Park could be created. They lived in the area between 81st and 89th Streets and 7th and 8th Avenues, in what is now part of Central Park, east of Central Park West.


For many years, three professors from City College, Columbia, and NYU had sought to gain permission to dig in the park, seeking artifacts from this community. They had documentary records of Seneca Village, including maps of houses, newspaper accounts, affidavits, and church records. They had radar that showed where homes existed. But the city wouldn't let them excavate -- until 8 weeks ago. Today marks the last day of their dig. We spoke to archaeologist Nan Rothschild of Columbia, who told us about what they found...and what it means.

Oceanographer Robert Ballard, best known for discovering the Titanic wreck, has new plans to plumb the depths of the seas.

Ballard said Thursday that his latest deep-sea venture will send crews combing through the Black, Aegean and Mediterranean seas for artifacts from ship wrecks and ancient civilizations.

His research vessel, the E/V Nautilus, set out from a port in Turkey last week on a four-month mission that will use four remote-operated vehicles and sonar technology to explore lost cities, as well as hydrothermal vents and undersea volcanoes.

At a news conference at Mystic Aquarium in Connecticut, Ballard said that while he has a general idea of what his crew might find, the exploration is about looking for the unknown.

"We're fascinated by extremely confusing parts of our planet and we say 'let's go there and see if we can figure it out," said Ballard, a co-leader of the mission who is planning to join the ship later.

A faint engraving of a reindeer in a South Wales cave looks to be among the oldest rock art known in Britain.

Researchers completed an analysis on July 27 that dated the image at roughly 12,600 years or older, putting it about on par with Britain's oldest known rock art.

The archeologist who discovered the engraving, George Nash, from the University of Bristol, said he believed it could be even older.

Nash discovered the engraving while visiting the cave with a group in September 2010. But dating - using a technique that looks at the decay of traces of radioactive uranium and thorium in the stalagmite crust deposited over the engraving - was only just completed.

The engraving's location is being kept secret to prevent vandalism, because the cave in which it is located is open to the public, said Nash, who also works with the environmental firm SLR consulting.

In 2003, the first British rock art from the Upper Paleolithic, which ended about 12,000 years ago, was discovered in Creswell Crags in England. A dating analysis put these engravings at roughly the same minimum age as Nash's more recent find. Rock art created since the end of the Upper Paleolithic is more common in Britain.

Even after years of excavations at the 18th-century military outpost that inspired James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans, archaeologist David Starbuck says there's still plenty of history waiting to be unearthed.

Starbuck is overseeing an archaeological field project at Fort William Henry in the southern Adirondack tourist village of Lake George. It's his fifth summertime dig at the reconstructed French and Indian War fort and 21st overall under the auspices of Adirondack Community College.

Starbuck-led teams conducted excavations at Fort William Henry from 1997 to 2000, turning up, among other things, the charred wooden foundations of the fort the British built here in 1755 and the French captured and burned after a weeklong siege in August 1757. Scores of the fort's soldiers and civilians were killed by Indian allies of the French in what became known as the massacre at Fort William Henry. The siege and its aftermath were retold in Cooper's novel and several film versions of his book, including the 1991 adaptation starring Daniel Day-Lewis.

All of which makes the fort, in Starbuck's estimation, the most famous of the nation's French and Indian War sites, most of which are concentrated in the Northeast. Visitors to the fort are encouraged to watch the archaeology work unfold and question the diggers about what they're doing. Hopefully, such interactions will give people a better understanding of the fort's role in a little-known yet vital part of American history, Starbuck said.

"Schools don't teach it, so sites like this have to tell the story," he said. "We need to convey to people why people did what they did, that it's not just a good guy versus a bad guy thing."

Archaeologists from The University of Western Ontario and the Ontario Heritage Trust will search for unmarked graves at Uncle Tom's Cabin Historic Site in Dresden, Ontario next week.

The site is home to two historic cemeteries belonging to the British American Institute and the Henson family. Although many tombstones are visible at the two cemeteries, their positions do not always precisely mark the location of the underlying graves.

"Historic cemeteries are notorious for having many more burials than are marked by gravestones or recorded in the cemetery records," says Edward Eastaugh, who will lead Western's survey team.

Dena Doroszenko, archaeologist for the Ontario Heritage Trust, which owns and operates the historic site, says, "This work will be extremely helpful. Because the Henson family cemetery is still in use today, it's important to know the exact location of all the graves in the cemetery."

An Italian professor has announced the apparent discovery of the tomb of St. Philip, one of Jesus Christ's apostles, at the ancient city of Hierapolis in the Aegean province of Denizli.

The discovery of the grave of the biblical saint, who was killed by the Romans 2,000 years ago, will attract immense attention around the world, said Francesco D'Andria. St. Philip, one of the 12 apostles, came to Hierapolis 2,000 years ago to spread the Christianity before being killed by the Romans, the professor said.

D'Andria has been leading archeological excavations at the ancient city for 32 years.

"Until recently, we thought the grave of St. Philip was on Martyrs' Hill, but we discovered no traces of him in the geophysical research conducted in that area. A month ago, we discovered the remnants of an unknown church, 40 meters away from the St. Philip Church on Martyrs' Hill. And in that church we discovered the grave of St. Philip," said D'Andria.

As ancient civilizations across the Middle East collapsed, possibly in response to a global drought about 4,200 years ago, archaeologists have discovered that one settlement in Syria not only survived, but expanded.

Their next question is - why did Tell Qarqur, a site in northwest Syria, grow at a time when cities across the Middle East were being abandoned?

"There was widespread abandonment of many of the largest archaeological sites and ancient cities in the region and also large numbers of smaller sites," said Jesse Casana, a professor of anthropology at the University of Arkansas. "At Tell Qarqur and probably at other sites also in the Orontes River Valley, where our site is located, [settlement] continues, and in our case, seems to have probably broadened [during that time]."

Casana and Boston University archaeologist Rudolph Dornemann discovered mud-brick homes beyond the city's fortification walls, suggesting the area was thriving.

More than 3,000 Roman coins have been discovered in a field, it has emerged.

The hoard of copper alloy coins, dating from the 3rd Century, was unearthed in Montgomery, Powys, several weeks ago.

About 900 were found by a member of a Welshpool metal detecting club, with the rest of the discovery made with help from archaeologists.

The exact location is being kept secret to protect the site. The Powys coroner will determine whether they qualify as treasure.

Clwyd-Powys Archaeological Trust (CPAT), which helped unearth the coins, said the discovery had the potential to reveal more about Roman life in mid Wales in the late 3rd Century.

The Romans left Wales in 410AD, having first arrived in 47AD. The find in Montgomery is a few miles away from where a Roman fort once stood in the village of Forden.

More than 70 years after it went down, a Second World War aircraft has been discovered in the depths of Lake Muskoka, it was announced Tuesday.

The Ontario Provincial Police, Department of National Defence, the provincial Heritage Ministry and the Lost Airmen of Muskoka Project confirmed that the A-17 Nomad that crashed following a mid-air collision in 1940 was discovered in the lake.

Although the announcement was made this week, the wreckage was first discovered a year ago, in July 2010, by an OPP underwater search crew using sonar.

A remotely operated vessel was later used to explore the site, some 150 kilometres north of Toronto, and the two-seater aircraft was identified as one that went down on Dec. 13, 1940. It was searching for another plane when the collision took place.

In the cool living room of a stone-built house in Northern Israel I might just have held in my hands the keys to the ancient mysteries of Christianity.

And then again, I might not have.

With the blinds shuttered against the glare of the midday sun my host, Hassan Saeda, lays out a collection of extraordinary books which he says are about 2,000 years old.

Flowing of hair and neat of beard, he bears a distracting resemblance to an illustration of Christ from an old children's Bible. It lends the scene an air of extra gravity.

The books - bindings, pages, covers and all - are made entirely of various metals.

They are inscribed - or engraved, stamped or embossed - with various simple pictures and writing in a variety of languages including Greek and Old Hebrew.

And they are astonishingly heavy. Some are no larger than a credit card but some are the size of large-format modern paperbacks. The largest that I handled probably weighed 4 or 5kg (about 10lbs).

You can see why the publishing industry was eventually won over by the flexibility and portability of paper.