Hey all, I am out of town for the holidays, so posts will resume on Tuesday, January 5th. I hope you all have a very Happy New Year!

A teacher in England has baked bread using ancient grain developed by an archaeological botanist.

Mr Letts developed the grain in frustration at the modern types of wheat grown in the UK, which produce straw too short for use as roofing thatch. He believed using older varieties where you could get two products from the land was better for the environment.

He scoured gene banks and traditional farms across the world to track down tall varieties of wheat, like those grown in medieval times.

He said: “After so many years of struggling to research this and develop it, I think it’s catching on.”
The grain is being grown on farms at Faringdon and Wheatley, producing 1.3 tonnes of grain per acre plus the same weight in thatching straw.

He said: “I think the bread’s delicious and most people really like it.

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Archaeologists in Norway have discovered the oldest and most complex group of iron forges ever to be found in the area.

The iron beads that had piqued Øien’s interest were only 1 to1.5 millimetres in diameter. But they were sufficient to make her realize they might be residue from a smithy. It turned out she was right, but the number of forges on the small field surprised everyone.

“We found three different types of forges”, Øien says. “Some were small and circular, some were indoors, and a third type was in the shape of a figure eight. Findings suggest the smiths used one half of the figure-eight shaped forges for the rough work before refining the iron in the other forges.”

The excavations uncovered more than 200 construction-related artefacts, including post holes, forges, fireplaces and wall ditches. “Even though we have only uncovered half of the area, we have already found seven forges”, says Preben Rønne, the museum’s project manager for the site. “This cluster suggest some kind of early industrial activity, in the sense that clearly they had large scale production.”

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A mysterious human tooth has been found in the attic of Blickling Hall, a home in Norfolk, England which was once owned by the Boleyn family.

“You find a lot of interesting things working in a house with centuries of history, and you do develop a strong stomach over time, but we’ve never found a tooth before, so we’re just really interested to know where it came from and why it’s ended up in our attic.”

Rather than squeamishly hurling the obscure item out with the rest of the rubbish, in true National Trust style the tooth was catalogued and bagged for further investigation.

Angus Wainwright, the National Trust’s regional archaeologist, said: “We’ve found a lot of interesting things in the Blickling attics before, but this has got to be the weirdest.

“It’s a tooth in very bad condition indeed, so its owner would have been in a huge amount of pain. It’s got a massive hole in one side and cavities throughout.

“Without proper scientific dating we can’t say too much more about it, other than that it’s never been buried in the ground because you can see some of the red mush still present, so I’d say it was probably lost right here in the attics.

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The 18th-century Rancho de las Cabras is the birthplace of commercial ranching, and now it needs funding in order to be preserved.

Ruins that archeologists call one of the last links to the original ranches and cowboys that shaped Texas have been kept behind a gate, literally buried, for more than two decades – awaiting the funding that would allow people to see them.

The 18th-century Rancho de las Cabras complex, with its stone building remains, was a birthplace of the large commercial ranching operations that would help define the state. Preservationists have long hoped it could be fully excavated and opened to the public, but the site has been unable to attract the money it would need from Congress or the National Park Service’s stretched budget.

“It’s one of these kind of once-in-a-lifetime sites. You’re not going to be able to see something like this anywhere else in the world,’’ said Park Service archeologist Susan Snow. “The mission ranches brought what we know today as the modern cattle industry.’’

The 100-acre site about 30 miles southeast of San Antonio was donated 32 years ago to the state, which handed it to the Park Service nearly 15 years ago as an addition to the San Antonio Missions National Historical Park.

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