Two privies, one dating back to the 18th-century, have been excavated in Halifax, Nova Scotia, at the future site of a new apartment building.

“The early outhouse, the late 18th-century one, is one of the most significant early deposits we’ve found in Halifax, given that it could be associated with Charles Morris, who was one of the most prominent people in the city,” Niven said Friday.

Morris was married and had children, he said.

“It’s a little time capsule. It’s really a statement about their lives.”

Dexel recently demolished the Victoria Apartments at the corner of Morris and Hollis streets and moved a two-storey building that once stood just to the south of the apartment building.

The structure that was moved was built in the 1760s by Charles Morris, the colony’s surveyor general and a founding father of Halifax.

“The house that they moved was his office,” Niven said.

The mandarin’s former mansion, which was located beside the Victoria Apartments on Morris Street, has also been torn down.

Archeologists sifting through the site found the remains of about 100 bottles dating from the late 18th century to the first quarter of the 19th century.

[Full story] [Discuss here]

Police in Italy have sealed off an illegal archaeological dig and have recovered 108 stolen artifacts.

The artefacts were excavated from tombs dating to the Daunian era, which preceded the Roman empire, in the southern region of Puglia.

The pieces were expected to be trafficked on the illegal antiquities market.

Several sites were sealed off by police near the town of Rodi Garganico, in the province of Foggia on the Adriatic coast after routine checks by the Italian tax police, Corrado Palmiotti told AKI.

“It’s an area rich in archaeology,” he said.

Police said they had made no arrests.

Several vases, ornamental objects and spearheads were recovered by police on the Gargano peninsula. The objects date from between the 6th and 4th-centuries BC.

Daunia refers to the civilisation that dominated northern Puglia for more than 1,000 years until around the 4th century BC.

[Full story]

Pottery, china, bottles and bones have been found in a privy, dating back to 1760, which was found under the site of a future parking lot in Annapolis, Maryland.

The artifacts were found buried in a long-abandoned privy behind the house at 26 West St. The construction crew alerted city officials as soon as the brick outline of the privy became visible Wednesday.

Thomas W. Bodor – a consulting archaeologist retained by the Historic Preservation Commission to oversee such discoveries at construction sites – said yesterday that the privy appears to have been dug around the same time the house was built, about 1760. It is next to another abandoned privy, that was dug about 1860.

“We can tell the people who lived here had a nice collection of pottery off of which they were eating,” Bodor said of the earlier privy site.

[Full story]

Pottery found in St. Augustine, Florida, may be a clue to finding a lost Spanish colony in the Solomon Island.

Three years after St. Augustine was founded, Alvara de Mendana, nephew of the governor of Peru, set out with two ships and 150 soldiers and sailed west to find gold and a new trade route to China.

Mendana’s 1568 voyage found nothing, so he returned to Peru.

But a relentless lust for gold pushed the Spanish to dispatch more colonizing fleets. And one founded a colony somewhere in the Solomon Islands, northeast of Australia.

No one knows its exact location or why the colony disappeared, but Martin Gibbs of the University of Sydney’s Department of Archaeology has done extensive research and thinks he has a few clues. He came to St. Augustine last week to look for some clues in possible similar objects.

[Full story]

A looted Pompeii plaster wall painting and a Corinthian vase for mixing water and wine are being returned to Italy.

They were recovered by immigration and customs officials in June. Both items had been scheduled for auction in New York before they were discovered to have been stolen.

Immigration officials said the vase may have been illegally introduced into the art market by Giacomo Medici (JAH’-kuh-moh MEH’-dih-chee) in 1985. The art dealer was convicted in Rome in 2004 of conspiracy to traffic in antiquities.

The wall painting was reported stolen in Italy in 1997.

[Full story]