Excavations at Swahili trading town in East Africa

Archaeology website "Past Horizons" reports on the excavations at Songo Mnara in Tanzania. The town was occupied between the 14th and 16th centuries AD, when the town was part of "the indigenous and cosmopolitan  form of urbanism that linked Africa with the Indian Ocean world system from AD 700 - 1500"

"Before silk: unsolved mysteries of the Silk Road" : video

Professor Colin Renfrew of the MacDonald Institute of Archaeological Research (Cambridge) delivers a lecture on the early contacts between China and Western Asia and Europe from the neolithic to the 8th century AD

This video of his lecture is uploaded onto YouTube.
Please note it runs for an hour and was recorded live

School of Museology to be established in Egypt: online article

Egypt's museums have been in the news following the looting that took place in major institutions and at archaeological sites during the country's recent political upheavals.

"The lack of trained museum personnel is indeed the overarching problem in Egypt's path towards the creation of a new effective museum system" says Ramadan Badri Hussein, supervisor of the office of the MSA's Minister for Archaeological Affairs.

As part of an ongoing programme of initiatives, a School of Museology is shortly to be established at the Casdagli Palace in Cairo.

Read more in Nevine El-Aref's report for the al-Ahram Weekly Online

Museums and ethics

The Smithsonian Institution in Washington is facing calls to cancel a planned exhibition of Chinese artifacts salvaged from a Tang-era shipwreck as they were recovered by a commercial treasure-hunter rather than by academic, archaeological methods.
Read more in this article from the online New York Times  

From Hellenism to Islam: book review

Published by Cambridge University Press in 2009, "From Hellenism to Islam: cultural and linguistic change in the Roman Near East" (edited by Hannah Cotton)  explores the "constantly shifting blend of languages and writing systems, legal structures, religious practices and beliefs in the Near East" in the 800 years between the Roman and Islamic conquests.

Read a review by Christian Hogel (University of Southern Denmark) in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review ("an impressive and very readable publication")

Find the book in SOAS Library at NB417 / 732888

The two eyes of the Earth: book review

Matthew Canepa's 2009 book "The two eyes of the Earth: art and ritual of kingship between Rome and Sasanian Iran" is reviewed in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review by Dr. Peter Edwell of Macquarie University, Sydney.

The book is based on the author's PhD thesis at the University of Chicago. Professor Canepa is currently  at the Department of Art History at the College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota
Dr. Peter Edwell is based in the Department of Ancient History at Macquarie University, Sydney

SOAS Library has a copy of this book at NT935 / 741958

Antiquities : is it possible to "collect" them with a clear conscience?

Article from the Huffington Post on the legality of collecting "antiquities" and the problems faced by museums where items in their collection, or that they wish to acquire, are of dubious provenance