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Monday, November 14, 2011

Nice mysterious artefact

Bronze Artifact Found on Alaska's Seward Peninsula
A research team is attempting to discover the origin of a cast bronze artifact excavated from an Inupiat Eskimo home site believed to be about 1,000 years old.

The artifact resembles a small buckle, researchers from the University of Colorado Boulder said in an announcement. How it got to Alaska remains a mystery.

"The object appears to be older than the house we were excavating by at least a few hundred years," research assistant John Hoffecker said in the release. Hoffecker led excavating at Cape Espenberg on Alaska's Seward Peninsula.
Nifty, no? Leather connected to the bar dates to about 600 CE, but they're trying to find more wood in the stratum to date it more thoroughly through radiocarbon method. The house is away from the then-shoreline, so would not simply have washed up from some sort of sea vessel, and the indigenous peoples did not cast metal. So the question is, were they visited by someone from the Old World far earlier than the Europeans who came later?

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