Wednesday List: Some recent archaeology finds I'm keen on

See me geek out at Stonehenge on a very dark day

While I'm not (yet?) elbow deep in dirt, I can still get my archaeological kicks from reading up on the discoveries that real-life archaeologists are making.

Here are some finds or analysis of past finds that I've read about, and that have made my skirt fly up in recent days.

1. The hairstyles of Ancient Egyptians. Amazingly and awesomely, a dig at Amarna in Egypt has uncovered at least 28 bodies with intact hairstyles. These include that of a woman whose (probably posthumous) 'do included over 70 different hair extensions, and another of a woman who hennaed her hair - perhaps to cover her greys. It turns out that the locals were also into braids in a really big way, and styled their hair with various fats. So, not that different from today.
   
   Extra awesomeness: Amarna is the desert city of the renegade pharaoh Akhenaten, who drastically overhauled Egyptian religious practises during his reign, and changed the focus (albeit for that period only) from polytheism to monotheism.
   
2. Neolithic child goldsmiths. New research on finds from the Bush Barrow burial mound near Stonehenge (so, on an amazing plain that's FULL of neolithic religious sites) indicate that it was children as young as ten who executed the really fine goldsmithing found on the artefacts. Check out the image of a dagger handle covered with over 140,000 tiny gold studs, overlapped to look like fish scales. Quelle amaze.
   
3. Hand holding skeletons at the Chapel of St Morrell, in Hallaton. This one has been kind of big news, because nothing says "sexy history" like 700 year old hand-holding skeletons. But the other details are equally fascinating: the Roman artefacts found beneath the chapel site, the six bodies found with stones on top of them (to "hold them down"), and the name of the Chapel site itself - "Hare Pie Bank" - and it's associated history of bottle kicking competitions.

Have you heard of any awesomely awesome digs recently? There's an extensive dig taking place in Gallipoli at the moment which looks pretty fascinating.