This weekly feature is a place to discuss new developments in fields of history and archaeology. This can be newly discovered documents and archaeological sites, recent publications, documents that have just become publicly available through digitization or the opening of archives, and new theories and interpretations.
Stashed Cash: Rare Ming Dynasty Banknote Found Inside Chinese Sculpture
Ancient mound used for defense hints at walled city in Japan
Earliest Known Clay Figurines in the Southwest May Be Fertility Symbols, Study Says
Scans locate historic secret room in walls of Gunpowder plot house
Gruesome Rituals Revealed in 9,500-Year-Old Graves - in Brazil
Pembroke Castle study uncovers possible Henry VII birthplace
Video Games and Archaeology - the SAA archaeological record, volume 16, number 5
5,000-Year-Old Chinese Beer Recipe Had Secret Ingredient - it's barley
Top music people gossip this week: Sothesby's is in a beef with an academic over how Beethoven wrote natural marks, and it ruined the auction. My money's on the historian of course, a man's accidentals are a personal thing.
Not something that's available already, but a project whose planning phase just finished, and that I found out about very recently is Amherst's Digital Atlas of Native American Intellectual Traditions. According to their project abstract, the aim is to develop a 'framework for sharing, exploring, and visualizing Native-authored library and archival collections'. Not exactly sure what stage the project's in now, but very exciting in general!
A quite recent article I read about this and similar digitization projects is here.
I think it's interesting but my question is more whether or not in fact it is new or not, but WikiLeaks this week put out 500,000 US diplomatic cables from the era-shifting year 1979: https://wikileaks.org/plusd/?qproject[]=ee&q=#result
I'm not entirely what these are, I think they might just be FOIA documents? Likewise I'm not sure if they are "new" or just newly available in an easily searchable format online?
Anyone who is more keyed-in on wikileaks who knows about this and could explain ELI5, I would deeply appreciate it.