Archaeologists announced on Wednesday that they had unearthed George Washington's boyhood home at a site not far from Fredericksburg, Va. Over the course of a seven-year excavation, the researchers found more than 500,000 artifacts. How can there be half a million artifacts at one site?

Almost everything you find counts as an artifact, as long as it was made or impacted by people. The objects comprise more than just materials from George Washington's home; archaeologists excavated a full acre of land, and the items they collected spanned 10,000 years of history—from rocks used to sharpen prehistoric stone tools to Civil War-era buttons. The collection does include an expensive tea set thought to be owned by the Washingtons and a pipe bearing a Masonic crest, but most of the objects are far more mundane, like nails, broken glass, or cracked egg shells. The only artifacts that weren't removed from the site are remnants of old buildings—either architectural fragments that are...

A glazed terra-cotta relief by the Renaissance sculptor Andrea della Robbia came loose overnight from its perch above a doorway at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and crashed to the stone floor below, suffering serious damage, museum officials said on Tuesday.

The fractured 15th-century sculpture, a 62-inch-by-32-inch blue-and-white lunette depicting St. Michael the archangel in a traditional pose, holding a sword and scales, was found early on Tuesday by a guard on regular rounds.

Harold Holzer, a museum spokesman, said the sculpture, which had been displayed over the doorway in the European Sculpture and Decorative Arts Galleries since 1996, might have done a flip in the air as it fell, causing it to land relatively flat on its reverse side and sparing it “catastrophic damage.”

Poetry doesn't matter to most people. They go about their business as usual, rarely consulting their Shakespeare, Wordsworth, or Frost. One has to wonder if poetry has any place in the 21st century, when music videos and satellite television offer daunting competition for poems, which demand a good deal of attention and considerable analytic skills, as well as some knowledge of the traditions of poetry.

In the 19th century, poets like Scott, Byron, and Longfellow had huge audiences around the world. Their works were best sellers, and they were cultural heroes as well. But readers had few choices in those days. One imagines, perhaps falsely, that people actually liked poetry. It provided them with narratives that entertained and inspired. It gave them words to attach to their feelings. They enjoyed folk ballads, too. In a sense, music and poetry joined hands.

In the 20th century, something went amiss. Poetry became "difficult." That is, poets began to...

A major New York museum has admitted that about one third of its collection of Coptic sculptures and reliefs from ancient Egypt are fakes. It plans to put them on public view in a highly unusual exhibition next year.

Dr Edna Russmann, a curator at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, said she began to have suspicions about its collection of Coptic art – the second largest in North America – about four years ago. She said she has no qualms about going public with her findings now. "It's about time," she said.

Although some chemical testing on the works has yet to be completed, Dr Russmann considers that 10 of the 30 examples of Coptic art – Christian imagery in limestone from Egypt dating between the late fourth century and AD641 – held by the museum are phoney. Moreover, about half the other pieces have probably been extensively recarved and retouched.

Part of the purpose of the exhibition will be to alert other US institutions to the possibility...

The regal black bull painted by a Stone Age artist on a cave wall in southwestern France 17,000 years ago has survived millennia of war and pestilence just a few yards above its subterranean gallery.

Today the prehistoric bovine could face annihilation by an army of encroaching black mold spots, the latest in a series of threats unwittingly brought in over the years by tourists, scientists and bureaucrats.

"Each time we try to resolve one problem, we create another," said Marie-Anne Sire, the cave administrator who coordinates the scientific teams trying to save the endangered reindeer, potbellied ponies and woolly rhinos of the Lascaux cave, which contains one of the world's most famous collections of prehistoric art.

The extraordinary creatures -- hundreds of exquisite beasts etched and painted across the undulating walls and ceilings of large underground cavities -- have become part of an international struggle to rescue prehistoric...