A statue depicting a beheaded ballgame player has been unearthed at Mexico’s El Teul Archaeological Zone. The statue was found in the southeastern corner of a ball court. Archaeologists from the National Institute of Anthropology and History expect to find more of the life-size statues.

Italian police have broken up a gang of looters that plundered the Torre Mordillo archaeological site in the Calabria region.  

A genetic study of Icelanders suggests that an Amerindian woman was brought to the island 1,000 years ago, perhaps by the Vikings.  

Graffiti has been removed from petroglyphs in Arizona’s Kaibab National Forest, but permanent damage has been done. “It will unfortunately never be the same,” said archaeologist Neil Weintraub.  

Mysterious stone balls found in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, may have been used to transport the giant stones in stone-circle monuments, according to a team of experimental archaeologists from the University of Exeter. The scientists placed similar stone balls in grooved tracks along the ground and successfully moved heavy concrete slabs. “The demonstration indicated that big stones could have been moved using this ball bearing system with roughly 10 oxen and may have been able to transport stones up to 10 miles per day,” said team leader Bruce Bradley.  

The Nottingham Caves Survey has been using laser scanners to produce a 3D record of the hundreds of caves dug out of the sandstone around the city of Nottingham, England. The caves have been used as dungeons, beer cellars, cess pits, tanneries, and even air-raid shelters. BBC News has posted some of the first images released from the project.  One of the caves to have been mapped is thought to be “Mortimer’s Hole,” the route taken by Edward III’s troops to capture Roger de Mortimer in 1313. Edward III suspected that Mortimer was involved in the murder of his father, Edward II.  

Curtis Marean of Arizona State University is a member of the team that analyzed 3.4 million-year-old animal bones from Dikika, Ethiopia, and found evidence of cut marks inflicted by stone tools or sharp stones. This would indicate that Australopithecus afarensis butchered and ate meat. In this Scientific American article, Marean and other team members respond to the recent claim by Manuel Domínguez-Rodrigo of the University of Madrid that those marks were not made by human ancestors, but by other animals that trampled the bones.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Thursday, November 18, 2010. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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