A bronze artifact resembling a broken buckle wrapped with a bit of leather has been unearthed at a 1,000-year-old Eskimo dwelling in Alaska’s Bering Land Bridge National Preserve. Archaeologists from the University of Colorado at Boulder think the bronze part of the artifact was probably produced in East Asia and reached Alaska through trade from the steppe region of southern Siberia. “The object appears to be older than the house we were excavating by at least a few hundred years,” said team leader John Hoffecker.

Archaeologist Diane Hanson talked to the Anchorage Daily News about the challenges she faces while excavating on the far-flung Aleutian Islands.

Archaeologists think that the interior of the Iron Age broch, or circular tower built of huge rocks, in Assynt, Scotland, remained unchanged from the time it was built until it collapsed in 1,000 A.D.

CNN has more information on the theft of Libya’s “Benghazi Treasure” last spring, and the problem of looting across the country throughout the civil war. “Throughout the conflict, locals did an enormous amount to keep their heritage safe, standing guard at sites and museums. They put themselves at risk and if it hadn’t been for them, it would have been a lot worse,” said Paul Bennett of The Society for Libyan Studies.

The state of New Jersey will develop the colonial-era industrial site located next to the State House in Trenton. “It appears that the site actually has quite the promising future in store as a preserved, displayed and interpreted, historic property,” said archaeologist Richard Hunter.

The remains of a third eighteenth-century log fort have been found in Illinois, near the Fort de Chartres State Historic Site. The outline of the fort can be seen in an aerial photograph taken in 1928. “We have the direct descendants of some of the people whose buildings we are digging up helping us dig,” said Robert Mazrim of the Illinois State Archaeological Survey.

Kristina Killgrove of Vanderbilt University wants to sequence DNA extracted from ancient, lower-class Roman skeletons. She knows from isotope analysis that some of these people had immigrated to Rome from distant lands, and she thinks DNA could provide some answers to questions about their origins. “It’s an untapped data source, especially about the common people, the ones we know nothing about,” she said.

“A very ancient aristocratic house” unearthed near the Arch of Titus on Rome’s Palatine Hill might have been owned by Gaius Octavius, father of Augustus, Rome’s first emperor. “We have unearthed more than 10 rooms, beautiful mosaic floors and frescoed walls,” said Clementina Panella of the University of Rome la Sapienza.

Six unmarked graves holding the remains of people thought to have been enslaved West Africans have been discovered at Kingsley Plantation in Jacksonville, Florida.

Archaeologists will excavate the officers’ quarters at an Army outpost in southern Oregon that was occupied between 1853 and 1856. “When the fort was abandoned, it fell down in place and rotted away. There were some squatters here in the late 1800s,” said Mark Tveskov of South Oregon University.

A well and artifacts dating to the Civil War have been unearthed on the oldest part of the College of William & Mary campus in Williamsburg, Virginia. At the time, most of the school’s students returned home to fight for the Confederacy. Some 1,500 Union soldiers took over the school buildings.

Irish and Slovakian archaeologists used new microgravitational technology to search for a possible second passage tomb at Newgrange.

A Peruvian farmer will be fined for digging a well in the middle of the Nasca archaeological site. Nasca’s mysterious giant animal figures and geometric line drawings can be seen from the air.