More than 26,000 people have signed a petition supporting the protection of West Virginia’s Blair Mountain from a mountaintop-removal mining project. The Battle of Blair Mountain was fought between 10,000 coal miners and 3,000 law enforcement personnel over a span of five days in 1921. “The Battle of Blair Mountain helped start the middle class,” explained retired miner Joe Stanley.

Jason De León of the University of Michigan studies the archaeology of undocumented migration from Mexico to the United States. He collects objects left behind in the desert, and he sometimes finds the remains of those who didn’t make it.

Sixteenth-century Spanish glass beads and iron tools have reportedly turned up in an excavation in southern Georgia. Some think that the discovery suggests that Hernando de Soto and his horses, pigs, and 600 men ventured further east than had been previously thought.

Here’s a story on the possible use of Iceland spar, a transparent form of calcite, as a Viking solar stone, or tool to detect the position of the sun for navigation purposes. Such a stone was found on an Elizabethan shipwreck in the Channel Islands.

Archaeologists have uncovered a 340-year-old Chinese coin in northwestern Canada. “The coin adds to the body of evidence that the Chinese market connected with Yukon First Nations through Russian and coastal Tlingit trade intermediaries during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and perhaps as early as the fifteenth century,” read a statement released by the archaeological firm Ecofor Consulting, Ltd. The coin is only the third to have been discovered in the region.

Recent heavy rains damaged several of the pagodas in the ancient city of Bagan in Myanmar.

Edeltraud Aspöck of the Austrian Academy of Sciences thinks that people may have opened graves during the Middle Ages for reasons other than robbery. “Some researchers say in early medieval periods the cemetery may have been a place to play power games, to display the dead with very rich grave goods. It may have been an important factor when families or clans are competing with each other,” she said.

Construction work in eastern England unearthed two Bronze Age pins and four torques. An Iron Age ring ditch was also found at the site.

Genetic traces of the Denisovans can be found in modern East Asians, according to a new genetic study using computer simulations that was led by Mattias Jakobsson of Uppsala Univeristy. “We found that individuals from mainly Southeast Asia have a higher proportion of Denisova-related genetic variants than people from other parts of the world, such as Europe, America, West and Central Asia, and Africa,” he said.

A development project in Greenwich, England, revealed bone-handled toothbrushes, thimbles, coins, bottles, and a nineteenth-century ceramic jug decorated with an image from the story of Robinson Crusoe.

University of Hawai’i archaeologists are investigating the Honouliuli Camp, where more than 3,000 prisoners of war and American citizens of various ethnic backgrounds were held during World War II. “What little has been known resulted in Honouliuli being thought of primarily as a World War II Japanese internment site. Our summer research emphasizes the diversity of those interned and imprisoned in Hawai’i,” said Suzanne Falgout of the the West O’ahu campus.

The Art Newspaper has more information on the theft of antiquities from a Libyan bank last spring.