The Athens Acropolis was closed today due to a strike by archaeologists and Greek culture ministry employees.

Here’s an update on the state of Libya’s archaeological sites from CNN.

UNESCO and the World Heritage Fund will assist Thailand with the flooding of the ancient city of Ayutthaya.

Neutron radiographs allow scientists to see how ancient artifacts were made. “Very few historical accounts describe the construction of such objects and archaeomaterials, ancient bronzes or ceramic vessels. The only source of information about how these objects were constructed comes from their material properties and composition,” said Krysta Ryzewski of Wayne State University.

A Maya bowl has been returned to Belize. It had been confiscated from a New Mexico man by U.S. Immigration and Customs agents.

An eighteenth-century iron foundry has been unearthed in northwestern England. “The main product of the furnace would have been pig iron. The molten iron would have been tapped from the furnace and ran off in channels into sand boxes or pigs laid out on the casting floor,” said archaeologist Stephen Baldwin.

In Georgia, archaeologist Daniel Elliott and a team of volunteers are looking for the outer palisade wall that surrounded Fort Hawkins, which was constructed in 1808 and played a major role during the War of 1812. “Every time we’ve come back, we’ve discovered a new part of the fort we didn’t know was there,” he said.

Archaeologist Todd Kapler of Sioux City, Iowa, explains what archaeologists do when they monitor construction projects. “We never stop a project. We don’t have the authority to say, ‘we think there’s artifacts here; you have to stop your project.’ We submit it to the state…and they make a determination,” he explained.

Scientists have used teeth collected from a fourteenth-century plague cemetery to reconstruct the genome of the bacteria that caused the Black Death. It closely resembles the genomes of modern strains of Yersinia pestis bacteria. So why did the “killer pandemic” develop?

Could the arrival of Christopher Columbus and other Europeans in the New World have triggered Europe’s Little Ice Age? Some scientists at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America think that the decimation of New World populations by European diseases led to the reforestation of large land areas. “There’s nothing else happening in the rest of the world at this time, in terms of human land use, that could explain this rapid carbon uptake,” said Jed Kaplan of the Federal Polytechnic School in Lausanne, Switzerland.

A Maori village  and an 800-year-old stone tool have been unearthed at the site of a nineteenth-century building that was demolished last month. The tool may have been used to construct canoes.

A joint American-Egyptian project to lower the level of ground water at archaeological sites in Luxor has resumed. The water could damage the structural integrity of five different temples.

While cataloging all of the ancient Egyptian coffins in English and Welsh museums, Aidan Dodson of the University of Bristol found one that is 1,000 years older than the mummy within it. “Cut from a single log of cedar wood, it is exquisitely carved, inlaid, and painted,” he said.

Bad weather is interfering with excavation at the Queen Anne’s Revenge wreck site off the coast of North Carolina. “We’ll do what we can; we still expect to raise a cannon,” said Mark Wilde-Ramsing of the North Carolina Office of State Archaeology.

A piece of a ship that may have been run aground by the British Navy 200 years ago has been recovered from the Connecticut River. Jerry Roberts, director of the Connecticut River Museum, wants to return to the site where it was found with side-scan sonar equipment.

The University of Maine’s Hudson Museum will return a small orange and black  Hohokam pot  holding cremated remains to several American Indian tribes in Arizona. “We’re very respectful of objects like these, and [this vessel] isn’t even normally handled by staff,” said museum director Gretchen Faulkner.

Writer Peter Curran studies the archaeologists themselves in this BBC News Radio story.