Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts has returned the top half of the sculpture known as “Weary Herakles” to Turkey after 20 years of negotiations. The bottom half of the 1,800-year-old statue is in the Antalya Museum. The statue was transported home yesterday, on a government flight.

In 1996, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City returned the 2,500-year-old gold jewelry and silver pots known as the Lydian Hoard to Turkey. This article in Today’s Zaman recounts the tale in terms of “the curse of the treasure.”

A 2,000-year-old, two-story home has been found near a road in the central part of Smyrna, Turkey. “The fact that the residence was built alongside this historical road, and that it contains a kitchen and a restroom, which is not common for houses of that period, indicate that the house was owned by a rich family,” said Akin Ersoy of Dokuz Eylül University.

The bones of a woman whose jaw had been nailed to the ground have been found in a cemetery in Italy’s Tuscany region. “This indicates to me that it was an attempt to make sure the woman even though she was dead did not rise from the dead and unnerve the locals who were no doubt convinced she was a witch with evil powers,” said archaeologist Alfonso Forgione of L’Aquila University.

In 2003, the remains of eight individuals were exhumed from the eighteenth-century African Burying Ground in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The bones show evidence of manual labor and poor nutrition, in addition to disease and chronic infections.

Here’s a wrap-up of the federal artifacts sting that ended in the arrest of 25 people in the Four Corners region in June 2009. Two of the defendants killed themselves, two cases are pending, and 21 have pleaded guilty to charges related to digging, stealing, selling, or trafficking in American Indian objects.

A genetic study of a 90-year-old hair sample indicates that some Aboriginal Australians are descendents of the first modern humans to migrate out Africa more than 60,000 years ago. These first explorers met Neanderthals and Denisovans along the way to Asia. Samples from different Aboriginal Australians suggest that looking for Denisovan DNA in Asian populations could help scientists track ancient waves of migration.

Two royal burials  have been discovered at the Maya site of Nakum in Guatemala. A 1,300-year-old tomb, which had been badly damaged by rodents, had been placed on top of a 2,000-year-old tomb containing the remains of a woman ruler.

A developer has agreed not to build on an Ohlone burial site in Santa Cruz, California, after the remains of an Ohlone child were uncovered at the site last month. The land will be set aside for use by the Ohlone and the homeowners association of the new housing complex.

In Kaikoura, New Zealand, construction workers uncovered the remains of two people, along with jewelry, hand tools, and ochre. The finds will be examined by an archaeologist and the remains will be reburied.

Excavations on the Channel Islands, the Isles of Scilly, and the Outer Hebrides could tell archaeologists if Britain’s indigenous population gradually made the change to agriculture, or if colonists from Europe brought farming with them.

A man’s skeleton from the Iron Age  has been unearthed in Leicestershire, England. Jermey Taylor of the University of Leicester talks about the bones in a short video by the BBC.

Colonial-era bricks and pottery have been found at a construction site in Kempsville, Virginia. “We’ve never been able to find anything. Now we know at least some of it is still here. When you think about all the development going on here today, it’s amazing that something from the 1750s is still intact,” said archaeologist Tony Smith.

The J. Paul Getty Museum will return three marble artifacts to Greece that it acquired in the 1970s.