The third-century gladiator school  recently discovered in Austria was first seen as a white spot in an aerial photograph of the Carnuntum archaeological site. Ground-penetrating radar has revealed a well-preserved complex of buildings, including 40 tiny sleeping cells for the gladiators, a bathing area, a training hall, administrative buildings, and a cemetery.

The Turkish Ministry of Culture has asked London’s Victoria and Albert Museum to return a 1,700-year-old sculpture of a child’s head. The marble head was separated from the Sidamara Sarcophagus by archaeologist Sir Charles Wilson in 1882, and is now held in the museum’s stores.

A model of Nonsuch Palace has been constructed based upon 50 years’ worth of research by Martin Biddle, Emeritus Professor of Medieval Archaeology at Oxford. Henry VIII began construction of the palace in 1538; Biddle excavated the site in 1959.

An examination of 340 skeletons exhumed from three of England’s Royal Navy graveyards shows that many of the sailors who died between the mid-eighteenth and early nineteenth-century were teenagers.

Here’s more information on the Abyssinian Meeting House, the only African American National Underground Railroad Historic Site in Maine. Archaeologist Martha E. Pinello has uncovered nineteenth-century wooden pipes that channel water from a spring underneath the church to a cistern. “These are as if they were new, they’re very solid,” she said.

Excavation will continue at Fort Hawkins in Macon, Georgia. “It was on the frontier. It was a major headquarters for the commanding generals of the U.S. Army. There were wars, the first Seminole War and the War of 1812,” said archaeologist Dan Elliott.

CNN reports on the condition of Libya’s antiquities.

A Mississippian village in Illinois, known as the East St. Louis site, will soon be fully excavated ahead of the construction of the New Mississippi River Bridge Project. “How and when this urban commercial and ritual center all came together and what caused it to fall apart is what we want to answer,” said archaeologist Brad Koldehoff of the Illinois Department of Transportation.

Egypt’s Djoser Step Pyramid is undergoing restoration work.

The ancestors of modern humans may have mixed with other hominin species some 35,000 years ago in Africa, according to a new study by evolutionary biologist Michael Hammer of the University of Arizona in Tucson. He and his colleagues used computer models to simulate how genes from different populations might have affected the modern humans.

Did modern humans and Neanderthals interbreed in Europe? A new study of mitochondrial DNA challenges the results of studies using nuclear DNA.

Archaeologists in Libya have reported to their colleagues that their nation’s antiquities are safe, for the most part. “The antiquities in the major sites are unscathed. But a few sites in the interior sustained minor damage and are in need of assessments,” said Hafed Walda of King’s College London.

A palace discovered at the Plan de Ayutla site in Chiapas, Mexico, pushes back the Maya occupation of the Lacandona Jungle by some 200 years. The palace had been dismantled for newer construction.

A conservator at York Archaeological Trust will examine parts that have been recovered from the RMS Lusitania, which sank off the Irish coast in 1915. The parts include four portholes, part of the steering mechanism, and its telegraph.

Parks Canada archaeologists and Environment Minister Peter Kent presented an array of artifacts from the HMS Investigator in a press conference. The Investigator was abandoned in the ice while searching for the lost ships of the Franklin Expedition in 1853.

A skull long thought to have belonged to Australian bushman Ned Kelly may actually have belonged to a man suspected of being Jack the Ripper.

Five chariots and 12 horses have reportedly found in a well-preserved tomb in Luoyang, China. The tomb dates to the Western Zhou Dynasty (1046-221 B.C.).