The remains of 116 people have been uncovered in a ninth-century cemetery in southeastern Mexico. “The 66 burials in urns correspond to individuals belonging to the Mayan elite and the other 50 – placed in different positions around them – to their companions in the afterlife,” said Ricardo Armijo of the National Anthropology and History Institute.

A mass grave containing nearly 300 people has been found beneath a church in a remote mountain village in northern Italy. About one-third of the bodies, which date from the mid-sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, were naturally mummified.

A DNA study of coconuts shows that there are two distinct groups, one that was first cultivated in the Pacific basin and the other in the Indian Ocean basin. “The big surprise was that there was so much genetic differentiation clearly correlated with geography, even though humans have been moving coconut around for so long,” said plant evolutionary biologist Kenneth Olsen of Washington University in St. Louis.

Two cannons were recovered from a shipwreck off the coast of northeastern Florida, near the St. Augustine lighthouse. The weapons were made sometime after 1776 in Scotland.

Scholars from the Israel Antiquities Authority say that a 2,000-year-old ossuary recovered from looters three years ago is genuine. The box is inscribed with the names “Miriam daughter of Yeshua son of Caiaphas, priest of Maaziah from Beth Imri.”

A dig at the Old College site at Scotland’s University of Edinburgh has unearthed laboratory equipment that was probably used by eighteenth-century chemist Joseph Black.

Human bone fragments were revealed in southeast Missouri when a Mississippi River levee was blown up in order to relieve flooding.

The Canadian Museum of Civilization will return its collection of Inuit remains and burial objects to the Inuit people living in Nunavut, Canada’s northernmost territory.

A World War II RAF Spitfire was removed from an Irish peat bog, where it crash landed 70 years ago. Six machine guns and about 1,000 rounds of ammunition were also recovered. “It’s just incredible because it’s just so wet here that the ground just sucked it up and the plane was able to burrow into it and it’s been preserved,” said historian Dan Snow.

Adrian Myers of Stanford University is excavating a World War II prisoner of war camp in Canada’s Riding Mountain National Park. The inmates of Whitewater Camp were German soldiers captured in Egypt after the Second Battle of El-Alamein who had rejected Nazism and were thought to be low risk. “I found four guys living who were interned at Whitewater and all four of them said it was awesome,” said Myers.

Australia’s University of Sydney has been left $6.9 million, which will be used to endow a chair of Australian archaeology and the Tom Austen Brown Fund for Prehistory.

The U.S. Navy and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are using sonar technology to create 3-D maps of the USS Cumberland and the CSS Florida. Both Civil War vessels sit on the bottom of the James River in Hampton Roads, Virginia.

The Confederate submarine H.L. Hunley is now sitting upright for the first time since it sank in 1864. “It is too soon to tell how the Hunley was forced to the bottom of the ocean along with her crew, but we are confident that we will eventually identify a cause now that the entire submarine is exposed,” said archaeologist Maria Jacobsen.

The Avenue of Sphinxes in Luxor will open to tourists in October.