Canada has returned more than 20,000 artifacts to the government of Bulgaria, including some 18,000 coins. The looted objects had been shipped to an importer in Montreal. No one has been charged with a crime in the case.

Jeffrey Crow of the Office of Archives and History of the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources made a special announcement about a shipwreck off the state’s coastline: “We have now changed our position, and we are quite categorically saying that it’s the Queen Anne’s Revenge.”

This summer, William Kelso and his team will look for the west end of the 1608 church at Jamestown, Virginia, in addition to a structure that may have been the fort’s guardhouse.

Archaeologists have located the home of eighteenth-century fur trader Louis Blanchette in St. Charles, Missouri. “We’ve finally discovered the settlement of the man who first settled St. Charles and founded St. Charles before the Revolutionary War,” said Steve Dasovich of Lindenwood University.

Yesterday marked 30 years since the release of Raiders of the Lost Ark. This article from Live Science reviews some of the ways technology, minus the bull whip, has changed the study of archaeology.

There’s more information on Paul Tacon’s campaign to create a data base of Australia’s rock art in The Independent, from South Africa. “Some sites have been lost because people haven’t realized their importance,” he explained. Tacon is a professor anthropology and archaeology at Griffith University in Queensland, Australia.

BBC News offers an update on the plight of Mes Aynak, a 1,400-year-old Buddhist monastery in Afghanistan that is threatened by copper mining. “The main thing for us is to document as much as we can before its destruction,” said French archaeologist Phillippe Marquis. The open-cast mining operation will begin in a year.

Forensic archaeologist Richard Wright was made a Member of the Order of Australia by Queen Elizabeth II for his work in France, Ukraine, and Bosnia.

In Cagayan de Oro City, on the island of Mindanao in the Philippines, some landscape work in a park turned up sixteenth-century pottery, Chinese porcelain, shells, bricks, and European ceramics. The area may have once been part of a Spanish fort.

A cremation urn dating to the Bronze Age was unearthed by University of York students at a construction site on their campus. “This is a very exciting and unexpected find as most of the features in the area investigated this year are from the Roman period, including evidence for timber buildings, hearths, furnaces, and trackways,” said their professor, Cath Neal.

Bison bones, tools, charcoal, and fire pits uncovered in a remote area of Texas near the Mexico border could shed light on the lives of prehistoric people.

Temple University graduate students and volunteers have returned to Timbuctoo, an antebellum settlement inhabited by freed slaves located in Westampton Township, New Jersey. “We just want people to know about this site and show people how a place like Timbuctoo went from slavery to Jim Crow era to present day,” said team leader Christopher Barton.

And in Illinois, students are excavating New Philadelphia, the first community planned by an African American, Free Frank McWorter.

The remains of four people who were executed for murder during the Klondike Gold Rush were discovered last year and reburied this month. Three of the four sets of remains have been identified.

A Neolithic site on the shore of Egypt’s Lake Qarun could be spared from becoming a tourist resort. The government of toppled President Hosni Mubarak had awarded the land to a developer, but the deal is now off. “We have the evidence of the earliest agriculture activity in Egypt. So it’s before the Pharaohs, it’s before the early dynastic period when Egypt becomes a state,” said Willeke Wendrich of the University of California in Los Angeles.

The spots on the painted walls of Tutankhamun’s tomb were made by long-dead microbes, according to Ralph Mitchell of the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. “We’re guessing that the painted wall was not dry when the tomb was sealed,” he said.

Colin Renfrew of Cambridge University first started excavating archaeological sites on the Aegean island of Keros in 1963. “I was amazed to find fragments of marble bowls and marble figurines,” he recalls. He thinks that Cycladic villagers ritualistically deposited the objects on Keros at regular intervals. “No doubt it was a ceremony of renewal – a new generation of icons being used and a new generation of people growing up,” he explained.  Renfrew has more to say about the figurines at Cambridge News.

Five suspects have been arrested for damaging a cave and the landscape around it in Oregon’s Deschutes National Forest.

The state of New Jersey plans to backfill the excavation of an eighteenth-century industrial site in Trenton in an effort to cut costs. “Filling in this site would not only mean throwing away a significant amount of money, but it would literally equate to burying history,” argued Assemblywoman Bonnie Watson Coleman.

On private land in northern France, British, French, and German researchers will begin a new project by using ground-penetrating radar to map tunnels dug by miners during World War I. “Finding out about these men has become an obsession, and although we know a great deal about the lives of soldiers in WWI, these men have left very few clues as to their experience or feelings,” said historian Simon Jones.