In Bulgaria, archaeologists have uncovered a temple dedicated to Demeter and her daughter Persephone near the Black Sea town of Sozopol. A church and fortress wall had been built near the site during the Byzantine period.

Road workers in southwestern Turkey unearthed a 2,000-year-old tomb made up of two rooms. “We found many ceramic, porcelain plates and water jugs,” said Kutahya Museum director Metin Turktuzun.

The Society for Commercial Archaeology has added the Boots Motel in Carthage, Missouri, to its list of most endangered roadside places. “The Boots Motel is an iconic motel on Route 66. Many people have photographed it, visited it, a number of people have written about it so it’s assumed this higher status in the consciousness of roadies on Route 66,” said Ron Hart of the Route 66 Chamber of Commerce. The motel is currently being used as low-rent housing.

A developer is interested in building a large grocery store complex in Oxford, Alabama, at the site where a nineteenth-century home once stood, and American Indian artifacts have been found. “That whole area was once a village – people have picked up arrowheads there, but I don’t know of anything more substantial,” commented Stayce Hathorn of the Alabama Historical Commission.

Early Hawaiian farmers developed earthen windbreaks to protect their crops that were later adopted by the ruling class, according to a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “In this part of Hawaii, the trade winds blow all the time, so the berms are there to protect the crops from the winds,” said Julie Field of Ohio State University.

Hawaii’s first Polynesian settlers brought pigs and rats that wiped out a species of land crab.

Scottish archaeologists will survey a circular earthen mound near Stirling Castle. Local legends link the mound, which is often called the King’s Knot, to King Arthur’s round table. “This is a fabulous opportunity to discover more about a site that has fascinated people down the centuries, and it’s all the more exciting because we really don’t know what – if anything – it will reveal,” said Richard Jones of Glasgow University.

An analysis of the minerals in reindeer teeth collected at France’s Jonzac rock shelter suggests that Neanderthals followed their migration patterns. “This sophisticated hunting behavior is something we see much later in the Upper Palaeolithic amongst modern human groups, and it’s really fascinating to see that Neanderthals were employing similar strategies,” said Kate Britton of the University of Aberdeen.

A giant metal ring from the USS Maine has been stolen from a public park in California. The sinking of the USS Maine in Havana Harbor in 1898 helped to draw the United States into the Spanish-American War.

Archaeologists from the University of Oregon Museum of Natural and Cultural History used metal detectors and radar to find the nineteenth-century barracks at the Fort Klamath military post.

Dan Sayers of American University is looking for traces of maroon communities, made up of African Americans who escaped slavery, in the Great Dismal Swamp National Wildlife Refuge, located in southeast Virginia and northeast North Carolina. “Many of these began as communities of Indigenous Americans around the 1600s. When maroons started taking refuge in the swamp around the 1700s, they began joining existing communities and also likely formed their own,” he explained.

Photographs of shell beads thought to have been crafted by Chumash children are posted at Discovery News. Many of the unusual beads have more than one hole. “Very likely, Chumash apprentices were learning to make money from their parents, and these were their practice pieces,” said Jeanne Arnold of the University of California, Los Angeles.

The French Archaeology School of Athens will begin a restoration project at Delos, the birthplace of Apollo and Artemis in Greek mythology.