The trial of five men charged with plundering more than 1,000 silver Viking coins and other artifacts is underway in Sweden. “We have seen many investigations over the past few years that have had to be dropped due to lack of evidence,” said police officer Mikael Aslund. 

Two Viking-era houses have been unearthed in Dublin’s Meeting House Square. They once sat on an island in the middle of the River Poddle. 

A new visitor center has opened in Egypt at Madinet Madi, the site of a Middle Kingdom temple dedicated to the cobra-headed goddess Renenutet and the crocodile-headed god Sobek of Scedet. 

Turkey is developing its Christian archaeological sites in an effort to draw tourists. “We have recognized this as a special field of tourism and as a special cultural wealth,” said Culture Minister Ertugrul Gunay. 

Medieval clay ovens and tanneries were unearthed during housing development in southwestern England.

It had been thought that rice was domesticated in both India and China, but a new genetic study by Michael Purugganan of New York University suggests that all of the world’s domesticated rice originated in China some 9,000 years ago. “As rice was brought in from China to India by traders and migrant farmers, it likely hybridized extensively with local wild rice, so domesticated rice that we may have once thought originated in India actually has its beginnings in China,” he explained. 

Egypt’s foreign ministry is expected to request that Germany return the bust of Nefertiti. 

This article asks the question, “Once you have a mummified chicken, then what do you do with it?” 

Will Bowden of the University of Nottingham, other scholars, and members of the Southwell Town Council are fighting to keep a housing development away from the seventh- and eighth-century Roman remains that were first excavated in Nottinghamshire, England, in the 1950s. The site could hold the remains of one of the largest Roman villas in Britain. 

NPR has more information on the commercial salvage of a ninth-century shipwreck in Indonesian waters, and the controversial museum show concocted from its artifacts. 

A new study published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B shows that chimpanzees are self aware and can anticipate the impact of their actions on the environment around them. It had been thought that this ability belonged to humans alone.