Hundreds of skeletons have been unearthed at a medieval mental health hospital in London. The site will be cleared for a new tunnel project.

Human remains that could be 7,000 years old were unearthed in Iowa during sewer construction, along with “apparent signs of a Stone Age clambake,” and flooring from ancient homes. “On a national level, we are still struggling to understand the first people of the Americas. Any information like this is hugely beneficial to filling in the gaps,” said Ben Thomas of the Archaeological Institute of America. 

Sewer work in Hastings, England, led to the discovery of a smugglers’ tunnel dating to the eighteenth century.

A well-preserved human brain has been recovered from a skull found in a waterlogged pit in Yorkshire. The man had been hanged and decapitated more than 2,000 years ago. 

An examination of Spanish and Portuguese skulls spanning 300 years revealed that while the crania of both men and women got bigger over time, women’s crania grew more. Ann Ross of North Carolina State University thinks that changes in nutrition, living conditions, and genetic influences could account for the differences. 

Daniel Grant writes about the antiquities trade for the Huffington Post. 

“The Amarna Princess,” a fake ancient Egyptian statue, was sold to a museum in 2003. 

A 29-year-old North Carolina man has been sentenced to probation, restitution, and community service for damaging a petroglyph while on a fishing trip on the Colorado River. “This defendant thoughtlessly defaced a work of art that is over 1,000 years old and holds immense cultural significance,” said U.S. Attorney Dennis Burke. 

Art historian Silvano Vinceti wants to find the remains of Lisa Gherardini, who died in 1542, and try to determine if she was Leonardo da Vinci’s model for the Mona Lisa.

More than 145 artifacts and 50 replicas are missing from a storeroom at the American University in Cairo. Three AUC employees have been arrested and charged with theft. 

James Evans of the University of Puget Sound thinks that two of the dials representing the zodiac and the Egyptian calendar on the Antikythera mechanism were adapted in order to account for the sun’s irregular speed. “It’s a pretty elaborate piece of machinery. Nobody would ever have guessed that there could be something this complex in the second century B.C.,” he said. 

Here’s a photograph of the pots discovered in what has been dubbed the oldest Maya royal burial. 

Benjamin Pykles of the State University of New York at Potsdam has examined petroglyphs thought to have been carved into Utah’s Salt Mountain more than 100 years ago by Hawaiians. Their settlement, Iosepa, was a Hawaiian Mormon outpost from 1889 to 1917. 

There’s more information in The New York Times about the fragment of clay tablet from the Mycenaean period that was unearthed near the Greek village of Iklaina. “The fact that we have a tablet like this means that this government had scribes, and scribes are a product of bureaucracy. And this suggests some degree of political complexity and a growing need to keep track of commodities, property and taxes, all earlier than we once thought,” said Michael B. Cosmopoulos of the University of Missouri, St. Louis. 

Hannes Schroeder of the University of Copenhagen is looking at DNA and isotopes in the ancient bones of enslaved Africans in order to try to identify their origins. He will now test the remains of an African man recently unearthed in a Roman cemetery in Warwickshire, England. Archaeologists think he was a Roman soldier. 

Digging at Shakespeare’s last home at New Place, Stratford-upon-Avon, will continue this year. “We are now down to virgin ground which has not been excavated by previous expeditions. This is where we have the most exciting potential to shed new light on Shakespeare’s life and times,” said Paul Edmondson of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. 

And an eighteenth-century cobbled street was uncovered in northeastern England. 

You can view computer animation depicting the ornamental landscape at Poplar Forest, Thomas Jefferson’s personal retreat.