UNESCO has announced that Afghanistan’s Bamiyan Buddhas, blown up by the Taliban ten years ago, will not be reconstructed. “We have to think of the public, and they don’t need to see a fake, they need to see the reality. And these statues have been destroyed. As much as we mourn that they have been destroyed it’s an historical fact,” said Francesco Bandarin, UNESCO’s assistant director-general for culture. 

Some archaeologists disagree with a plan to open the exhibit “Shipwrecked: Tang Treasures and Monsoon Winds,” at the Smithsonian’s Arthur M. Sackler Gallery next year. The ship was salvaged in Indonesian waters, and then its artifacts were sold to a company in Singapore for $32 million. “I think this exhibition would send a very bad message to the public, that the Smithsonian doesn’t stand for the preservation of archaeological resources and that mining archaeological sites is OK,” said Bruce Smith, curator of North American history at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. 

New evidence suggests the ancient Britons were building well-engineered roads before the arrival of the Romans in the first century B.C. “The traditional view has often been that Iron Age Britons were unsophisticated people who needed to be civilized by the Romans,” said contract archaeologist Tim Malim. 

A construction project in Hampton, Virginia, has turned up thousands of eighteenth-century artifacts that will be donated to several museums. 

Here are some photographs of the Ming Dynasty mummy discovered by a road crew in eastern China. Its wooden coffin had been flooded and preserved in anaerobic conditions. 

A study conducted by scientists at Scotland’s Edinburgh University concludes that climate change is destroying archaeological treasures around the world. “Long-term efforts are needed to locate archaeological remains that are at risk, and research how best to care for them,” said researcher Dave Reay.

Stone tools dating to 50,000 to 35,000 years ago have been discovered in Greece’s Pindos Mountains. The tools may have been used by some of the last Neanderthals in Europe. It had been thought that hunter gatherers kept to lower altitudes. 

Archaeologists will look for the remains of a circus elephant rumored to have died in 1848 while on tour in the Welsh town of Tregaron. “It would be fabulous if the story was confirmed as true – it is such a great local story,” said Michael Freeman, curator of the Ceredigion Museum. 

In conjunction with Britain’s No Smoking Day, osteologist Donald Walker of the Museum of London Archaeology Service examined the skeletons of 268 individuals who had been buried between 1843 and 1854. He found that the teeth of 92 percent of the adults had been damaged by pipe smoking. 

In Oxfordshire, England, archeologists say they have found an intact Neolithic pot. 

Laser scanners are being used to look for carvings on the surfaces of Stonehenge. “This new survey will capture a lot more information on the subtleties of the monument and its surrounding landscape,” said Paul Bryan of English Heritage. 

A married couple from Durnago, Colorado, has pleaded guilty to charges brought against them after the federal artifacts sting operation in the Four Corners region. The authorities removed five truckloads of American Indian artifacts from their home. 

A team of archaeology students and professors from Simon Fraser University will assist police in the search for the remains of a Vancouver woman who disappeared in 1977. 

National Geographic Daily News has posted photographs of an underwater cave near Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, where divers found a human skull thought to be 10,000 years old. 

Egyptologists and archaeologists have joined together in an international petition campaign calling for adequate security at Egypt’s heritage sites. “The situation is certainly quite dire indeed,” said Andrew Bayuk, who started the petition.