Senior writer Andrew Lawler of Science assesses Zahi Hawass’s possible standing in Egypt’s new government.

A symbol said to represent West African spirit practice has been discovered on the brick furnace at the Wye “Orangery” on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. This eighteenth-century greenhouse is the last of its kind in North America. “These greenhouses were for agricultural and horticultural experimentation in eighteenth-century America, and African American slaves played a far more significant and technical role in their operation than they’ve been given credit for,” said Mark Leone of the University of Maryland. 

In Baltimore, archaeologists have unearthed a nineteenth-century mikveh, or Jewish ritual bath, in what had been the basement of a rowhouse. Jewish congregations met in private homes until 1828 because they were barred from incorporating and owning property.  

China’s government will permit the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology to exhibit the Silk Road mummies and artifacts after all. “We are delighted to be able to present the complete range of this spectacular material,” said Richard Hodges, Williams Director of the museum.  

A new paper has been published in The Lancet on two ancient Egyptian prosthetic toes. One of the big toes shows signs of wear, the other was found strapped to a mummy. Volunteers tried out replicas of the toes and determined that they were indeed functional.  

It just isn’t Valentine’s Day without a history of the holiday. This one is from NPR.

A 3.2 million-year-old Australopithecus afarensis foot bone has been discovered among the remains of some 35 individuals in Ethiopia. The long bone suggests that “Lucy” and her kind had well-formed arches and walked with an upright gait, and that they could have left the 3.7 million-year-old footprints at Laetoli in Tanzania.

Scientists looking for fossilized rat bones stumbled upon 10,000-year-old petroglyphs in a limestone cave in East Timor.  

Archaeologists have found what’s left of a Nantucket whaling ship 600 miles northwest of Honolulu. The Two Brothers struck a coral reef in shallow water in 1823. Several harpoons, tools, and cauldrons whalers used to render whale blubber have been recovered.  

Two scow schooners were discovered in San Francisco when a trench for a new sewage pipe was dug at a “ship graveyard.” Jim Delgado, director of maritime heritage at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, explained. “They’re largely forgotten now, but these scow schooners moved the goods that built the city and the Bay Area economy.”  

The Peruvian National University of San Antonio Abad in Cusco is building a new facility for the collection of Machu Picchu artifacts that will soon be returned by Yale University. The “UNSAAC-Yale University International Center for the Study of Machu Picchu and Inca Culture” will be run jointly with Yale.  

A team of researchers from the Smithsonian Institution and the Texas Historical Commission wants to know if they have found the grave of James Coryell, one of the first Texas Rangers. Coryell died after an attack by Caddo Indians in 1837.  

Pakal the Great, ruler of Maya city of Palenque, may have had a second son, according to epigrapher Guillermo Bernal from Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History. The son’s name was found on fragments of a wall panel from the Temple of the Sun.