Pieces of a partially gilded sword hilt have been recovered from the ship thought to have been sailed by Blackbeard the pirate. His Queen Anne’s Revenge ran aground on a sandbar in 1718 near the town of Beaufort, North Carolina, where the wreck was discovered.

A study of more than 9,000 pieces of wood dating back 2,500 years offers information about climate and its interaction with the history of Western Europe. Extreme shifts in weather patterns coincided with the decline and fall of the Roman Empire and the Bubonic plague in the Middle Ages. “It’s not a reach to say these extreme and prolonged climate activities could have affected the trajectory of social evolution,” said David Stahle, a geoscientist at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville.  

Experts from Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History are restoring Temple 20 at the Maya site of Palenque. The temple contains a funerary chamber decorated with wall paintings and dates to the Early Classic period (430 to 600 A.D.). Archaeologists have not been able to enter the unstable tomb.  

Hundreds of gold artifacts were recovered from 16 different excavations in Turkey’s Aegean region in 2010. “Most of the pieces delivered to our museum are golden earrings, necklaces, rings and ornaments. There are also earthenware jugs, amphoras, statuettes and tools reflecting the social and economic life of ancient times,” said Mehmet Tuna, director of the Izmir Archaeology Museum.  

The wine cups used in Athenian symposia over the centuries reflect what was happening in Greek society, according to classics professor Kathleen Lynch of the University of Cincinnati. “In the same way that the coffee mug with ‘World’s Greatest Golfer’ in your kitchen cabinet speaks to your values and your culture, so, too, do the commonly used objects of the past tell us about the past,” she explained.  

More than 150 tourists entered Iraq between 2009 and 2010 to visit archaeological sites. This article reviews the work undertaken at Babylon by the World Monuments Fund and the potential economic benefits of tourism to the Iraqi people.  

Spanish explorers wrote of finding gleaming cities in Amazonia in the early 1500s, but very little has been found. Several archaeologists discuss the evidence for advanced Indian civilizations in Amazonia on NPR.  

Dozens of skeletons have been uncovered at the site of what could be the first cemetery in the city of Los Angeles. The cemetery officially closed in 1844, when the bodies were supposed to have been moved and reinterred elsewhere.   

A heated water tank has been unearthed in a bath house at the site of Apamea in Syria.

In observance of Dr. King Day, the news will return on Tuesday, January 18.

My apologies folks–no news today due to family illness. The news will return tomorrow, Friday, January 14.