News reports from Myanmar say that railroad construction continues to damage the ancient city of Mrauk U.

German authorities seized 15 artifacts near the Dutch border that had been plundered from Iraq. Two of the objects were fakes.  

A team from the University of South Carolina has located what remains of the CSS Peedee, a gunboat scuttled by the Confederates in 1865, in the Pee Dee River. Two of its three cannon were found last year. The rest was broken up during a dredging operation in 1906.  

The Tasmanian government has approved the plan to build a bridge over the Jordan River, at a site where archaeologist Rob Paton says he has found 40,000-year-old Tasmanian Aboriginal artifacts. “It’s a nice neat record of a very long span of Tasmania’s history,” he explained.  

These two Egyptologists, Jean Francois Champollion and Karl Richard Lepsius, were born on December 23. The Daily Telegraph offers brief descriptions of their lives and discoveries.

Thousands flocked to Stonehenge for the Winter Solstice, enjoying a Pagan marriage ceremony and a snowball fight.  

A detailed study of stick use among the Kanyawara chimpanzees in Kibale National Park, Uganda, has revealed that young female chimps sometimes treat sticks as dolls, in a way that evokes maternal play. The researchers think this form of play is a learned tradition among the Kanyawara community. “This would suggest that chimpanzee behavioral traditions are even more like those in humans than previously thought,” said Richard Wrangham of Harvard University.

Scientists have been examining the well-preserved Neanderthal bones recovered in 1994 from the Spanish cave known as El Sidrón. They think that the remains represent an extended family of 12 members who were killed and butchered.

A mass grave of people killed in 1936, during the Spanish Civil War, is being exhumed by archaeologists. “We never used to speak about the war here. But it’s starting now that they’ve discovered the bodies,” said a woman in her 80s who lives in the village of Cazalla.  

At Newgrange, heavy snowfall prevented light from reaching the tomb chamber at sunrise this morning, the shortest day of the year.  

An Anglo-Saxon settlement has been unearthed in Northumberland, England, for the first time.  

Archaeologist Rob Paton and geomorphologist Tim Stone say that there is a 41,000-year-old site containing more than two million stone stools at the site of a planned bypass bridge in Tasmania. Other scholars say that the site is less than 30,000 years old, and that the construction project could continue.  

An airplane pilot spotted a shipwreck in the sands of Cape Cod last month. “It strikes me that it’s a vessel that might have run aground and sanded over,” said Victor Mastone of the Massachusetts Board of Underwater Archeological Resources. The state plans to investigate the wreck next month.