In Myanmar, construction of a railroad has damaged the ancient stone pagodas, stupas, walls, libraries, moats, and city walls at Mrauk U, which was once a trade hub and religious center, and is now an open-air museum and tourist destination.

Egypt’s Al-Ahly Bank has handed over more than 200 artifacts that had gone unclaimed in its vaults since the early twentieth century to the Supreme Council of Antiquities.  

Earlier this year, U.S. Customs officers discovered a 500-year-old artifact wrapped in a t-shirt while examining a passenger’s luggage at Oakland International Airport in California. The figurine was returned to Mexico earlier this week.  

Recent auction prices for Chinese antiquities have been making world-wide headlines. “These relics were smuggled, stolen, or looted in wars. If we offer huge sums of money to buy them back, it is legalizing these illegal activites,” said Li Jianmin of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.  

A 61-year-old Colorado man has pleaded guilty to a felony charge of unauthorized excavation on federal land in southern Utah.  

When the Pirate and Treasure Museum moved to St. Augustine, Florida, owner Pat Croce had to install a handicapped-accessible ramp to his storefront across from the Castillo. The workers unearthed a bottle, a compass, some glassware, a tooth, and parts of an eighteenth-century British sword. “It tells us how the property developed over time. Finding an artifact that is representative of what the military would have used, the learning experience for me is exciting as it is for the visitors,” said city archaeologist Carl Halbirt.  This article has a better description of the artifacts.  

Chinese archaeologist Yuan Honggeng of Lanzhou University wants to search for a legendary lost Roman legion on the edge of the Gobi Desert because genetic testing of villagers living in this remote part of China suggests that some of them are descended from Europeans. But as Yang Gongle of Beijing Normal University points out, “The county is on the Silk Road, so there were many chances for transnational marriages. The ‘foreign’ origin of the Yongchang villagers, as proven by DNA tests, does not necessarily mean they are of ancient Roman origin.”

Happy Thanksgiving! The news will return on Monday, November 29.

A storeroom in the Sutton Hoo Visitors Center has yielded a couple of cardboard boxes packed with more than 400 amateur photographs taken during the excavation of the Sutton Hoo ship burial in 1939. “We assume that whoever received the boxes didn’t know what was in them and they were just put away in a store cupboard and forgotten,” said learning officer Claire Worland.

Acoustic scientists have experimented with some well-preserved shell instruments unearthed at Chavín de Huántar, a pre-Inca ceremonial center in Peru, and even played them in the stone chamber in which they were found.  

A multi-million-dollar sports complex is scheduled to be built near American Indian sites in Oxford, Alabama, including a man-made mound. Human remains were discovered last February, stopping the project temporarily.  

Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal has been surveyed by Environmental Protection Agency archaeologist John Vetter. Remote sensing technology picked up traces of nineteenth-century boats, anchors, and anchor chains.  

Two Chinese government agencies will work together to protect China’s underwater cultural heritage.