The top half of a 3,000-year-old red-granite statue of Amenhotep III has been unearthed near the northern entrance to his temple in Luxor, Egypt.

More than 130 reports of vandalism against Arizona’s archaeological sites have been filed in the past year, including petroglyph thefts, paint damage, graffiti, and garbage dumping. “I don’t see an easy solution. You want Americans to have access to the country’s cultural resources, but you want to keep sensitive sites off the radar, so to speak,” said archaeology buff Robert Schroeder.  

Traces of the Kelvin culture, which dates to 900 A.D., have been excavated in Brunswick, Georgia.  

An intact home site dating to 3500 B.C. has been uncovered in Norway and dubbed a “mini-Pompeii” because it had been buried in a sand storm. Archaeologists have found an intact pot and large pottery shards, arrowheads, and wooden artifacts. “This is the first time we’ve made a find like this in Norway,” said Hakon Glorstad of the University of Oslo.  

Maria Anna Pabst of Austria’s Medical University of Graz thinks that the tattoos on a female mummy from Chiribaya Alta in southern Peru may mark acupuncture points.  

Workers continue to dump sand on Allianoi, an ancient spa town in western Turkey. The site will be flooded by dam waters before the end of the year. “There is no other warm bath, health center in the world as well preserved as this… Unfortunately, all of this will be abandoned forever,” said excavator Ahmet Yaras.  

Vietnam’s ancient monuments are crumbling, including the citadel at the old capital of Hue and 82 giant steles in Hanoi.  

Here’s more information on the so-called eighteenth-century mystery ship discovered at the World Trade Center site in New York City.  

A man living in Scotland found a 5,000-year-old tomb in his garden. “There is a big slab of stone about eight foot by eight foot and I had always wondered what was underneath it. I had a bit of time at the end of the summer and thought I would take a look,” he explained.

A jury has found Raphael Golb guilty of identity theft, criminal impersonation, forgery, harassment, and unauthorized use of a computer in a case involving the Dead Sea Scrolls. Golb tried to undermine Dead Sea Scroll scholars he perceived to be rivals of his father, Norman Golb, who is a professor of Jewish history at the University of Chicago.

People were living in a high altitude, cold environment in Papua New Guinea 50,000 years ago, according to an international team of archaeologists. They found charred nut shells from the pandanus tree and stone tools 2,000 meters above sea level. “It demonstrates that Australasia’s most ancient colonists were really able to get right out there into the most difficult, hard to reach places and actually live successfully,” said Andrew Fairbairn of the University of Queensland.  There’s more to the story at Australian Geographic.  

A new paper on the fossils known as Homo floresiensis states that they represent individual Homo sapiens affected by hypothyroid cretinism, and not a new species. Emeritus professor Charles Oxnard of the University of Western Australia and his colleagues first proposed this explanation in 2008. The new paper mathematically compared the bones of cretins to chimpanzees, unaffected humans, and H. floresiensis. “Cretinism is caused by various environmental factors including iodine deficiency – a deficiency which would have been present on Flores at the period to which the dwarfed Flores fossils are dated,” he added.  

The new luxury hotels surrounding Cambodia’s ancient temples of Angkor are using up the groundwater and threatening to destabilize the temples’ sandy foundations.  

A prehistoric campsite at Minnesota’s Spring Lake Park Reserve yielded a fire pit and burned animal bones to add to artifacts recovered in the 1950s.