An intact Roman lantern made of bronze has been found in England by a man with a metal detector. “What is particularly amazing about the lantern is that the chains it was suspended from still look and move like any modern chain and had not corroded into a metal lump,” said Emma Hogarth of the Colchester and Ipswich Museums. The man has donated the lamp to the museum.

A massive freeze dryer at Texas A&M University will be used to preserve the wreck of the French explorer ship La Belle, which sank in Matagorda Bay in 1686. “It is a much gentler process than straight dehydration, and it is slightly revolutionary in that no one has tried it before,” said Peter Fix of the Center for Maritime Archaeology and Conservation.  

BBC News has posted video from the new expedition to map the wreck of the Titanic.  

Meanwhile, the Holland 5, a submarine which sank off the coast of England in 1912, has been damaged by looters. The sub was one of the first to have been used by the British Navy.  

Rock art in Arizona’s Kaibab National Forest has been vandalized.  

A Moabite temple dating to the eighth century B.C. has been discovered at Khirbat ‘Ataroz, according Ziad al-Saad, head of the Jordanian Antiquities Department.  

Archaeologist Önder Bilgi has found 4,000-year-old obsidian blades and skulls with cut marks that match them. “We know that patients lived at least two to three years after the surgery, because the skull has tried to close the wound,” he said.  

Protesters are still trying to prevent the construction of the Ilisu Dam in southeastern Turkey, which would flood the ancient city of Hasankeyf. The Turkish government has said that the ancient city will be moved to an archaeological park, but activist Güven Eken says that it is impossible to separate Hasankeyf from the Tigris River and its people.  

Here’s more information on the supposed Paleolithic funeral feast uncovered in a cave in northern Israel.  

And there’s a little more information on the 1,600-year-old burial of a teenage boy discovered in northern Peru. “We are excavating in the same platform on the same royal mausoleum of the Lord of Sipan where they [the Mochicas] buried all the high ranking people from lords to priests and of course people in the noble Mochica families,” explained archaeologist Walter Alva.

Could these bits of flint be 200,000-year-old knives? The tiny tools, made from parts of larger knives, were unearthed around a fire pit in a cave near Tel Aviv. Charred animal bones were also found. Ran Barkai of Tel Aviv University adds that materials that have long been thought to be waste at archaeological sites might actually be tools.

Communal feasts may predate agriculture, according to a study published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Archaeologists from Hebrew University say that the 12,000-year-old tortoise shells and cattle bones that had been butchered, roasted, and placed in and near the grave of a shaman in northern Israel were part of a symbolic meal.  

The team mapping the wreckage of the Titanic has been forced to return to Newfoundland until Hurricane Danielle has passed.  

A drought in England has revealed outlines of many previously unknown archaeological sites. “It’s hard to remember a better year,” said Dave MacLeod of English Heritage.  

The copy of the Magna Carta housed at the National Archives Building in Washington, D.C., is getting a new display case that will be filled with argon. The inert gas will displace any oxygen and moisture to help preserve the medieval parchment. The old case had been filled with helium.  

A new mitochondrial DNA study of European cave bears suggests that they may have been driven to extinction by humans. The bears’ genetic diversity began to decline 50,000 years ago, which is much earlier than previously thought and at the same time humans expanded into their territories. “As humans became more effective at using caves, the number of places where cave bears could hibernate, which was essential to reproduction and everything else they did, started to decrease,” said anthropologist Erik Trinkaus of Washington University in St. Louis.  

Two 5,000-year-old villages have been found in China’s Inner Mongolia region. Archaeologists have excavated homes, tombs, earthenware, and animal bones. Artifacts made of jade were also found at one of the sites.  

Bulgarian customs officers retrieved four ancient artifacts hidden in the luggage of someone traveling from Turkey to Germany.  

Parks Canada archaeologists failed to discover the lost ships of the Franklin Expedition this summer.