In northern Peru, archaeologists have uncovered what they say is a ceremonial hall decorated with murals where the Moche carried out the ritual killings of prisoners of war.

A long-term occupation site on the eastern shores of Lake Huron has yielded everything from stone tools to copper trade items from the nineteenth century. Dog burials have been found, so there may also be human burials.  

The upper-right jawbone of a dog unearthed in Swiss cave in 1873 has been radiocarbon dated to between 14,100 and 14,600 years ago. “The Kesslerloch find clearly supports the idea that the dog was an established domestic animal at that time in central Europe,” said Hans-Peter Uerpmann of the University of Tubingen. Other scientists disagree—some think that dogs were domesticated much earlier, and others that the Kesslerloch fossil represents an “incipient dog.”  

A new organic molecule may be the culprit behind the blue sheen covering stone tools and other artifacts housed in an old armory in Verona, Italy, according to Gilberto Artioli of the University of Padua.  

Tim Darvill of Bournemouth University thinks that the circular structure discovered near Stonehenge is more likely to be a barrow, or tomb, rather than the remains of a wooden henge.  

Excavations are underway at the Pillar of Eliseg, in northeast Wales. The pillar was erected during the early medieval period, on a mound that could be much older.  

Local volunteers are assisting with the excavation of the summer kitchen at the eighteenth-century Muhlenberg House in Trappe, Pennsylvania.

The international team mapping Stonehenge announced that another ceremonial monument has been found just a few hundred yards away from the stone circle. “It will completely change the way we think about the landscape around Stonehenge,” said Vince Gaffney of the University of Birmingham.  BBC News offers a video report on the discovery, complete with a virtual re-creation of the wooden henge.

How did Neolithic people living in northwestern France move their megaliths, known as menhirs? Scientists are giving tourists a chance to find out.  

Remote sensing equipment is being used to search the depths of Egypt’s Lake Qarun for slabs of volcanic rock spotted in a satellite survey. “I believe that these huge slabs are made of basalt which were eventually moved upstream to the Giza plateau for the construction of the Great Pyramid,” said Khaled Saeed of the Supreme Council of Antiquities.  

“The Bulgarian Machu Picchu” was a “fortress-sanctuary” on the outskirts of the Sredna Gora mountain range. The rulers of united Thracian tribes lived there from the fifth to the third centuries B.C., according to Ivan Hristov of the Bulgarian National History Museum, who is excavating the site.  

Learn more about the artifacts discovered in an intact Maya tomb beneath a pyramid at El Zotz in Guatemala.  Archaeologist Stephen Houston of Brown University talks about the excavation in this second article.  

Archaeologists from Parks Canada are setting out once again to search for the lost ships of the Franklin Expedition.