The 1,600-year-old tomb of a Maya king was discovered in Guatemala, beneath a pyramid at the site of El Zotz. The well-sealed tomb also contained the remains of six children, wood, textiles, and painted stucco in excellent condition. “When we opened the tomb, I poked my head in and there was still, to my astonishment, a smell of putrification and a chill that went to my bones,” said Stephen Houston of Brown University.

The 1,200-year-old tomb of a high-ranking official has been unearthed in Peru, at the Huaca Las Ventanas archaeological site. He had been buried sitting up with a winged eye mask, a ceremonial knife, and a metal cup.  

A second Neolithic “Venus” figurine has been found in Scotland, close to the spot where the first “Orkney Venus” was discovered last year. “It’s difficult to speculate on the precise function or meaning of these figurines. They could even be children’s toys,” said Peter Yeoman of Historic Scotland.  

When did the human foot develop? Anthropologist Brian Richmond of George Washington University is filming people walking on sand, and comparing the film and footprints with a 1.5 million-year-old track way in Kenya. “Sure enough, they were walking with a long stride, they had an arch in the foot the way we have,” he explained.  “Meet the family” at this gateway to more articles from NPR’s series, “The Human Edge.”  

The sea salt industry boomed along England’s Solent coast until the nineteenth century. Volunteers will help archaeologist Frank Green excavate the area around the last two sea salt boiling houses in the town of Lymington. “It wouldn’t be over-emphasizing it to say that you could judge how sophisticated a society was by the availability of salt,” he said.  

Here’s another article on the 300 looted antiquities recovered by Italian police and put on display in Rome’s Colosseum.  

Looters’ holes have been found at Dalkhuni Fort, a Sassanid structure in southwestern Iran.  

A burial ceremony was held this morning in Fromelles, France, for the Australian and British soldiers who were killed there during World War I. They had been buried at the battlefield in mass graves by German soldiers.  

Human remains taken from marked graves at a church mission site on Labrador’s north coast by anthropologist William Duncan Strong in the late 1920s will be returned by Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History. “We are deeply saddened by this incident,” said museum president John McCarter.  

Jaromir Malek keeps the archive of Howard Carter’s Tutankhamun project at the Griffith Institute at Oxford University. He is making all of the documents available online. “We can’t make Egyptologists work on the material if they are not inclined to do so. But we could make sure that all of the excavation records are available to anyone who is interested,” he said.

Hundreds of looted Italian artifacts returned from Switzerland have been put on display in Rome’s Colosseum.

Modern-day New Yorkers are asking questions about the eighteenth-century ship unearthed at Ground Zero. Was the ship involved in the slave trade, or could it have been a whaling ship?  More photographs of the excavation are available at Monsters and Critics.  

The stories of two Australian soldiers who died in 1916 at the Battle of Fromelles are told by Adelaide Now. Robert Courtney Green and Gregory Francis Stalgis will be laid to rest next Monday, along with other soldiers whose skeletal remains were recovered from mass graves near the French battlefield. “Even if some of them have not been named, 250 soldiers who fought and died in that battle and who have been lost for all these years will now finally be remembered,” said Louise Loe of Oxford Archaeology.  John Charles Bowden is remembered in The Age.   

A piece of sandstone carved with two pairs of concentric circles in the later Neolithic era was found in the Cambridgeshire village of Over. It is the first time the motif has been found in eastern England. “The big question in the case of the Over stone is whether we should actually be calling it meaningful art, or if it amounted to no more than Neolithic doodling. Either way it’s a great find,” said Chris Evans of the University of Cambridge.  

In Hampshire, England, a bronze representation of Harpocrates, the god of secrecy and silence, was found on a charcoal-burning brazier at the Roman city of Silchester. “The brazier, the sort of thing you would expect to find in Pompeii, is the first evidence of such a luxurious item from Roman Britain,” said Mike Fulford of the University of Reading.  

Excavation of London’s first successful theater, where William Shakespeare’s plays were performed, has revealed a curved wall made of bricks and a patch of hard-pressed gravel, where people with cheap tickets stood to watch the show. The traces of “The Theater” will be displayed under glass as part of a new theater to be built on the site.  

Jim West of the Quartz Hill School of Theology and other scholars offer criticism of archaeologist Eilat Mazar’s claim that an inscribed shard she uncovered is the oldest known written document ever found in Jerusalem. “My primary concern is that archaeology is being turned to political use and as nothing but a means to raise funds for ideologically driven projects. This certainly seems to be the case in the City of David dig,” West said.  

Whiskey distilled at Mount Vernon, according to George Washington’s recipe, is now on sale. “This is frankly a lot like white lightning,” said Dennis Pogue, vice president for preservation at Mount Vernon.