The Israel Antiquities Authority has announced that discovery of a 2,000-year-old incense altar at an ancient cemetery site in Ashkelon. Protesters claim the graves are Jewish and should not be moved to make way for a hospital emergency room, but the archaeologists say that the site is pagan.

Erosion threatens archaeological sites along Alaska’s Arctic coast. “The problem is that these things are revealed so fast. Some of these materials are so fragile that if you don’t get to them and recover them within a year or so, you can’t preserve them,” said state archaeologist Dave McMahan.  

An employee of the Guam State Historic Preservation Office is concerned that photographs of skeletal remains on the Guam Preservation Trust website are offensive. Archaeologists for the Trust responded that photographs of the grave goods without the remains would be “displayed out of context,” and could “lose their meaning and become just things to many people.”  

A memorial service was held for more than 1,000 people whose bones were exhumed from a mass grave in Ireland’s County Kilkenny in 2005. The victims died from hunger and disease while living in a workhouse during the Great Famine of the mid-nineteenth century.  

The team that has excavated China’s army of terracotta warriors from the tomb of the country’s first emperor has been awarded Spain’s prestigious Prince of Asturias prize for scientific and technical research.  

He may not have told a lie, but George Washington did have a very overdue library book. The first president checked out The Law of Nations by Emer de Vattel from the New York Society Library on October 5, 1789. Yesterday, the staff at Mount Vernon, Washington’s Virginia plantation, replaced the book with another copy of the same edition.  

Excavation at the home of Rev. John Rankin, an abolitionist who lived in Ohio, has turned up a cellar that may have been used to house runaway slaves, in addition to nails, dishes, pottery, bones, bricks, and a prehistoric pit.   

There’s more on the search for Cleopatra’s tomb at the Temple of Taposiris Magna at National Geographic Daily News.

Four intact coffins made of clay were unearthed during construction work in eastern Cyprus. The coffins are about 2,000 years old. Human skeletal remains and glass and terracotta vessels were also found.

National Geographic Daily News reports on the discovery of the “oldest known Central American pyramid tomb” at Mexico’s Chiapa de Corzo site, with plenty of detail and a photograph of the pyramid’s exterior. “We are trying to distill from the archaeology how the Zoque emerged out of an Olmec ancestral base, and it seems like it happened right around the time this tomb appeared,” said Bruce Bachand of Brigham Young University.  Additional photographs from the excavation are offered here.  

Some of the leftover bandages used to mummify Tutankhamun are on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. They had been stored at the museum in “a rather overlooked cache of large ceramic jars.” The jars were found sometime between 1907 and 1908, before Howard Carter opened Tut’s tomb.  

An Anglo-Saxon settlement dating to between the sixth and eighth centuries has been uncovered in Gloucestershire, England. “It would now appear that there were more pockets of Anglo-Saxon control in the Severn Valley than we previously thought,” said Cliff Bateman of Cotswold Archaeology.  

Archaeologists and volunteers working together at Charles Towne Landing in South Carolina unearthed a tabby floor, made of lime and crushed oyster shells, dating to the 1690s. “It would be nice to find a way to keep it clean and show it to visitors,” said assistant archaeologist Cisek Beeby.  

Civil War soldier Lt. Alonzo Cushing of Wisconsin will be awarded the Medal of Honor by the U.S. Army. Cushing died on July 3, 1863, the last day of the Battle of Gettysburg, while defending the Union position on Cemetery Ridge against Pickett’s Charge. The battle was a turning point in the war.  

New Zealand will preserve its last operational whaling station as a tourist attraction. “We must be careful to keep the historic fabric intact. We have to repair, but we must retain the integrity and adhere to conservation principles,” said Steve Bagley of the Department of Conservation. The day after the Perano whaling station closed in 1964, the country banned all whaling.  

More graves have been moved in Israel to make way for construction. This time, more than 1,000 medieval Muslim burials were exhumed inorder to make way for a Museum of Tolerance funded by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which is based in Los Angeles. The newspaper Haaretz has printed claims made by workers that the bones were damaged and mistreated in a rushed excavation.