China has reportedly sentenced four tomb robbers to death.

The U.S. government returned 18 Maya artifacts to El Salvador that had been stolen from an archaeological site and sold on the Internet by a Salvadoran couple. Other objects were recovered in El Salvador, but many that had been sold in Japan, Britain, Canada, and France have not been found.  

Computational modeling techniques are helping archaeologists interpret how humans and the environment interact. “Although soil erosion is a natural process, through the models we are able to investigate the contribution of different agricultural practices used by prehistoric societies to land degradation and how it influenced the evolution of these communities,” said Helena Mitasova of North Carolina State University. 

Is this what China’s terracotta warriors looked like with paint? 

Here’s a photograph of all that remains of a wooden canoe made by the Lenape sometime between A.D. 1420 and 1580. The canoe was pulled from New Jersey’s Sand Pond in the 1930s.  

Alice V. M. Samson of Leiden University, and Bridget M. Waller, of the University of Portsmouth, suggest in their new article in Current Anthropology that the bared teeth shown in the art of the Taino may have signaled non-aggression and benign intent, contrary to the negative interpretation assigned by early European observers.

The 500-year-old well-preserved mummy of a woman was discovered at a construction site outside of Seoul, South Korea. Her husband’s tomb is expected to be found nearby. “This mummy will help us study life during the early days of the Joseon Dynasty,” said archaeologist Kim Woo-rim.

Czech and Danish scientists plan to exhume the remains of astronomer Tycho Brahe, who died in 1601. “I don’t know if it’s possible to answer the question of how he died. I think not. I’m more interested in how he lived,” said Jens Vellev of the University of Aarhus.  

Gold Byzantine and silver Venetian coins have been found in a small box at Skopje Fortress in Macedonia.  

Archaeological sites along the Gulf Coast are threatened by the oil spill from the Deepwater Horizon. “Biological resources can recover and archaeological resources cannot,” said Noel Stowe, retired from the University of Southern Alabama.  

In Wyoming, a construction crew digging a water pipeline found a 4,000-year-old campsite where obsidian tools were made. The source of the obsidian we be determined using x-ray fluorescence.  

Here’s an interview with Francisco Etxeberria, who has exhumed the remains of 4,800 people from mass graves in Spain. As many as 200,000 people are thought to have been killed during the Spanish Civil War and the dictatorship of Francisco Franco. “I don’t think we’ll find them all, it’s impossible,” he said.