Peru has filed legal papers to dismiss allegations of fraud and conspiracy from its lawsuit against Yale University. Peru is suing for the return of artifacts removed by a Yale scholar from Maccu Picchu between 1911 and 1915.

Trial dates have been set for eight more defendants in the federal artifacts-trafficking sting in Utah and the Four Corners region, despite the death of a key witness known as “The Source.”   

A gas pipeline project has revealed at least a dozen well-preserved shipwrecks in the worm-free waters of the Baltic Sea. The oldest is thought to be about 800 years old.  

USA Today highlights an online article from ARCHAEOLOGY about the Iron Age necropolis of Orthi Petra at Eleutherna on Crete.   Read the original, “Dynasty of Priestesses,” by Eti Bonn-Muller.   

There’s more on the Maya water system discovered at Palenque. “With 56 springs, nine perennial waterways, aqueducts, pleasure pools, dams, and bridges – the city truly lived up to its ancient name, Lakamha, or ‘Big Water,'” according to a recent article in the Journal of Archaeological Science.   

Two grain elevators survive along the industrial riverfront of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.  

A memorial has been dedicated immigrants whose unmarked graves were disturbed during subway construction in Los Angeles. Many had been Chinese laborers who had been denied burial in the local cemetery. “This day is a long time in coming,” said Congressional Representative Judy Chu.

 Czech archaeologists say that they have found a 150,000-year-old settlement in the northern Iraqi town of Arbil, one of the oldest permanently inhabited parts of the world.

Here’s a wrap-up of the latest thinking on Homo floresiensis. “This is a new species that cannot be explained by any known pathology,” concluded William L. Jungers of Stony Brook University Medical Center, who co-edited a recent issue of the Journal of Human Evolution that was dedicated to the Hobbits.  Meanwhile, the residents of the tiny Indonesian village of Rampasasa are trying to cash in on the tourists who come to see Liang Bua cave, home of the Hobbit fossils.  

Volunteers have been assisting archaeologist Lisa Donel investigate the nineteenth-century Talbot Mineral Water Company in Gloucester, England. Its old buildings will be torn down for redevelopment of the area. “I’m very interested in industrial archaeology, so that was what made me want to get involved,” explained volunteer Frank Colls.  

In Massachussetts, a nineteenth-century whale-oil works, or candle house, will be transformed into a hotel conference center. “Right now, the concern is to document as much we can,” said Steven R. Pendery of the National Park Service. The National Park Service, the Whaling Museum, and the Marriott-Fairfield hotel will decide where some of the building’s artifacts can be preserved.  

A man and a woman will go to trial this week in Idaho for damaging structures at the Snoose Mine, which dates to about 1910. The couple is accused of selling the timber from the mine’s missing structures to a recycled timber company for $10,000.  

A silver bracelet depicting the Ten Commandments is the first material evidence of the Mormon Battalion at Alamo Mocho, in the desert of Baja California, during the Mexican-American War.   

Two privies belonging to a well-to-do family were unearthed in Halifax, Nova Scotia.  

Scientists from Barcelona’s Quiron Hospital and its Egyptian Museum have used medical technology to reconstruct the face of a 2,000-year-old Egyptian mummy, without opening its shroud.  

Egyptologist James P. Allen offers translations of some of the texts from Queen Behenu’s burial chamber.  

Tour guides are using the closure of Machu Picchu due to flood damage to beef up their knowledge of Peru’s other archaeological and historic sites.