Neolithic stone circles, alignments, and corbelled roof tombs have been found in the Syrian Desert. “We’ve found something that’s never been found in the Middle East before,” said Robert Mason of the Royal Ontario Museum. Did the practice of building such stone landscapes have spread to Europe along with farming? “It’s such an important hypothesis if it’s right that it’s worth telling people about now,” he added.

A colossal red granite sculpture of the head of the ancient Egyptian pharaoh Amenhotep III has been unearthed at his mortuary temple in Luxor. Parts of his body and ceremonial beard have also been recovered. “Other statues have always had something broken: the tip of the nose, the face is eroded. But here, from the tip of the crown to the chin, it is so beautifully carved and polished, nothing is broken,” said lead excavator Hourig Sourouzian.   There’s more information on the statue at Discovery News.   

A building dating to the sixth century B.C. has been unearthed some 12 miles from Rome. An image of the Minotaur, an emblem of the Tarquins, was found on a terracotta fragment of the roof. Could this be the palace of the infamous Etruscan prince, Sextus Tarquinius? “Even if the precise attribution was not 100 percent correct, this would not detract much from the scholarly value of this wonderful discovery,” said Nicola Terrenato of the University of Michigan.  

In Iran, wooden covers installed to protect the stone stairways of Persepolis have created ideal conditions for the growth of fungus, lichen, and plants.  

South Korea will fund a new 13-mile road circling Cambodia’s Angkor temples.  

A fifteenth-century inscription on the wall of Salisbury Cathedral may be the earliest example of written English in a church. (Latin had been the language of churches.) “So far now the basic questions of what exactly the words are and why the text was written on the cathedral wall remain unanswered,” said archaeologist John Crook.

 Two anthropologists from the University of Utah speculate that people could have traveled to the Americas via Canada’s High Arctic islands and the Northwest Passage 25,000 years ago. “As neither archaeological nor genetic data have yet been able to unequivocally resolve many of the long-standing questions regarding American colonization, the generation of new models and hypotheses to which new and more powerful analyses may be applied is essential,” wrote Dennis O’Rourke and Jennifer Raff in Current Biology. 

The United States returned another batch of cultural artifacts to Iraq this week, including ancient artifacts and a rifle bearing Saddam Hussein’s image.  

An intact Roman burial urn was unearthed at a construction site in Cullompton, England.  

Roman-era skeletal remains uncovered in York, England, in 1901 have been shown to have been a woman of African origin. She had been buried with jet and elephant ivory jewelry and a blue glass jug.  Up to twenty percent of York’s Roman-era population was probably immigrants. “We’re looking at a population mix which is much closer to contemporary Britain than previous historians had suspected,” said Hella Eckhardt of Reading University.  

The African Burial Ground Visitor Center will open tomorrow in Lower Manhattan, inside a General Services Administration federal office building. The cemetery, which is marked as the “Negros Burial Ground” on a map dated 1755, was uncovered during construction in 1991.    

Archaeologists from China and Kenya will search for Ming Dynasty shipwrecks off the east coast of Africa. The ships are thought to have been part of a trade fleet led by Admiral Zheng He that landed in 1418.  

Seven tourists who had been viewing Peru’s Nazca Lines were killed when their plane crashed.  

Visitors will be able to take a peek at the excavation of the “House of the Chaste Lovers” in Pompeii. “This is the first house being excavated in Pompeii after many years. Visitors will be able to observe the dig process as it happens. Several pieces of Pompeii’s daily life are going to emerge,” said Marcello Fiori, Pompeii’s emergency commissioner.