Evidence of a successful amputation performed 6,900 years ago has been found in the tomb of a high-status man in France. “I don’t think you could say that those who carried out the operation were doctors in the modern sense that they did only that, but they obviously had medical knowledge,” said archaeologist Cecile Buquet-Marcon.  

In an 800-year-old tomb in Peru’s Lambayeque region, archaeologists have found the remains of a man who had been buried with 500 nectarine seeds, which were prized as aphrodisiacs. The man is thought to have been a folk healer or shaman.  

Police in Cyprus busted up a smuggling ring in possession of stolen antiquities from Cyprus and elsewhere. An international network may have been involved.   

A cache of weapons dating to the Anglo-Boer War has halted construction in King Williams Town, South Africa. The rifle barrels, bayonets, swords, and burnt wooden rifle butts had been buried by the British army at the end of the war, in 1902.  

History of art teacher Michael Fitzgerald describes the rock art of Zimbabwe’s great cave of Inanke in the Wall Street Journal.  

Australia’s megafauna co-existed with humans for some 5,000 years, according to new dates for the animals’ bones and teeth. “Now that we have new methods to date the bone itself, we can know how long ago the animals died rather than how long ago since the bones were last buried,” explained Barry Brook of the University of Adelaide.  

U.S. military veterans, many of whom are disabled, have begun to sort through the government’s collection of American Indian artifacts. The program is being funded with federal stimulus money.  Photographs of the vets at work are shown at Statesman.com.  

Here’s another review of the new Acropolis Museum in Athens. This one is from the Los Angeles Times.  

Highway construction in Ireland now threatens the Bru na Boinne site around Newgrange.  

Four men appeared before a judge in Burke County, Georgia, all of whom had been arrested for either trespassing and/or looting at a 4,000-year-old American Indian burial site on private property.  

A couple looking for historic photographs at the American Legion hall in Old Town Alexandria, Virginia, discovered a rare personal letter written by Thomas Jefferson in 1808.

 In Laos, a team of scientists uncovered 2,000-year-old human bones, some of which had been placed in a burial pot, as part of the Middle Mekong Archaeological Project. “Last week, we unexpectedly found two skulls and a fragment of a third, a baby, along with some body bones,” said Joyce White, associate curator at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

Burial vaults that could contain the remains of more than 400 people will be moved to make room for family housing in northeast England. The chapel had been demolished in the 1970s.  

The scholarly debate over whether or not humans caused the extinction of Australia’s megafauna has migrated to a morning radio program.  

An American Indian village site in Jacksonville, Alabama, has been destroyed. “There was a big noticeable hump…. It has been here since the twelfth century and now it’s gone. It was there when the city bought the property,” said Harry Holstein of Jacksonville State University.   Human remains were found nearby.   

Parking lot construction revealed a mid-eighteenth-century privy in historic Annapolis. “We can tell the people who lived here had a nice collection of pottery off of which they were eating,” said consulting archaeologist Thomas W. Bodor.  

Here are more photographs of the “cat goddess temple” discovered in Alexandria, Egypt.