Experts are busy decoding the clay tablets inscribed with cuneiform that were discovered in an Assyrian palace in southeastern Turkey last summer. “You’re really getting at the nitty gritty of the management of the empire through these kind of records,” commented Melinda Zeder of the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.

The Independent, a British newspaper, tells the story of the Rosetta Stone and the quest of Zahi Hawass, head of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, to get the British Museum to relinquish it.   This article on the Rosetta Stone by the Associated Foreign Press contains more quotes from Hawass.   

A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences says that corn grains from five sites in Arizona and New Mexico are too old to have been brought north by migrating Mesoamerican farmers. The authors think corn was probably passed from group to group of Southwestern hunter gatherers. “We think the Southwest stands as a region in which indigenous foragers adopted crops and made the transition to agriculture locally rather than having been joined or displaced by in-migrating farming societies,” said Gayle Fritz of Washington University in St. Louis.  

A University of Washington student unearthed a projectile point estimated to be between 4,000 and 6,700 years old while doing some landscaping work near a greenhouse on the Seattle campus.

Hotels in the Maya world are taking advantage of the publicity accompanying the release of the movie 2012 and offering “Doomsday” tourist packages.   

The city of Ottawa will have to decide what to do with the 2,000-year-old artifacts being excavated from a site near the Rideau River. Two bands of Algonquins have filed competing claims for the stone tools, animal bones, and pottery.

 What could be the sacred temple of Naylamp, the legendary first ruler of Peru’s Lambayeque civilization, has been uncovered, according to Carlos Wester La Torre, director of the Brüning Museum.

Here’s more information on the Minoan-style paintings discovered at Israel’s Tel Kabri.  

Stone slabs that once covered graves were found near the roof of a 1,000 year old church in Brancepeth, England. Historian Jim Merrington thinks they may have been hidden there 450 years ago to keep them safe from vandals and reformists.  

While re-examining artifacts taken from the tomb of King Muryeong, who ruled Korea’s Baekje Kingdom between 501 and 523 A.D., a curator from the Gongju National Museum identified four fragments of a human shinbone. This is reportedly the first time royal bone fragments have been found in an ancient tomb in Korea.  

Many artifacts from the Joseon Dynasty (1392-1910), including arrowheads, European cannon parts, and pottery, were unearthed in central Seoul, Korea.  

A 1,000-year-old anchor was dug up on Scotland’s Isle of Skye. “I stumbled on it quite by chance, I wasn’t looking for anything. I just wanted to drain the land so I can grow potatoes there next year,” said landowner Graeme Mackenzie.  

Park rangers have found fresh graffiti defacing pictographs at Sequoia National Park in California.  

Vassili Khristoforov, head archivist for Russia’s intelligence service, insists that a skull fragment and jaw in his collection are the only existing remains of Adolf Hitler, despite recent DNA tests by scientists from the University of Connecticut, who found the skull fragment to be that of a woman between 20 and 40 years old. They did not test the jawbone.   

National Geographic News has listed its top ten archaeological discoveries for 2009.