A Union gunship, the USS Westfield, has been recovered as part of the preparations to deepen a shipping channel near Pelican Island, Texas. The ship exploded on New Year’s Day, 1863, while its crew prepared to scuttle it, killing 14. What remains will be conserved at Texas A&M University.  

The Archaeological Institute of America, ARCHAEOLOGY’s parent organization, supports expanding current import restrictions on cultural property to include ancient coins, as a way to curb the looting of archaeological sites. The State Department will review the policy next fall.  

Four days’ worth of bulldozing has destroyed what may have been an American Indian burial ground on farmland near Trumansburg, New York. The State Historic Preservation Office was able to halt construction because the project had received state funding. “There was confusion. The site should have been investigated before bulldozing began,” said Kurt Jordan of Cornell University.  

Excavation continues on the Philadelphia waterfront at the site of a future casino. Archaeologists have unearthed everything ranging from a 3,500-year-old fire pit and burned rocks and small tools, to the contents of eighteenth-century privies.  

Did the Greeks build their temples to face the rising sun? The debate rages on with a new study by Alun Salt of the University of Leicester. “There are quite a few temples in Greece which don’t face sunrise, so a few archaeologists have published that there’s nothing significant about the number that do face East. The problem is that no one has ever said what a significant number would be,” he explained.  

A photograph of two silver cups that were discovered in a Thracian tomb in southern Bulgaria last year is shown at the Sofia News Agency.     

Statistical analysis shows that Homo floresiensis is a human species, and not a diseased dwarf, according to researchers from Stony Brook Medical Center. “Attempts to dismiss the hobbits as pathological people have failed repeatedly because the medical diagnoses of dwarfing syndromes and microcephaly bear no resemblance to the unique anatomy of Homo floresiensis,” said Karen Baab.  

Forty archaeological sites were damaged in American Samoa following a tsunami on in September. 

 When sixteen mummies with surviving heart and blood tissue from the Egyptian National Museum of Antiquities in Cairo were given CT scans, nine of them were found to have hardening of the arteries. “We were struck by the similar appearance of vascular calcification in the mummies and our present-day patients,” said Dr. Michael Miyamoto of the University of California at San Diego.

Dominican archaeologist Kathleen Martinez continues her search for the tomb of Cleopatra. She thinks that she will find it at Ptolemy’s Temple, near Alexandria.  

Canadian mathematician Bryan Wells examined the incised marks on pots and tablets from Harappa. He concluded that the symbols may have been used by workers as time cards. “It is possible that wages were paid with grains dispersed from a centralized storage facility or in the case of incised tablets, material for construction projects and other short term projects,” he wrote in an article for Antiquity.  

Victorian-era railroad tracks were uncovered beside the Thames and Severn Canal in Gloucestershire, England. Coal was probably transported by barge along the canal, then loaded and carried along the rails to a nearby factory.  

The stray dogs of Pompeii will be given permanent homes, according to Marcello Fiori, Pompeii’s emergency commissioner. They will be sheltered by volunteers outside of the city’s walls until adoptive families can be found.