A 4,500-year-old circular city has been found in Syria on the banks of the Euphrates, in an area due to be flooded by a dam project.  

Traces of the home of a wealthy Roman have been unearthed beneath Marlowe Theater in Canterbury, England. The house dates to the late second or third centuries.  

Here’s more information on the possible route taken by explorer Hernando de Soto through what is now Jacksonville, Georgia. Glass beads and Spanish tools were found by researchers from Atlanta’s Fernbank Museum of Natural History at an Indian village dating to the early sixteenth century.  

The health of the 1,300 people buried in a medieval Irish cemetery is described in the Irish Times.  

And there’s an article on the discovery of a third-century building in the former Japanese capital of Nara that may have been Queen Himiko’s Yamatai palace.   The Mainichi Daily News describes the building in greater detail.  

Four ancient wells that were part of a lake sacred to the Egyptian goddess Mut were unearthed in Tanis. Zahi Hawass, head of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, said they were probably used by the people for their daily water needs.  

“I’m only asking for the unique cultural objects,” Hawass said of his quest for the return of Egyptian artifacts housed in the world’s museums.   

Hamid Baqaei, of Iran’s Cultural Heritage, Handicrafts, and Tourism Organization, announced that the loan of the Cyrus Cylinder to the National Museum of Iran would begin in January and last for three months. “We can confirm that representatives from the British Museum are in Tehran at the moment, but until we have spoken to them we can’t confirm anything further,” responded a press assistant from the British Museum.  

The Bureau of Land Management has nominated 63 rock art sites along Utah’s Nine Mile Canyon for the National Register of Historic Places.

 A mural at the Maya site of Calakmul, Mexico, depicts scenes from the lives of ordinary people, and reveals the words for “maize,” and “salt.” “This is the first time that we’ve seen anything like this,” said Simon Martin of the University of Pennsylvania Museum. The murals had been protected with a layer of clay when a new structure was built on top of them.  

The partial text of a badly eroded stele found in the sunken city of Heracleion has been published by the Oxford Centre for Maritime Archaeology. The city sank in the Nile Delta 1,300 years ago.  

The Getty Conservation Institute will join Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities at the tomb of Tutankhamun for a five-year cleaning and restoration project.  

Hydrocarbons from Saharan dust that settled on the sea floor off the coast of West Africa indicate that rainy weather may have made it possible for early humans to cross the desert and migrate out of Africa some 93,000 years ago.  

Construction work at a known archaeological site in Saanich, British Columbia, turned up human bones thought to be 1,000 years old.  

An engraved spoon belonging to a crew member has confirmed that a shipwreck in North Carolina’s Pasquotank River is the CSS Appomattox.  

A new study of the 93 medieval chess pieces discovered on Scotland’s Isle of Lewis in 1831 suggests that they may have also been used to play Hnefatafl, a popular game in medieval Scandinavia. The rules to Hnefatafl have not survived.  

The third-century remains of Queen Himiko’s palace may have been uncovered near the Hashihaka ancient burial mound in Kyodo, Japan. Some think the legendary queen was buried in the mound.  

A partial silver-plated serving set removed from the USS Arizona is set to be auctioned off in Cincinnati. The items are thought to have been recovered from the war grave sometime between May 1942 and May 1943 by a Navy diver who was salvaging ammunition, weaponry, and personal items from the Pearl Harbor wreckage.