Customs authorities in New York City confiscated two red ceramic vases smuggled out of Italy.

In Iran, part of a mound that may have covered a Sassanid city was destroyed by bulldozers. Earlier this year, officials from the Khuzestan Cultural Heritage, Tourism, and Handicrafts Department visited the mound and wanted to register it on the National Heritage List.  

The Metropolitan Museum of Art purchased a 4,000-year-old fragment of a pharoanic shrine from a collector in order to return it to Egypt.  

A California man who pleaded guilty after he posted a video of himself looting a Yurok Tribe burial ground in a state park has received jail time, community service, and a fine.  

It seems that the Battle of Bosworth Field, fought in 1485 at the culmination of England’s War of the Roses, took place two miles away from the monument commemorating it. Fired ammunition from early handguns has been found at the correct location. “For me the most important thing about the discoveries at Bosworth is that it opens the door for archaeology to explore the origins of firepower,” said Glen Foard from the Battlefields Trust.  

Two gravestones covered with mysterious carvings have been unearthed under a gateway leading from the medieval stronghold of the Knights Templar in Scotland and an adjoining mansion. “It might be sheep shears, or they could be hawking bells, the kinds of things that might be attached to a falcon. They could even be a made-up piece of heraldry,” said archaeologist David Connolly.  

The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, England, has been redesigned and will reopen next month.  

The teen-aged son of an archaeologist discovered a submerged temple while swimming off the Mediterranean coast of Montenegro. “I’ve been dragged around a lot of ancient ruins, so if it hadn’t been for that I wouldn’t have looked twice,” he explained.  

Learn about the Waldseemuller map, drawn in 1507.

 Sgt. Ronald Peters, a geospatial analyst with Multi-National Corps-Iraq C-7, is creating new maps of 800 of Iraq’s archaeological sites.

CT scans of skull fragments unearthed at the royal cemetery at Ur show that the palace attendants had died when a sharp instrument had been driven into their heads. It had been thought that the many attendants buried at Ur had been poisoned. The new study is part of an exhibition at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.  

Government conservation of synagogues in Cairo has become a political issue. “Jewish sites are an important part of our heritage, and we place as much importance on the maintenance and development of the Jewish temples as we do to the mosques and the churches in Egypt,” said Zahi Hawass, Egypt’s chief archaeologist.  

Is Thatcham the oldest continuously inhabited place in Britain?  

Further study of a statue fragment found in England in the 1960s suggests that it came from a statue of Nero as a teenager. Only two other statues of Nero have ever been found. “This is exciting as it indicates that there may have been links between the Chichester area and one of the most famous Roman emperors of all time,” said Miles Russell, who completed the laser scan.  

Turkey’s Emali coins are on display at the Antalya Archaeology Museum. The coins had been smuggled out of the country in 1984.  

An eighteenth-century tombstone was found during the renovation of Washington Square Park in New York City. The area was once a cemetery.  

Conservation of headstones at a church cemetery in Elizabeth, New Jersey, has revealed information about figures from the Revolutionary War. “Some of the stones have gunshot marks from the British using them as target practice,” said archaeologist Seth Gartland.  

Svante Paabo, director of genetics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, has analyzed the Neanderthal genome. He says he knows that Neanderthals and modern humans got together. “I’m sure that they had sex, but did it give offspring that contributed to us? We will be able to answer quite rigorously with the new [Neanderthal genome] sequence,” he told conference attendees.  

The new movie Amelia will open soon. Here’s what archaeologists think happened to aviator Amelia Earhart.