Israel National News reports that ancient footprints, left by the artisans who constructed the Lod mosaic 1,700 years ago, have been uncovered. Some of the prints were made by shoes, others by bare feet. “It’s exciting. This is the first time I have ever encountered personal evidence such as this under a mosaic,” said Jacques Neguer of the Israel Antiquities Authority.  

Cooks who camped in Edmunton, Canada, 2,000 years ago made a soup of pronghorn, rabbit, whitefish, trout, wild onion, and sunflower. Their camp sat by a river and was surrounded by currant shrubs, chokecherry, and roses.  

Archaeologists are finding evidence of trade between the Vikings and the Dorset in the Canadian Arctic. The Dorset are known to researchers by their fish weirs, tent rings, and drying racks, and are thought to have disappeared ca. 1200 to 1300 A.D.  

Traces of what may have been a public building dating to the late 1500s or early 1600s have been found in St. Augustine, Florida.   

Steps are being taken to protect and preserve Judaculla Rock, a boulder covered in pictographs considered sacred in Cherokee culture. “Many people in this part of the state had become aware of Judaculla and the effects on it from visitors and weather forces,” said Lorie Hansen, project director of the North Carolina Rock Art Survey.  

The Emali Coins have returned to Antalya, where they will be exhibited at the Antalya Archaeology Museum. The coins were smuggled out of Turkey in 1984, and were on display in Ankara since they were returned in 1999. “The Emali treasure will be back where it belongs. We have been making efforts for a couple of years now. The coins should be kept in the region where they were produced and where they were once used,” said local politician Sadik Badak.  

How did our habits for butchering meat develop? Here’s more information on the study of cut marks on bones from Israel’s Qesem Cave.

 Traces of a temple dedicated to the Greek goddess Nemesis have been uncovered near the Aegean Sea in Izmir, Turkey. “It might be under the Hurriyet Anatolian High School building. We hope to unearth it in coming years,” said Akin Ersoy of Dokuz Eylul University.

Two 5,000-year-old rock-cut tombs were unearthed in Malta.  

Roger Atwood, a contributing editor at ARCHAEOLOGY, thinks that the best way to combat looting in rural areas is to enlist the help of local people. He has written an op-ed piece about the success of this approach in Peru for The New York Times.   

Six people died near Egypt’s Giza Pyramids when the hole they were digging beneath a house collapsed on them. They had been searching for buried antiquities.  

Iran’s Cultural Heritage Organization has given the British Museum two months to deliver the “Cyrus Cylinder” for an agreed upon loan. “If within this period this pledge is not honored then all agreements in archaeological research, trade fairs and so on with Britain might be harmed,” said Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Hassan Qashqavi.  

France has confirmed that it will return five fragments of Egyptian tomb paintings thought to have been stolen from Luxor. Egypt has suspended cooperation with the Louvre Museum until the matter is settled.  

Roughly 16 inches of sediment were deposited by a tsunami off the coast Israel when a volcano erupted between 1630 and 1550 B.C. on the Greek isle of Santorini, some 600 miles away. These new sediment cores, collected by Beverly Goodman of the Interuniversity Institute for Marine Sciences, support the idea that the tsunami had “a very real impact on coastal settlements,” in the eastern Mediterranean, and “might have been part of the fabric of the Atlantis story.”  

Archaeology students are investigating Union Siege Battery 8 in Port Hudson, Louisiana, at the last Confederate stronghold on the Mississippi River, known as “Fort Desperate.”  

Meet archaeologist Patrick McGovern of the University of Pennsylvania-he’s well known for recreating ancient beverages.  

PCB dredging in the Hudson River exposed timbers from Fort Edward, and an early nineteenth-century canal boat. “I’d give a near guarantee that more sites are going to be found downriver,” said Adam Kane of the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum.  

Will the world end in 2012, along with the 13^th Baktun of the Maya calendar? “If I went to some Mayan-speaking communities and asked people what is going to happen in 2012, they wouldn’t have any idea,” said archaeologist Jose Huchim.