The World Archaeological Congress (WAC) is holding an international conference in Ramallah on “overcoming structural violence,” and the “negative impact of politics on archaeology.” The Israel Antiquities Authority claims not to have been invited, according to The Jerusalem Post. The WAC has responded that Israeli archaeologists were not intentionally excluded and that that conference was widely publicized. “Since it is difficult for Palestinian archaeologists to interact with the international community, we decided to bring members of the international community to Palestinian archaeologists,” said WAC president Claire Smith.

Early Paleolithic hunters living in central Israel caught big game and shared it, but they were less organized, less efficient, and less specialized than later Paleolithic hunters, says Mary C. Stiner of the University of Arizona. “This might not seem like a big deal to the uninitiated, but there’s a lot of speculation as to whether people of the late Lower Paleolithic were able to hunt at all,” she explained.  

Artifacts have been recovered from the mass graves at the 1916 battlefield of Fromelles, France. “We are getting glimpses of what life was like on the Western Front,” said archaeologist Louise Loe.  

Analysis of skeletons at the Newton sugar cane plantation on Barbados has shown that the enslaved people who labored there came from different regions in Africa. “We now have a method that enables us to identify first-generation captives among the burials and to trace their origins back to their native Africa,” said archaeologist Hannes Schroeder of the University of Oxford.  

An oak tree bearing an engraved mark has reportedly been unearthed in Prague. Archaeologists say the star-shaped mark is 1,000 years old.  

Tarek el Awady, director of scientific research for Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, has traveled to the State Archaeological Museum of Hyderabad, India, in order to restore a mummy that is peeling and cracking. The mummy has been on display at the museum since 1930.  

Three heritage groups in Scotland are working together to build a replica longboat using Bronze Age tools. The boat will be modeled after the Carpow longboat, discovered in Loch Tay.  

Surprise! Students retain more information from movies than from their textbooks, whether or not the information is accurate.

Ameruddin Askarzai will receive a medal from Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai, for his role in protecting the Bactrian Gold from the Taliban. Askarzai, who works for the country’s central bank, also controls the key to the presidential vault at the presidential palace, where the artifacts had been hidden. “I didn’t want them to take the gold outside of the country and sell it. It belongs to the people of Afghanistan,” he explained.

Chinese historian Chen Jingyuan thinks that the massive terracotta army buried at Xi’an may not have belonged to Qin Shihuang, but his ancestor, Empress Xuan. “The hairstyle, the ancient Chinese characters found on some unearthed warriors, and other evidence indicates the owner of the warriors was Empress Xuan,” he said. Critics point out that the soldier’s weapons are inscribed with the name of Qin’s prime minister.  

A gold-banded dagger was one of the artifacts found in a 4,000-year-old cist tomb unearthed in Forteviot, Scotland. “It is also incredibly rare to find some kind of animal skin wrapped around the dagger. The metal is in good condition. It’s a spectacular and unusual find,” said Kenneth Brophy of the University of Glasgow.  

The first traces of Jewish culture in Lycia have been uncovered by archaeologists from Turkey’s Akdeniz University. The artifacts date to the third century A.D.  

Here’s more information on the prehistoric dwelling discovered during airport construction in Great Britain’s Isle of Man. Artifacts from the site include burnt hazelnut shell mounds, hammer and anvil stones, and flint tools. “There were presumably so many hazelnuts near the house as a result of processing and consumption of these within the building,” said project manager Fraser Brown.  

A 6,000-year-old building has been unearthed from a prehistoric peat bog in London, near the Thames River. “The discovery of the earliest timber structure yet found in the London Basin is an incredibly exciting find,” said Diccon Hart, who directed the excavation.  

A large trading post from the early Viking period has been found in Norway.  

Bone analysis suggests that a taste for seafood may have given Homo sapiens an edge over the Neanderthals in northern Europe. “It seems modern humans had a much broader diet, in terms of using fish or aquatic birds, which Neanderthals didn’t seem to do,” said Michael Richards of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, and the University of British Columbia. It is known that Neanderthals in southern Europe ate seals and dolphins.  

Neanderthals and modern humans shared a gene that gives the ability to taste bitter flavors.  

Castle moats were not just defensive constructions, according to two recent studies.  

A large seventeenth-century pewter serving plate, discovered 100 years ago by a local farmer, has been returned to the medieval Mount Grace Priory in Yorkshire, England, by his grandson. “Whilst my mother fed ducks from the plate, she also knew it was pretty old, even guessing, wrongly as it seems, that it could have been used by the monks,” said Arthur Dent, aged 73.  

Jordan Emmett, aged 8, spotted a 5,000-year-old Newnan projectile point, once used to hunt small game, at a Florida construction site. “I saw a red thing sticking up and I brought it home,” he said. He has since put the point on permanent loan at the Safety Harbor Museum of Regional History.  

The conservation of ancient bronze statues pulled from the sea could help scientists develop metals resistant to “biofouling,” the accumulation of sea creatures that eat away at metal ships’ hulls.