Destruction of the largest Indian Mound in Alabama’s Choccolocco Vally continues. The city of Oxford’s mayor, Leon Smith, is promoting the construction project, and his “campaign has financial connections to firms involved in the $2.6 million no-bid project,” to build a Sam’s Club on the site, according to the Online Magazine of the Institute for Southern Studies. “What it’s going to be is more prettier than it is today,” the mayor insists.

Archaeological monuments and natural wonders are threatened by “a greed that infantilizes rather than enhances experience,” according to Telegraph travel writer Michael Kerr. The Agra Development Authority wants to “enhance visitor experience” at the Taj Mahal by surrounding it with ropewalks, a suspension bridge, cable cars, and a Ferris wheel.  

Warning! Watching these top ten most historically inaccurate movies could leave you seriously misinformed.  

Here’s another article on the new “hobbit” study by Debbie Argue of Australian National University. “Our cladistic analysis created two very similar evolutionary trees which establish a very early origin for H. floresiensis back around the emergence of the very first members of the Homo family. This suggests that H. floresiensis was not a sick modern human, not even a very close relative,” she explains.  

A total of 26 sets of human remains have been disinterred at a high-school construction site in California. A Bay Miwok village was probably located nearby. The bones will be reburied at the Ohlones Indian Cemetery.  

Excavations continue on Roanoke Island by the First Colony Foundation. Last year the team unearthed a copper necklace, a Venetian bead, and a delftware pottery shard.  

The Israel Antiquities Authority will begin to register private antiquities collectors, according to a law passed in 2002. The IAA estimates that more than 100,000 citizens possess more than 15 artifacts, but only several hundred of them are registered.  

It seems that there is an Egyptian bust from the New Kingdom period that is the spitting image of the late “King of Pop,” Michael Jackson. The sculpture is housed at Chicago’s Field Museum.

 A new genetic study of dogs suggests that they were first domesticated in Africa, and not East Asia, as had been thought.

A field school at a self-sufficient medieval monastery in County Meath, Ireland, unearthed a deep defensive ditch and a thirteenth-century foundation. Waste near the foundation included animal bones and oyster shells, leading investigators to believe the building was a guest house, since the monks only ate fish.  

Coastal erosion threatens Skara Brae, a Neolithic village in Orkney, and thousands of other sites around Scotland.  

In Morven, Scotland, a man found bar shot, or two metal balls linked with an iron bar, in his garden. The ammunition may have come from one of two warships that attacked the town in 1746 before the Battle of Culloden. “The ships were certainly landing men in Morven and what they were doing was checking the settlements for Jacobites,” said Colin Martin, a retired marine archaeologist.  

Human bones were uncovered during road construction in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. “We’re not getting any indication that (the remains are) anything recent,” said Lt. Bill Flood of the local sheriff’s department.  

A chunk of the first highway funded by the national government was removed intact from Uniontown, Pennsylvania. The road, completed in 1820, traveled across southwestern Pennsylvania and connected Cumberland, Maryland, and Wheeling, West Virginia.  

The Archaeological Survey of India and the Agra Development Authority have different ideas about what sort of development is acceptable in the area around the Taj Mahal.  

Make a virtual visit to the Maya site of Palenque.  

Here’s more information on the 2,000-year-old inscribed pottery discovered in Jerusalem.