An ancient Buddhist monastery in Taxila, Pakistan, has been looted with heavy equipment, and authorities suspect that small statues of Buddha are among the stolen artifacts. Muhammad Bhadur Khan, deputy director of the federal department of archaeology and museums, said that organized criminals in league with the local police are responsible for the destruction of the site.

Two men have agreed to make a donation to the New Zealand Historic Places Trust after they admitted to damaging an archaeological site while filming a television show. They men dug up and hauled away artifacts from an old gold mining town known as the North Pole.  

A total of 17 sets of human remains have been unearthed at a high school construction site in Danville, California. The bones are thought to be anywhere between 250 and 2,500 years old, and to have belonged to members of the Bay Miwok tribe of the Saclan village.  

A palm tree at London’s Kew Gardens is reputed to be the world’s oldest potted plant. The tree was planted at Kew in 1775, was recently replanted in a larger pot, and is expected to live another 250 years.

 The skeletons of 51 young men, possibly Vikings, have been found entangled in a 1,000-year-old pit in southern England. Their heads were stacked neatly to one side. “The majority seem to have taken multiple blows,” said David Score of Oxford Archaeology.

Italy is seeking restitution of some 1,000 artifacts from bankrupt British antiquities dealer Robin Symes. Photographs of some of the objects are posted at Scoop, along with a short article by Suzan Mazur.  

Conservators in Germany have reconstructed 30 monumental basalt sculptures excavated from Tell Halaf, Syria, in the early twentieth century. The sculptures were badly damaged in a bombing raid during World War II that destroyed the wood and limestone artifacts from the site.   

The ancient Antikythera device may be older than previously thought.   

Authorities in Yemen have recovered some 200 artifacts from smugglers this year.  

A genetic study suggests that human populations began to expand in Africa during the Late Stone Age, 40,000 years ago, before the development of agriculture in the Neolithic period.    

Excavation will resume next month at a Thracian temple complex near the Bulgarian village of Starosel. Archaeologist Georgi Kitov died of a heart attack while working at the site last year.   

Here’s another article on the idea that global warming allowed the Incas to open up new farmland in the Andes Mountains, and thus feed a growing population. “They were highly organized and they had a sophisticated [governance], but it wouldn’t have counted a lot without being underpinned by the warming of the climate,” said paleoecologist Alex Chepstow-Lusty of the French Institute of Andean Studies in Lima.