Seventeen tombs dating to the fifth century B.C. were discovered in southwestern Macedonia. In one of the tombs, archaeologists found the remains of a 15-year-old girl wearing a gold funeral mask.

Rene Larsen of the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts says the controversial Vinland Map is not a forgery. The fifteenth-century map shows Greenland and an island in the western Atlantic, and is said to have been drawn 50 years before Columbus sailed. The document has no known provenance.   

In northern Ohio, archaeologists have found a large and sophisticated American Indian encampment that was used periodically as a ceremonial spot, winter shelter, a defended village, and a trading hub. “This place is kind of a weird outlier of Hopewell artifacts that seem to be out of place in northern Ohio,” said Brian Redmond of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. The site was abandoned in the 1600s.  

Researchers in Massachusetts will look for the HMS Diana, a British schooner burned by the Continental Army during the early days of the Revolutionary War, after the Battle of Chelsea Creek. “It’s a relatively unknown or unrecognized battle so we want to give it more definition,” said Victor Mastone of the Massachusetts Board of Underwater Archaeological Resources.  

Three African-American soldiers who served in the U.S. Army in the late nineteenth century have been identified and will be reburied with military honors. Their graves at Fort Craig cemetery in New Mexico and many others were unearthed by the Bureau of Reclamation after widespread looting was discovered at the site.  

A shrine to a Roman god was unearthed near the north gate of Hadrian’s Wall in Vindolanda. “What should have been part of the rampart mound near the north gate has turned out to be an amazing religious shrine with a substantial and exceptionally well preserved altar dedicated by a prefect of the Fourth Cohort of Gauls to an important eastern god, Jupiter of Doliche,” said Andrew Birley, director of the excavation.  

New radiocarbon dates for human bones discovered in Britain’s Gough’s Cave suggest that people lived there 14,700 years ago. “The occupation really is right on the cusp of this warming which we can see in Greenland ice cores,” said Chris Stringer of London’s Natural History Museum. The bones made sensational headlines in the 1980s when cut marks compatible with cannibalism were noticed on them.  

Why do modern humans wear clothing? Ian Gilligan of Australian National University thinks that fitted clothing was a crucial behavioral adaptation to survive seasonal temperatures during the Ice Ages.

Another tourist to Israel has returned artifacts taken from a national park.   

The Grand Egyptian Museum is scheduled to open in 2013. “The new museum is one of the best ways of preserving these antiquities and showing them to the people at the same time. Our hope is it will be the greatest museum in the world,” said Alaa al Din Shaheen of Cairo University and the Supreme Council of Antiquities.

NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter will photograph Apollo landing sites, and try to determine if the flag planted by the Apollo 11 crew is still standing. “We need to know where our material culture resides on the moon. Many parts and pieces of our time, certainly in the era of the early robotics on the moon, are missing from the database,” said Beth O’Leary of New Mexico State University. The Lunar Legacy Project seeks to have the landing site designated a National Historic Landmark.   The original video recordings of the NASA 1969 moon landing are gone-they were recorded over when the space agency was low on tape.  “It was a mistake, no doubt about that. This is a problem inside the entire federal government. They don’t think that preservation is all that important,” said Smithsonian curator Roger Launius. He added that federal storage facilities really are “kind of like the last scene of ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark.’ It just goes away in this place with other big boxes.” Copies of the historic footage are being restored by a Hollywood film company.   Artifacts from the Apollo 11 space flight haven’t fared much better.

An army officer is among the 100 terracotta warriors unearthed at the tomb of China’s first emperor in Xi’an. The statue was found lying face down behind four chariots and was largely intact. “The original colors have faded after more than 2,000 years of decay, but a corner of the officer’s robe suggested it was in colors other than the grey-ish clay,” said chief archaeologist Xu Weihong.  

A study of mitochondrial DNA from the fossils of six Neanderthals suggests that their population between 38,000 and 70,000 years ago never exceeded 3,500 females. “Because there never really were millions of them, they probably were more susceptible to some event that made them go extinct, which to me, suspiciously coincides with the emergence of modern humans,” said Adrian Briggs of the Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.  

The children sacrificed by the ancient Maya priests of Chichen Itza were likely male, according to Guellermo de Anda of the University of Yucatan. “It was thought that the gods preferred small things and especially the rain god had four helpers that were represented as tiny people,” he said.  

Police in Tacoma, Washington, raided an auction house and took possession of nearly 100 woven baskets and beaded items they say were stolen from the home of a Puyallup tribal leader.