The conviction of Italian art dealer Giacomo Medici for conspiracy to traffic in antiquities has been upheld by an appeals court in Rome. Evidence from his 2004 trial was used to compel American museums to return artifacts to Italy.   Among them was the J. Paul Getty Museum, which is now opening a show featuring “The Chimaera of Arezzo,” an Etruscan bronze sculpture loaned by Florence’s Museo Archeologico Nazionale as part of the deal.   The Cleveland Museum of Art has also returned antiquities that had been stolen from Italy.  

The museum show “Pompeii and the Roman Villa” has traveled from Washington D.C. to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.  

Scientists now estimate the number of British and Australian soldiers buried in mass graves at the battleground of Fromelles, France, at 300. Fewer individuals have been found in each burial pit than had been expected.  Excavators have also uncovered the men’s personal effects.  

The emerging discipline of primate archaeology challenges the idea that tool use “is the exclusive domain of the genus Homo.” Julio Mercader of the University of California explains: “It’s not clear whether we hominins invented this kind of stone technology, or whether both humans and the great apes inherited it from a common forebear.”  

Guess what? Cannonballs were effective at sinking battleships.  

Stone carvings in southern Mexico suggest that Zapotec men carried human femurs. Burials missing femurs show this to be possible. “It seems likely that each firstborn son was expected to brandish the femur of his father,” commented Joyce Marcus of the University of Michigan.   

Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History has surveyed the historic shipwrecks in Banco Chinchorro, a coral reef atoll off the coast of Quintana Roo. More than 60 sites with parts of ships from Spain, England, China, Russia, and the U.S. were recorded.  

Here’s more information on the man accused of threatening the undercover informant in the federal artifacts case in Utah.  

NASA spacesuits present special preservation challenges. “Most of them are in restoration, but we can put them on display in a controlled environment for a short period of time,” said curator of Allan Needell of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.

Evidence of a planned Iron Age town has been found beneath the Roman site of Calleva Atrebatum, in southern England. “After 12 summers of excavation we have reached down to the 1^st Century AD and are beginning to see the first signs of what we believe to be the Iron Age and earliest Roman town,” said Michael Fulford, director of the Silchester Town Life Project.

Children playing near Ireland’s Ballybunion Golf Course discovered a human skeleton beneath a flat rock. “It could be Iron Age, which would make the date around 2000 B.C .or, more likely from 2000 B.C. onwards to 700 A.D.,” said Mary Cahill of the National Museum.  

Here’s an overview of the excavations of a large fortress and temple at Egypt’s Tell Dafna. The fort was located on the ancient military and trade route known as the “Ways of Horus.”  

The remains of a woman killed in the fifteenth century have reportedly been found in northern Peru, at the mud citadel of Chan Chan. Archaeologist Raul Sosaya said that the 17-year-old had been sacrificed to stop the rain.  

In this video, Haagen Klaus of Utah Valley University talks about the 33 mummies discovered in 2007 at Chotuna Huaca, Peru. Many of the mummies were of women and girls who had been sacrificed.  

Looters tried to break into 2,000-year-old graves at the ancient Greek city of Apollonia, located in Albania.  

Plans are being made to rebury the remains of a lone Civil War soldier unearthed in Franklin, Tennessee. “It’s going to be an unknown soldier’s grave,” said retired history professor Sam Gant.  

An international team of scientists is examining the dental fossils of animals hunted by hominids, in order to determine how long early humans occupied a particular site. Microwear on animal teeth is sensitive to seasonal changes in vegetation, telling scientists when the animals were hunted and eaten. “If the animals are hunted during long periods of occupation, more variable dental wear would be expected,” explained Florent Rivals of the Catalan Institute for Research and Advanced Studies.  

In New Mexico, state officials used digging sticks to break ground for a new state archaeology center. Some 10 million artifacts in the state’s collection will be stored in the building, along with offices and labs for state archaeologists.  

A Missouri family is unhappy with plans to build a playground on land they donated to Kansas City. The family wants the Hopewell Indian Village on the land to be preserved, but the city wants to build a playground on the site. “We’re going to excavate this. So it will be destroyed. But it won’t be destroyed without getting information from it,” said Steve Dasovich, an archaeologist contracted by Kansas City.  

Officials from Parks Canada have declined an invitation from a private company, ProCom Diving Services, to look for the lost ships of Sir John Franklin. “All the work we are doing is non-intrusive – it’s look but don’t touch,” claimed Rob Rondeau, head of the company.