The New Acropolis Museum will open in Athens tomorrow. “The ceremony will be plain and elegant, not spectacular. We’re leaving spectacular to the museum and its exhibits,” said archaeologist Dimitris Pandermalis.   Here’s a brief description of the new museum.

Human researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, have learned that tool use among wild chimpanzees is more complex than originally thought, especially among honey-eating chimps in Loango National Park on the coast of Gabon. “It is past time to give up on the idea that there is going to be some simple, qualitative statement that fully encapsulates what is unique about human tool use,” commented archaeologist Dietrich Stout of University College London.  

Stone tools have been unearthed in what is now Delaware. Most of the artifacts are at least 1,000 years old, and some are more than 4,000 years old.  

A camp used by the Jornada Mogollon more than 650 years ago has been uncovered at a military base in New Mexico. “We found structures that represent two fairly distinct occupations, maybe a couple of hundred years apart,” said contract archaeologist Mark Sales.  

Ancient human remains discovered by hikers in Washington State will be turned over to local tribes for reburial.   

Students from the University of Virginia have been digging at the Morven Farm, using a map of an ancient Indian camp drawn by Thomas Jefferson as a guide. “We’re going to record all the history that’s out here and there’s probably thousands of years of history,” said their professor, Jeffrey Hantman.  

The seventeenth-century footings of a Welsh town’s historic bridge were revealed by a construction crew. The bridge had been designed by noted British architect Inigo Jones.  

Tomorrow may be the big day for the opening of the New Acropolis Museum, but it is also the day that the banjo-ukulele used to write the “Oh, I wish I were an Oscar Mayer wiener” jingle will be donated to the Wisconsin Historical Museum. The song will be played on the instrument one last time as part of the ceremony.

In Egypt, an 18^th Dynasty tomb (1570 to 1315 B.C.) has been discovered on Luxor’s west bank, in the necropolis of Dra Abu el-Naga. The entrances to two other tombs, mummy fragments, and Ushabti figures have also been found.

Stonehenge was a burial ground for 500 years, and possibly for just one ruling family, according to researchers with the Stonehenge Riverside Archaeological Project. “Stonehenge was a place of burial from its beginning to its zenith in the mid-third millennium B.C.,” said Mike Parker Pearson of the University of Sheffield.  

Learn more about how federal agents carried out the arrests of alleged looters and artifact traffickers in Utah in The New York Times. Some have complained that the government was “heavy handed in the raids,” but the agents knew that most of the homes they were entering contained firearms. “The arrests that were done were felony arrests, and as best as I can tell, they were done in accordance with the FBI and Bureau of Land Management standard operating procedures,” said Attorney General Eric Holder.  

Thailand’s government will continue to object to the Preah Vihear temple being listed as a Cambodian World Heritage site at the World Heritage Committee meeting in Seville, Spain. The issue has sparked border clashes near the temple between the two countries.  

Was Meriwether Lewis murdered? His descendants want to have his body exhumed from its grave in Tennessee to see if any evidence is left. “What we want is the truth,” said Howell Lewis Bowen, Lewis’ great-great-great-great nephew.  

The Neolithic burial of a child and adult was uncovered in western Serbia. “It is unusual because the double grave is within the village – they emptied a mud hut and used it as a burial site,” said archaeologist Radivoje Arsic.