Most of Ireland’s prehistoric gold may have come from the Mourne Mountains, located in the southeast of Northern Ireland. Scientists examined more than 400 gold artifacts, and compared the results of x-ray fluorescence spectrometry with gold collected around the country.  

In Jerusalem, an Ottoman-era aqueduct that once brought water to the reservoir known as the Sultan’s Pool and to the Temple Mount has been uncovered.   

A large field of cultivated manioc planted by Maya farmers in about 600 A.D. has been discovered in El Salvador by archaeologist Payson Sheets. The village of Ceren was destroyed by a volcano and now lies buried under 17 feet of ash. “This is the first time we have been able to see how ancient Maya grew and harvested manioc,” said Sheets.  

A pre-Inca tomb has been found in Peru’s Machu Picchu Archaeological Park.  

Archaeology students in Maryland are digging in Zekiah Swamp, where they have discovered the site of a 1674 courthouse, and what could be traces of a summer house built by Charles Calvert. They are looking for Zekiah Fort, built to house Piscataway Indians who were English allies.  

Fence construction at a school in St. Augustine, Florida, has revealed a school that operated between 1786 and 1820. The Boys’ School, as it was called, was financed by the Spanish government.  

The skull of a young man who was an African American soldier in the U.S. Army in 1866 has been reunited with a skeleton exhumed from the Fort Craig cemetery in New Mexico. His skull was discovered in the home of a retired airline pilot.  

Information from search-warrant affidavits in the federal crackdown on artifact trafficking in the West has been released.  

Archaeologists in Missouri are concerned that the high school students excavating the St. Ferdinand shrine, which is listed on the National Historic Register, are not being supervised by a qualified instructor. “We’re not mean people, trying to keep people from having fun. We just want to channel the fun in a way that’s not being destructive,” said Mark Raab, acting president of the Missouri Association of Professional Archaeologists.  

Erika Simon, who discovered Oetzi the Iceman 18 years ago with her husband, has agreed to a financial settlement. Helmut Simon died in 2004.

Excavations outside Naples have reportedly yielded parts of marble Roman sculptures, columns, and fragments of monuments bearing inscriptions.

In 2006, archaeologists uncovered a carved monolith of the Aztec earth deity Tlaltecuhtli beneath Mexico City’s main square. Since then, there has been speculation that the monument marks a royal tomb. “Everyone wants us to dig faster, and this is the only thing we cannot do,” said head archaeologist Leonardo Lopez.  

A controversial new study by astrophysicist Giulio Magli suggests that Machu Picchu was built as “an Inca pilgrimage site and a scaled-down version of a mythic landscape.” Worshippers would have been able to relive a mythic journey taken by their ancestors by walking through the city.  

Archaeological excavations in the Philadelphia area have uncovered an eighteenth-century home that happened to belong to the great-great-great-great-great grandfather of a local historian. “I couldn’t believe it. About 10 years ago, I ran out of discoveries. Any new information now is a breakthrough. That’s what delights me,” said Rich Remer.  

Further south along the I-95 corridor, in Miami, work crews unearthed an unmarked , undocumented cemetery. “There is no doubt it was a cemetery. No one knows what this cemetery is. It’s really unusual. I was amazed. It’s a real history mystery,” said contract archaeologist Bob Carr.  

A brick-and-concrete structure found underneath a street in Monroe, Louisiana, may have been a crypt associated with a nearby home built in 1895. No evidence of human remains has been found, however.  

The rest of the remains of a man thought to be a Union soldier were exhumed yesterday in Franklin, Tennessee. “We did find the little nails from his boots. So he was buried with his boots on,” said contract archaeologist Larry McKee.  

This article in The Salt Lake Tribune investigates the link between artifact looting and drug crimes.   

In Wales, analysis of soil and pollen samples taken from the uplands on Moel Famau has shown how human intervention, such as burning and farming, changed the landscape over time.  

Here’s more information on the two massive, 6,000-year-old burial mounds that were recently discovered during a routine aerial survey by English Heritage. Helen Wickstead, leader of the Damerham Archaeology Project, calls the find “completely amazing.”  

In Scotland, archaeologists think that Victorian builders reused stones from Preston House, the home of Jacobite James Erskine, Lord Grange. “An interesting result of the survey was the recognition that two sculptured flower heads in the wall of a garden in a nearby street, and long known about by local people, are in fact cockades – the white cockade being a symbol of the Jacobite cause. There seems little doubt that they originated in a garden ornament or decoration of the house across the road,” said Tony Pollard of the University of Glasgow.  

Sri Lanka’s Customs Bio Diversity Protection Unit has fined Swedish national Robert Ulvenkrantz for attempting to smuggle two nineteenth-century Buddha statues out of the country last January. Ulvenkrantz was caught when an American stopped by customs officials for smuggling named him as an accomplice.  

Actor Shia LaBeouf announced that work on the fifth Indiana Jones movie is underway.   And Harrison Ford has been named the highest-earning actor between June 2008 and June 2009 by Forbes magazine.