Casts of the Hobbit’s fossilized bones were on display for the first time anywhere at Stony Brook University in New York this past Tuesday. “I really had no idea how small it was until now,” said Stony Brook student Jennifer Kamb. After the one-day exhibition, the Homo floresiensis casts were packed up and shipped home to Indonesia.    There’s more information on the Hobbit and a picture of “Flo’s” skull at Time.

Economist Steven D. Levitt, author of Freakonomics, discusses an ARCHAEOLOGY article about EBay and the illegal antiquities trade in his blog for the New York Times.   Click here to read the full text of “Forging Ahead,” by Charles Stanish.  

In Germany, excavation of a mass grave of Jews killed by the Nazis in 1945 has begun.  

Australia’s Commonwealth War Graves Commission has appointed an archaeology company to complete the excavation of Australian and British war dead buried in mass graves at Fromelles, France. Lambis Englezos, an Australian school teacher who pinpointed the location of the burial and notified the authorities, will be given a short tour during the excavation. Archaeologists want to limit possible contamination of the site, in order to increase the chances of identifying the soldiers’ remains with DNA testing.  

ABC News has picked up the story on archaeologist Jane Lynden Rousseau’s study of the crypts beneath Boston’s Old North Church. “This basement is bursting with bones,” she said.  

Read more about the computer reconstruction of a Neanderthal pelvis and ideas about childbirth in Science.  

Don’t miss the traditional Maya feast prepared by archaeologists Patricio Balona and Ben Thomas and executive chef Jason Munger at the Archaeological Institute of America Gala!

The Cleveland Museum of Art will hand over 14 looted artifacts to Italian authorities today. The museum will receive long-term loans of similar objects in return.

View 2,000 years’ worth of renovations, demolitions, and additions at Digital Karnak, the creation of UCLA’s Experiential Technologies Center in the Department of Architecture and Urban Design. “We rely on architectural transformations and depictions on contemporary reliefs to provide invaluable information about Egypt’s rich history,” said Diane Favro, principal investigator for the project.  

Bob Genheimer, curator of archaeology at the Cincinnati Museum Center., found no evidence of shaping or manufacturing by ancient people on the turtle-shaped boulder from Oregonia, Ohio.  “There is no doubt that it appears to be a turtle head, but I believe that is an artifact of nature, not culture,” he said.  

Two historic walls have been unearthed in Rochester, England, near the Elizabethan mansion known as Restoration House. “The Tudor wall may have formed a backdrop to prestigious gardens that swept down towards the River Medway, offering a grand vista to people arriving by water. The latest discovery, while being a defense structure, could also have provided a raised walkway linking that part of the gardens with those that have already been restored by the owners of Restoration House,” explained archaeologist Peter Rumley.  

Avocational archaeologists discovered a World War II-era bomb in another historic wall in England.