More information and photographs are now available about the contents of a Moche tomb discovered last summer in Peru. The Lord of Ucupe had been buried 1,500 years ago with three other people, including a pregnant woman. Be sure to follow the links to read the full story and captions, and see the artifacts associated with the “King of Bling.”

Peru’s National Institute of Culture is planning to protect the Nazca Lines from future damage by heavy rains.  

A mammoth wooden henge once stood at Ireland’s Hill of Tara, according to archaeologist Joe Fenwick. The structure would have separated the outside world from the ceremonial center.  

An 8,000-year-old ax head turned up in a ploughed field on Ireland’s Inch Island.  

Dozens of Middle-Kingdom mummies and a funerary chapel were found in a necropolis near the Fayoum oasis, along with painted masks, amulets, and pottery.  

China will build a subway line from the city center of Xian to the tomb of the first emperor, Qin Shihuang, whose terracotta army is a top tourist attraction.   Liu Jiusheng of Shaanxi Normal University says the terracotta figures aren’t soldiers, but high-status royal servants and bodyguards.  

Cardiologist John Sotos, who studies rare diseases in his spare time, wants to test a pillowcase fragment stained with Abraham Lincoln’s blood, now conserved at the Grand Army of the Republic Museum and Library. He thinks the president may have been suffering from a rare cancer at the time of his assassination.  

In Yemen, archaeologists have uncovered a building, a relief depicting two oxen and a “tree of life,” an incense burner, and an inscribed statue of seated woman at the site of Humat Thiab, a Himyarite city dating between the first and third centuries A.D.   

Government officials in Vietnam are calling for new laws to protect cultural heritage sites.  

An early eighteenth-century tavern was revealed during an excavation at the site of a new highway bridge near Baltimore, Maryland.  

Human remains were found within four of the five caskets that surfaced from an eroding creek bank in Ohio last week. The caskets were left behind when the cemetery was moved in the 1970s.  

Two archaeologists from Tel Aviv University say they have found a ceramic plaque depicting a figure with both male and female attributes. They think it may represent the “Mistress of the Lionesses,” a female Canaanite ruler who communicated with an Egyptian pharaoh.   Not everyone agrees with their interpretation, however.  

Farmers uncovered a 1,400-year-old statue of the goddess Laxmi in northern India. “It is a rare find bearing Gandhara art influence,” said Peerzada Mohammad Ashraf of the state Archives and Archaeology department.  

Do you have your ticket to the Archaeological Institute of America gala event? The 130^th anniversary party will honor Harrison Ford and the Samuel H. Kress Foundation.  

National Geographic News has photographs of some of the 70,000 beads from around the world that were unearthed at the seventeenth-century Spanish outpost on Saint Catherines Island, Georgia.  

Malta is home to one of the oldest surviving buildings in the world, the 7,000-year-old temple of Ggantija. This short travel article recommends other sites in Malta to see as well.  

Saddam Hussein’s personal AK-47 will be returned to Iraq by the U.S. Army. The weapon was traced to Fort Lewis in Washington.

A 14,000-year-old toolkit that may have been used to hunt big game has been found in Scotland, according to a report in British Archaeology. The tools were probably used by hunters who migrated across a large land bridge connecting Great Britain to mainland Europe.   BBC News also has an article on the “earliest Scots.”

Some 70,000 beads, manufactured in places all over the world, have been uncovered at the Santa Catalina de Guale Mission, on St. Catherine’s Island off the coast of Georgia. “This is the northernmost outpost of the Spanish Empire, but we see evidence of ancient trade routes from China via Manila’s galleons to Mexico and Spain,” said Lorann Pendleton of the American Museum of Natural History.  

The proposed runway expansion at Georgia’s Macon County Airport endangered an ancient Middle Cherokee settlement and burial ground. The airport authority has now agreed to 100 percent artifact recovery if the funding can be obtained.  

The Prime Ministers of Thailand and Cambodia met during the ASEAN summit and discussed their border dispute near the ancient Preah Vihear temple. “It happened because of a misunderstanding. The incident will not affect our relations and we will use channels of communication if anything happens in the future,” said Thai Premier Abhisit Vejjajivawill.   As part of their talks, Thai Premier Abhisit is scheduled to hand over an ancient Khmer artifact to Cambodian Premier Hun Sen. “Those Khmer artifacts were stolen and trafficked out of Cambodia, but finally arrested by the Thai authorities,” he explained. More artifacts will be returned at a later date.  

Aftershocks continue to damage ancient buildings in L’Aquila, Italy, including the basilica of Santa Maria di Collemaggio. “Another few aftershocks and the whole thing is going to collapse,” said site engineer Domenico Visioni.  

If the thought of chanting while holding hands with other tour group members before entering Egypt’s Great Pyramid appeals to you, this is the trip for you.  

The Portland, Maine, bomb squad safely detonated a Civil War cannonball that had been sitting in a residential basement for years.