Cambodian and Thai troops exchanged heavy gunfire today near the eleventh-century Preah Vihear temple, located near their shared border. At least two soldiers were killed. Conflict in the area began last year when the temple was given UNESCO World Heritage status.

Egyptian customs officials stopped an illegal shipment of artifacts to Spain that had been hidden in furniture and other wood products.  

Dynamite-wielding looters damaged 11 niches in rock walls in Mersin, Turkey. The reliefs carved into the niches dated to the third century B.C.

Sophisticated digital imaging is being used by a team of scientists to study the delicate painting of a statue of an Amazon Warrior discovered in 2006 in Herculaneum.   

Construction work in Salzburg, Austria, uncovered wooden buildings, jewelry, tools, and pottery, all thought to have been part of a village dating between the fifth and seventh centuries A.D.   

Kilns unearthed in northern China may have been used to bake bricks for reinforcement of the Great Wall during the Ming Dynasty, 600 years ago.  

Albania created a national park to protect the UNESCO World Heritage site of Butrint, which has become the model of preservation for the country, despite its turbulent recent history.  

A 4,000-year-old flint ax turned up at the Olympic construction site in London.  

In the Philippines, archaeologists unearthed a 400-year-old gold necklace from the grave a woman found in a church compound.  Here’s more information on the excavations in the church graveyard.   The necklace belongs to the national government and not the church, but special arrangements could be made to display it at the Cebu Cathedral Museum.   

Learn more about the rock art at Arizona’s V-Bar-V Heritage Site. “Trying to sort out imagery is probably the toughest thing in archaeology,” said Travis Bone, an archaeologist for the Red Rock District of the Coconino National Forest.

Ancient Ur will be reopened to the public after the U.S. military hands it back to the government of Iraq next month. Ur sits near a U.S. air base outside the city of Nasiriyah.

Britain’s Times Online talks about the article “Sites in Peril” from the March/April issue of ARCHAEOLOGY. The warming climate is thawing frozen Scythian burials and is revealing prehistoric and Roman items that had been trapped in glacial ice.   Read Andrew Curry’s own words about “Sites in Peril” here at the ARCHAEOLOGY website.  

Italian archaeoastronomer Giulio Magli says that some of Egypt’s pyramids follow a pattern of diagonal lines pointing to Heliopolis, dedicated to the sun god.  

The interpretive center at the 5,000-year-old Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump in southwestern Alberta, Canada, is celebrating its twenty-second birthday with new exhibits. “This is the single greatest food-getting event ever designed by human beings. Nobody ever produced more food in a single moment that people driving bison over a cliff,” said archaeology curator Jack Brink.  

Erosion at Great Barrier Island is quickly uncovering Maori burials. “The area is rich in archaeological features, and there is great potential for the excavation to recover scientific information as well as human remains,” said archaeologist Bev Parslow. The bones will be reinterred.

   The skeleton of an American Indian man was unearthed by archaeologists during a test dig on the banks of the Sacramento River in California. The bones are estimated to be 4,000 years old.  

The Army Corps of Engineers and archaeologists for the SugarHouse Casino agree that the proposed construction site for the casino, along the Delaware River in Philadelphia, does not hold remains of a British fort or an eighteenth-century men’s social club. Archaeologists did find American Indian artifacts and brick-lined shafts from eighteenth-century privies, however.  

The names of 191 Australian soldiers believed to have died at the Battle of Fromelles in 1916, and buried in a mass grave near the battlefield, have been published. “Given the information available, it is impossible to be absolutely certain who is buried at Pheasant Wood, [but we] believe this list provides a solid foundation for further investigation,” said Warren Snowdon, Australia’s Minister for Defense Science and Personnel.   

A marble slab inscribed with an image of Alexander the Great and his troops has reportedly been found in Bactria, located in modern Afghaistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. (Good one!)