The wreck of the MV City of Rayville, the first American ship sunk during World War II, has been found off the southeastern coast of Australia. The merchant vessel was carrying a load of lead, wool, and copper when in hit a German mine in 1940.

Earlier this week, Robert Deutsch testified for the first time at his three-year trial in Jerusalem for faking and selling antiquities. His co-defendant, Oded Golan, is charged with faking the so-called James ossuary and an inscribed stone said to have been in the First Temple. Last fall, the judge in the case advised the prosecution to consider dropping the charges for a lack of evidence.   

A collector has turned over a twelfth-century statue of Ganesha, believed to be the only one of its kind in Indonesia, to the Mpu Purwa Historical Object Preservation Center. The god is depicted riding a mouse and is adorned with lavish decorations.  

China’s State Administration of Cultural Heritage has listed the country’s top ten archaeological discoveries of 2008. The winners include 5,500-year-old man-made cave houses, a Bronze-Age graveyard, and a shopping district.  

University of Delaware graduate student Lauren McMullen has written about her internship at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, where she helped prepare Egyptian artifacts for exhibition.  

Did the “Rx” symbol for prescription medicine evolve from the Udjat Eye of ancient Egypt?   

More images from the CT scan of the bust of Nefertiti are available today.  

As Nefertiti’s “makeover” reveals, ancient Egyptians were obsessed with youth and beauty. Be sure to watch the video from New York 1.

New CT scans of the famous bust of Nefertiti suggest that the statue’s limestone core may represent a more realistic image of Akhenaten’s wife, complete with less prominent cheekbones, a bump on the ridge of the nose, wrinkles, and less depth at the corners of the eyelids.   Here’s a second article and view of Nefertiti’s likeness.

Mass graves containing the bodies of some 30 women and children were unearthed in northern France. Archaeologists say they were killed on December 12, 1793, during the first War of the Vendee during the French Revolution.  

Scientists have pieced together a child’s skull which may indicate that early humans might not have immediately killed or abandoned their abnormal offspring, as other mammals are known to do. The 10-year-old <i>Homo heidelbergensis</i> child suffered from a rare birth defect known as craniosynostosis, which would have interfered with brain development and caused severe health problems requiring special care.  

Take a look at some of the artifacts recently recovered from the shipwreck thought to be the Queen Anne’s Revenge. The director of the project, Mark Wilde-Ramsing, says that the bit of gold treasure, navigational tools, and medical paraphernalia strengthen the case that Blackbeard’s pirate ship has been found.  

Archaeologists have excavated a pottery workshop in Pella, capital of the ancient kingdom of Macedon.  

Volunteers in the National Park Service’s Passport in Time program helped archaeologists excavate and restore a looted American Indian site in the Kisatchie National Forest.  

Residents of the village of Tudakavsh, Tajikistan, discovered a 4,000-year-old skeleton. The man’s face-down posture suggests that he died in battle.  

Some of the Machu Picchu artifacts at Yale University have become the subject of a work of art by Sandra Gamarra. She painted more than 100 of the objects shown in a Yale exhibition catalog, and displayed them as a house of cards. “The house of cards is a direct reference to the state of the Peru-Yale case. It is a very unstable situation and at the same time it’s gone on so long that there’s a kind of equilibrium,” she said.