Egypt’s antiquities authority has announced that archaeologists pieced together a wooden embalming bed from fragments found in a room in KV-63. “We believe this was a room used for embalming because we found some embalming materials, including herbs, oils, and pottery vessels,” said Luxor antiquities director Mansour Bouriq.

This article in Al-Ahram Weekly tells the story of the Egyptian wall paintings taken from the tomb of Nebamun in the early nineteenth century, and describes the new gallery where they are now displayed in the British Museum.  

A team of scientists is analyzing the teeth of crew members from Columbus’ second voyage to the New World. “This is telling us about where people came from and what they ate as children,” said anthropologist T. Douglas Price of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The men’s remains were found at the site of La Isabela on the island of Hispaniola in 1990.  

A felony charge against a California man accused of removing artifacts from an American Indian site in a public park has been dropped. “The law requires that it be taken from a grave. There hasn’t been any testimony that says it [an arrowhead] was taken from a grave,” ruled Judge Joyce Hinrichs. The 30-year-old man still faces two misdemeanor charges.  

A treasure hunter in Wales uncovered two bronze bowls and a bronze wine strainer.  

Archaeologists are digging underwater in Turkey at the 6,000-year-old city of Limantepe. An earthquake ca. 700 B.C. caused a section of the city to slide into the Aegean Sea.   

Popular Forest, Thomas Jefferson’s octagonal-shaped retirement retreat, will celebrate its 200^th anniversary when it reopens next month, after extensive renovations. “He was blending all the things he liked – British, French, and American. This is a very small slice of architectural history because it’s so playful. It wouldn’t be so playful if it were a public house like Monticello,” said Travis McDonald, director of the architectural restoration.  

It has been 50 years since the Nubian monuments at Aswan were salvaged before the creation of Lake Nasser. “Hundreds of sites were inventoried and thousands of objects were identified and conserved,” by 70 separate archaeological missions from 25 countries, explained Giuseppe Fanfoni, director of the Italo-Egyptian Center for Restoration and Archaeology.  

Australia’s Lake Mungo area was occupied continuously by Aborigines for 50,000 years, and is recognized as a world-class archaeological site. The dry lake bed is now a “flat, barren bed of a long-dried lake and weathered, albeit unusual, sand dunes,” writes traveler Bruce Elder.

In Yemen, archaeologists have reportedly uncovered a statue of a queen sitting on a throne.

Construction workers digging near the Washington Museum of Natural History in Missouri unearthed some 800-year-old American Indian artifacts.  

Plans to reconstruct the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus in the nearby Turkish town of Selçuk are still on the books. The new building would be used as a center for the arts.  

At Harpers Ferry National Historical Park, an arsenal originally built in 1806 will be partially reconstructed in order to protect its remaining features. The building held thousands of weapons that John Brown failed to obtain during his raid in 1859, and was eventually burned down by Confederate troops.  

Two Civil War battlefields in western Maryland are endangered by plans to build a trash incinerator and a natural gas plant.  

England’s National Trust will mark the seventieth anniversary of the discovery of an Anglo-Saxon ship burial at Sutton Hoo with a 1930s-style garden party. This article gives a brief description of the excavation.  

Chimps living in the Republic of Congo use wooden implements and spend a lot of time to extract honey from beehives. “The nutritional returns don’t seem to be that great. But their excitement when they’ve succeeded is incredible, you can see how much they are enjoying tasting the honey,” said Crickette Sanz, of the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology.