Critics in Scotland are calling police “clumsy and incompetent” after they destroyed a rare 4,000-year-old burial chamber, thinking it was a crime scene. “If they were dealing with a real crime, they shouldn’t disturb the scene in any case,” said Jim Crow of the University of Edinburgh.

The police officers investigating bones uncovered in a Scottish churchyard recognized that they were not from a recent death, however.  

Hikers in Toowoomba, Australia, found a skull fragment that they thought was an artifact and took it to an archaeologist. The archaeologists referred the hikers to the police, saying the bone was only 30 to 40 years old.  

Three cannons from the gunboat CSS Pee Dee will be raised from South Carolina’s Pee Dee River. The cannons were thrown into the river when the vessel was scuttled at the Mars Bluff Naval Yard in 1865, in order to keep it out of Union hands.  

The Italian government has hired doctor and civil servant Guido Bertolaso to improve the safety and conservation of archaeological sites in Rome and Ostia. Bertolaso is known for his efforts to clean up the garbage problem in Naples.  

Conservation officers for England’s Yorkshire Dales National Park are urging visitors to resist the temptation to remove rocks from prehistoric cairns to build modern ones.  

Archaeologists are studying one of Iran’s oldest mosques, in the ancient Seljuk city of Decius.  

Here’s more information on the recently discovered tomb of one of Hatshepsut’s treasury officials. Spanish archaeologists found wall paintings and gold jewelry in the tomb.  

Learn more about the 1,000-year-old fish trap located just off the coast of Wales in this video from BBC News.  

And Ethiopian Review has a story on the discovery of a footprint thought to have been made by a Homo erectus, originally announced last week.   

A preliminary hearing was held for a California man accused of taking artifacts from an American Indian burial ground in a state park and posting a video of the act on YouTube. He has pleaded not guilty to the charges against him.

Before leaving office, George W. Bush signed an agreement with China that imposed import restrictions on Chinese artifacts from 75,000 B.C. to A.D. 907, and monumental sculpture and wall art at least 250 years old. Art dealers and museums complain that the deal won’t prevent looting in China, it will only keep the objects out of the United States. 

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has announced it will cut 74 jobs from its staff, and that more cuts may follow.   

George Hedges, who helped to find the fabled city of Ubar in southern Oman, has died at the age of 57.

The Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen is reluctant to return bronze Etruscan artifacts to Italy, despite evidence that they were looted from a tomb in the Colle del Forno necropolis. “For now we have to evaluate the good or bad faith of the buyer. The sin has almost been ascertained, let’s see if we will absolve them,” said Paolo Giorgio Ferri, the prosecutor at the Italian trial of art dealer Robert Hecht, who sold the objects to the Danish museum.

More than 10,000 cave paintings have been found in Peru’s lush jungles of Amazonas over the past two years. Many of the 6,000-year-old paintings depict hunting scenes.  

A new study published in Analytical Chemistry validates accelerator mass spectrometry as a method for dating rock art.

Here’s how police in Jakarta recovered a Buddha statue stolen from a museum last week.  

Visit a medieval Irish monastery on Skellig Michael, called “an incredible, impossible, mad place,” by George Bernard Shaw in 1910.  

Viking invaders eventually got along with the Anglo-Saxons and Celts living in Britain, according to researchers at Cambridge University. “They started building settlements and interacting with the locals and become assimilated into their culture and influenced them in many ways,” said senior lecturer Maire Ni Mhaonaigh.   

Zephyrhills, Florida, was founded as a retirement community for Civil War veterans. Archaeologist Jeff Moates of the Florida Public Archaeological Network is looking for traces of the old downtown.