Carved stucco panels depicting scenes from the Popol Vuh have been uncovered at the Maya site of El Mirador in Guatemala. The panels date to 300 B.C.

Italy has returned more than 2,000 artifacts, confiscated at an ancient coin show in Verona, to Bulgaria. “The Italian police found that [the Bulgarian sellers] did not have any papers confirming ownership of antique coins and items, arrested them and then released them,” said Bozhidar Dimitrov, director of Bulgaria’s National Museum of History.  

New dates for Peking Man suggest that Homo erectus lived in far northern China 770,000 years ago, during a glacial period. “They may have been freezing their buns off,” commented Rick Potts of the Smithsonian Institution.  

The Athens Acropolis has reopened to tourists, for now.  

German hydromechanics engineer Mathias Doring is studying the “amazing” 66 miles of canals, most of them underground, built by the Romans in modern-day Jordan. The canals brought water to the ten cities of the Decapolis.  

Residents of Hasankeyf, located in southeast Turkey, are said to be tired of waiting to find out if their homes and nearby archaeological site will be flooded by the Ilisu Dam Project. People have been living in the region for 10,000 years.

Museum curators at the National Museum of American History have confirmed one family’s oral history that the inside of Abraham Lincoln’s pocket watch was engraved with a secret message. Watchmaker Jonathan Dillon was holding the president’s watch when he heard that first shots of the Civil War had been fired, and he recorded the event on the timepiece.

A business in New Jersey has offered a private mortgage to a family of Missouri cave dwellers on the verge of losing their home. “We’re excited about it. We’re throwing a party at a friend’s cave,” said cave-owner Curt Sleeper.  

Here’s a photograph of the gold jewelry found in the Egyptian tomb of Gahouti, who was head of the treasury during the reign of the female pharaoh, Hatshepsut.  

A bronze drum stand in the exhibition “Treasures from Shanghai,” now at the British Museum, could have been looted from the tomb of a Chinese ruler. The drum stand is now owned by the Shanghai Museum. Archaeologist Colin Renfrew has commented that “a little more due diligence in this case might have been useful,” in order to comply with the British Museum’s new loan guidelines.  

Archaeologists will recover the Ming Dynasty porcelain found in a shipwreck off the coast of southern China. “It is a very interesting finding because, under the rule of Emperor Wanli, China imposed a ban on sea trade. The excavation of the ship will help us learn more about China’s foreign trade at that time,” said Cui Yong of the Guangdong Provincial Institute of Archaeology and Relics.   

The church and winery of a Byzantine monastery have been unearthed in central Israel.  

Striking workers have closed the Athens Acropolis again. Some of them have not been paid since last November, according to archaeologist Yiannis Nakas.  

DNA analysis of the exhumed remains of the last Russian tsar and his wife and children concludes that the whole family was killed in 1918.   The Los Angeles Times also tells the story of the Romanovs.

Sixty mummies from museums around the world will appear together in northern Italy, in a museum show called “The Dream of Eternal Life.”