Chinese art collector Cai Mingchao was the winning bidder at the Christie’s auction of two bronze animal heads taken from Beijing’s Summer Palace in the nineteenth century, but he refuses to pay for them. “I think any Chinese person would have stood up at that moment. It was just that the opportunity came to me. I was merely fulfilling my responsibilities,” he explained.

Scientists working in the new field of nuclear archaeology have identified a sample of reactor-produced bomb-grade plutonium in a bottle that dates to 1944. The bottle was found in a trench at the Hanford nuclear site in Washington State.   

The tomb of Amenhotep, deputy seal-bearer of Tuthmosis III, has been rediscovered in Luxor by a team of Belgian archaeologists.  The tomb was first uncovered in the nineteenth century, but was lost again under the sand.  

One of four colossal statues of Egypt’s Amenhotep III has been raised and topped with a replica head produced by the British Museum, where the original is held. The statues stood around the courtyard of the pharaoh’s funerary temple at Kom el-Hettan.   

Archaeologists think they have found a brick chimney foundation from a trading outpost built as early as 1674 in South Carolina. The bricks could be the oldest in the Carolinas.

Britain’s Culture Minister has placed an export ban on a Celtic mirror and two brooches that were unearthed from a cremation grave in 1993.   

More information on the petroglyphs found in Tonga last year is now available in The Honolulu Advertiser. The images carved into the rock are “pretty much identical” to those found in Hawaii, according to David Burley of Simon Fraser University. Photographs have been included in the article.  

Plans are in the works to list Hawaii’s Honouliuli Internment Camp on the National Register of Historic Places, and make it accessible to visitors.

Footprints discovered in Kenya are thought to have been made by Homo ergaster or Homo erectus. The prints are approximately 1.5 million years old, and are the earliest evidence of modern upright walking.

Underground passageways have been found beneath St. George’s Square in Valletta, Malta. The tunnels may have been built by the Knights of the Order of St. John as part of a drainage system.  

Scientists are gathered in Paris today to discuss how to stop the spread of fungus, algae, and bacteria over the prehistoric paintings inside the Lascaux Caves.  

This article from the Associated Press on the Clovis tools unearthed in Colorado has a few details that were missing from yesterday’s announcement.  

Modern cave-dwellers in Missouri could soon be out on a ledge because they can’t refinance their mortgage.

Movie star Jackie Chan, who reportedly collects antiquities, has criticized the sale of two Chinese bronze animal heads that had been in the collection of the late French fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent. Chan says he will start filming a movie next year about the search for and return of artifacts taken from Beijing’s Summer Palace.