In Pakistan, archaeologists announced they had discovered a city that is at least 5,500 years old, and could be 9,000 years old.

A huge, stone-lined hangi pit used for cooking meat has been discovered at the site of New Zealand’s oldest building. “We have never seen one like this before on any archaeological site in the country. We were not expecting to find it,” said team leader Richard Walter.  

Researchers have turned to language and gut bacteria to try to map the paths of human migration across the Pacific, where there has been insufficient archaeological evidence, and genetic studies have proven inconclusive. The new studies suggest that Pacific peoples share a common 5,000-year-old ancestor from Taiwan.  

Some have suggested that a rapid rise in sea level wiped out Neolithic settlements near the Black Sea and inspired flood tales such as Noah’s Ark. In a new investigation, an international team of geologists examined cores taken from the delta of the Danube River, which empties into the Black Sea, to determine sea level for the Black Sea 10,000 years ago. “We don’t see evidence for a catastrophic flood as others have described,” said Liviu Giosan of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.  

A small metal token excavated ten years ago in Alexandria, Virginia, is a George Washington Baker 66 Medal from 1797.  

New Philadelphia, Illinois, has been designated a National Historic Landmark. The town was founded in 1836 by freed slave Frank McWorter, and grew to become an integrated community of 160 people. The town failed after it was bypassed by the railroad in 1869, and has become an archaeological site.   

Here’s another report on the planned auction of artifacts looted from China in the nineteenth century at Christie’s in Paris. “It is not acceptable that a foreign company would put the looted relics for auction, and we will not try to buy them back,” said Song Xinchao, director of the museum department in China’s State Administration of Cultural Heritage.  

This article on the theory behind the death of sixteenth-century astronomer Tycho Brahe has a few new factoids about his life. Danish scientists want to exhume his body, buried in a Prague church, to test it for mercury.

Iraq’s new minister of tourism and antiquities, Qahtan al-Juburi, has fired the acting head of the State Board of Antiquities and Heritage (SBAH), Amira Edan. Edan had argued against the minister’s proposal to reopen the Iraq Museum in Baghdad to the public by mid-February. “If the museum is open, that is a message to the world that everything is fine and that the Americans can leave,” said Donny George, former head of SBAH and the museum.

The Netherlands will hand over some 2,000 artifacts recovered from Dutch ships wrecked off the coast of West Australia to museums in West Australia. The objects, dating to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, include a cannon, an elephant tusk, amber, stoneware and porcelain, and coins.  

Customs officials in Islamabad, Pakistan, found 42 ancient coins in an outgoing package in the mail.   

Philip Crummy, director of England’s Colchester Archaeological Trust, is looking for Colchester’s Roman amphitheater. “I think we are at a stage now where we can say that, if the amphitheater was within the town walls, there is only one space big enough and empty enough where it could have been,” he said.  

The writing on a wooden tablet, or mokkan, discovered in Japan has been translated. The 1,000-year-old text bans anyone from tilling a noble’s field without permission.  

A $3.5 million grant has been awarded to complete an exhibit at the President’s House on Philadelphia’s Independence Mall. George Washington lived at the site while he was president, along with nine slaves. Their quarters were uncovered by archaeologists in 2007.