The $30 million restoration of the Roman Colosseum will get underway in December, funded by the billionaire Diego Della Valle. Rossella Rea, director of the Colosseum, thinks that the monument’s tilt, which was recently announced, happened in antiquity, possibly following an earthquake. “The monument is very stable, otherwise we wouldn’t have arranged for the kind of intervention that we are carrying out. We would have obviously opted for a very different course of action,” she said.

The headless remains of Ned Kelly, who was hanged for killing three policemen in Australia in 1880, will be handed over to his relatives. Kelly is seen by some as an outlaw and by others as a folk hero. After a long search, his headless bones were found in a mass grave at a former prison and were identified through DNA tests. “We also appeal to the person who has the skull in their possession to return it…so that when the time comes for Ned to be laid to rest his remains can be complete,” said Ellen Hollow, Kelly’s great-grandniece.

Union troops occupied the Williamsburg, Virginia, campus of the College of William and Mary during the Civil War, where they built ditches and palisades and dug a well. Archaeology students at the college have excavated a portion of the fortified area, where they found traces of the defensive structures, in addition to an unfired Minié ball, clay marbles, buttons, and a pen nib.

Students from the University of Idaho are at the Basque Block in downtown Boise, excavating a boarding house where the first Basque immigrants lived more than 100 years ago. The project is being carried out in cooperation with the Basque Museum and Cultural Center. Be sure to take a look at the photographs of everyday items that the students have recovered.

DNA remnants that may have originated with an unknown, extinct human cousin have been identified in the genomes of 15 living hunter-gatherers from Africa. Five of the tested individuals are Pygmies from Cameroon, and five Hadza and five Sandawe are from Tanzania. Statistical analysis suggests that the unknown species split from the ancestors of modern humans more than one million years ago, but then interbred with modern humans more recently, sometime between 30,000 and 70,000 years ago, before the three ethnic groups of people in the study separated. “There is a signal that demands explanation, and archaic admixture seems to be the most reasonable one at this point,” commented genome biologist Richard Green of the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Archaeologist Steven Wernke and engineer Julie A. Adams of Vanderbilt University have developed a product intended to reduce the time it takes to create a three-dimensional model of an archaeological site. A small, unmanned aerial vehicle and a software system small enough to fit into a backpack capture the information and transform it into a map quickly and easily. Tests of the system are now underway. “The SUAVe system should be a way to create a digital archival registry of [endangered] archaeological sites before it’s too late. It will likely create the far more positive problem of having so much data that it will take some time to go through it all properly,” said Wernke.

U.S. troops deployed all over the world have been given access to playing cards imprinted with information about archaeological sites located in combat zones. That information has paid off—educated troops protect cultural property and thus enhance their relationships with local people. Some veterans have even been inspired to study archaeology.

A Roman sarcophagus stolen more than 20 years ago from a church in Aquino, Italy, has been returned. The sarcophagus, which dates to the second or third centuries B.C., is carved with scenes of chariot races at the Circus Maximus. It had been in a private collection in London.

Two Egyptian sarcophagi without proper paperwork have been seized by customs agents in Laredo, Texas. The artifacts will be returned to Egypt. No information has been released about where they had come from, or where they were headed.