The first Illyrian trading post has been found by a team from the University of Oslo, in an area between Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina known as Desilo, according to a report in Apollon. The Illyrians have been thought of as pirates, but these archaeologists say they also had peaceful trade connections with the Romans. “There certainly were pirate activities along the coast, but we thought it rather odd that the pirates were so far inland and so near the important Roman colony of Narona. In our opinion Desilo might have been a trading center,” said Marina Prusac and Adam Lindhagen.

The shipwreck thought to be Blackbeard’s Queen Anne’s Revenge shows signs of having run aground by accident. For the past 300 years, it has been said that the British pirate sank his ship in order to avoid splitting the loot up among the crew.   

A dump chock-full of mass-produced oil lamps confirms that Modena was a pottery center in the Roman Empire.  “The city was a major pottery center, a cluster of pottery workshops, as the variety of brand names on the newly discovered items testifies,” said archaeologist Donato Labate.  

A town destroyed in the nineteenth century and erased from official memory has been located in farmers’ fields by a businessman with a hand-drawn, heirloom map. The town of Mahua Dabar, in eastern Uttar Pradesh, India, was razed by the British during the 1857 revolt.  

A bit of Stone Age string was discovered in a camp 30 feet under water off the coast of England’s Isle of Wight. “The string was found with wooden planks and stakes and some pits containing burnt flint. We believe they may have been heated up to help work timber into boats,” said Jan Gillespie of the Hampshire and Wight Trust for Maritime Archaeology.  

British archaeologists are also busy at Turquoise Gate, an offshoot camp from the Greenham Common women’s antinuclear campaign 25 years ago.  

Russia has handed over six medieval stained glass church windows to Germany that had been looted by the victorious Red Army in 1945. Artifacts and artworks were plundered by both sides during World War II.

This photo essay from Discovery News shows the 2,700-year-old grave of a shaman who had been buried with a “stash” of marijuana. The grave was unearthed at the Yanghai Tombs in China’s Gobi Desert.

Christie’s auction house in New York says it is cooperating with an investigation into whether or not ancient gold earrings it had planned to sell had been stolen from Iraq. The artifacts, thought to have come from Nimrud, have been withdrawn from Monday’s planned auction.  

Chemical signatures in a piece of calcite from a cave near Jerusalem indicate that periods of dry weather coincided with the fall of both the Roman and Byzantine empires. “Whether this is what weakened the Byzantines or not isn’t known, but it is an interesting correlation,” said geologist John Valley, of the University of Wisconsin, Madison.  

Scaffolding is due to be removed from the façade of the Parthenon in the next few days, according to this report from the Athens News Agency.   Listen to a short report on National Public Radio about the return of a Parthenon Marble fragment to Greece. The fragment had been taken by a soldier during World War II.  

Earlier this year, it was announced that 14,300-year-old human coprolites had been uncovered in a cave in Oregon by archaeologist Dennis Jenkins. Here’s how the discovery of the oldest evidence of human presence in North America happened.