The timber roof and wooden coffered ceiling of part of a Roman villa thought to have once belonged to Marcus Nonius Balbus, a wealthy governor, has been reconstructed at Herculaneum. Some 250 roof pieces of the House of the Telephus Relief survived because they had been buried in wet beach sand and the hardened ash of Mount Vesuvius. “It’s the first-ever full reconstruction of the timberwork of a Roman roof,” said Andrew Wallace-Hadrill of the Herculaneum Conservation Project. Even some of the paint and gold leaf have survived.

A 5,000-year-old funerary boat belonging to King Den of Egypt’s First Dynasty has been discovered in the cemetery at Abu Rawash, which is located to the northeast of the Giza Plateau. Such boats were believed to carry the king’s soul to the afterlife. This boat’s 11 large planks were unearthed within a flat-roofed burial structure by French archaeologists, and will be displayed at the new National Museum of Egyptian Civilization.

In eastern Croatia, archaeologists have excavated a set of 6,500-year-old antlers that hung on the wall of a prehistoric house. “We have the oldest deer hunting trophy in Croatia,” said Marcel Buric of the Department of Prehistoric Archaeology of the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb. The size of the antlers indicates that the deer would have been large, fast, and hard to catch.

Excavation for a waterline in Winnipeg uncovered the skull of a teenaged pioneer from the nineteenth century. The bones were found in a gravesite that was once part of a large cemetery. “We put the remains back to where they were and moved the waterline,” said archaeologist Brian Smith.

This video clip shows the excavation of a third skeleton at an abandoned convent in Florence. One of the graves is thought to hold the remains of Lisa Gherardini, the proposed model for Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. Gherardini is known to have been buried in the convent in 1542. “I’d say that we’ve got to the really exciting part for researchers,” said Silvano Vinceti, head of the research team.

Several unfinished millstones were found carved into slabs of granite in a boggy area of Ireland’s County Donegal by hikers. The circles of the stones had been marked and chiseled, but some had cracked before completely separated from the parent rock. Others had a hole bored into the center.

Fourteen large storage jars filled with 3,300-year-old burnt wheat have been found at Tel Hatzor, located in northern Israel. The jars had been placed in a storage room in palace-like building. “The water system built at Hatzor is one of the largest and most amazing that has been exposed in the country, and everyone who continues to explore the site finds more and more secrets and details about our past in Israel,” said Zvika Tsuk of the Israel Nature and Parks Authority. The excavation is a joint project between the Parks Authority and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

A team of archaeologists from the U.S. and Iran has been looking for the ruins of the 1,100-year-old port of Siraf in the Persian Gulf. “The U.S. archaeologists have brought special equipment necessary for underwater excavation as we do not have such gear in Iran,” said Mahmud Mireskandari of the Iranian Center for Archaeological Research. Siraf is thought to have been home to 300,000 people and a center of the pearl and silk trade. Much of the city sank into the sea, however, and is now a small town of 7,000.

Archaeologists will search a strategically important stretch of the Hudson River, between the village of Schuylerville and Saratoga National Historic Park, using side-scan sonar and other technologies. They will look for artifacts left behind by British and American soldiers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

There are photographs of “vampire” skeletons unearthed in Bulgaria earlier this year at National Geographic Daily News. Seven hundred years ago, one of the bodies had been stabbed in the chest with an iron rod, and its teeth had been pulled, before it had been buried in a church in Sozopol.