Analysis of residues of Roman garum, or fish sauce, found at the bottom of seven jars from Pompeii suggests that the date of August 24, 79 A.D. for the fatal eruption of Mount Vesuvius, recorded by Pliny the Younger, is accurate. The sauce had been made with a fish species that was abundant in the area during July and early August.

Investigators have concluded that someone forgot to turn off a vacuum cleaner aboard the Cutty Sark, starting last year’s fire that gutted the nineteenth-century tea clipper. Security guards failed to follow safety procedures that might have caught the problem early.  

The Italian province of Bolzano has agreed to pay a finder’s fee of $250,000 to German hiker Erika Simon. She and her husband, Helmut, discovered Oetzi the Iceman in the Italian Alps in 1991. Mr. Simon died in 2004.  

How did two ancient Egyptian skulls come to be buried in the front yard of a house in Manchester, England? A major police investigation cracked the case.  

Archaeologists have expressed concern that a proposed landfill in Ireland’s County Dublin could destroy a prehistoric “large-ditched enclosure of the Tara or Navan kind.” The site is named Nevitt, which is derived from a Celtic word meaning “the sacred place.”  

Archaeologist Bradley T. Lepper discusses an article on identifying ethnic groups of the past from American Antiquity for his column in The Columbus Dispatch.

The port of the ancient Phoenician city of Tharros has been discovered off the coast of Sardinia, in the Mistras Lagoon.

A 3,000-year-old knife and other artifacts were found in the Firse Sten tomb in Sweden. The tomb is 5,000 years old, but was reused during the Bronze Age.  

Archaeologist David Nichols says that as much as 70% of the cultural material has been plundered from Mojave National Preserve’s 1,600 documented sites. “It’s awful. And because the place is so vast we never, ever catch anyone in the act of doing anything,” he said.  

Tiles that once formed the edge of eaves on a building at Poongnap Toseong, South Korea, were unearthed by the Hanshin University Museum.  Poongnap Toseong is an earthen wall from the first capital of Baekje, which was one of the Three Kingdoms of Korea, from 18 B.C. to 660 A.D.   

Here’s a summary of what’s been published so far about the sixteenth-century Portuguese shipwreck discovered off Namibia’s Skeleton Coast. The ship was probably carrying its heavy load of gold, silver, copper, tin, and ivory to India or Asia.   

A man in Texas called archaeologists after he found spear points in a load of topsoil from the banks of the Guadalupe River.  

The Lone Star Flight Museum in Galveston, Texas, was damaged by a storm surge from Hurricane Ike, but the museum’s irreplaceable World War II planes were moved to safety in time. “We were hit hard, but we’ll be back,” said museum president Larry Gregory.  

The remains of Australian and British World War I soldiers buried in mass graves at Fromelles, France, will be reburied in individual graves at a new military cemetery. No decision has been made at this time as to whether or not to try to identify the remains.  

Scholars are looking for missing pages of the 1,000-year-old Hebrew Bible known as the Crown of Aleppo. The codex had been held in an iron chest in a synagogue in Syria for centuries, until 1947.   

Fragments of copper sheeting that may have come from the HMS Erebus and the HMS Terror were found by Parks Canada archaeologists. The ships carried the 128-man crew of Sir John Franklin’s doomed Arctic expedition in 1845.