Here’s an update on the Cambodia-Thailand border dispute near the ancient Hindu Preah Vihear temple. The recent tensions began when former Thai foreign minister Noppandon Pattama decided to support Cambodia’s bid to make the temple a UNESCO World Heritage site.

A mosaic floor uncovered by Sir Mortimer Wheeler in the 1930s is no longer there, according to archaeologists who were looking for it in Watford, England, at the site of a second-century manor house. “It does make me worry whether this is a one-off or whether other parts of the old Roman town that were recorded by him are also missing,” said archaeologist Simon West.  

English Heritage and the government have pledged that a new visitors’ center will be built at Stonehenge in time for the 2012 Olympics in London. “We have to do this – there is no alternative,” said Lord Bruce-Lockhart, chairman of English Heritage.  

Underwater archaeologists will investigate the stumps of about 50 prehistoric trees in Loch Tay, Scotland. “We’re looking for remains of people traveling up and down the loch, things they’ve dropped, how they’ve used the loch and settlement alongside or in the water, because crannogs were built out in the water,” said Barrie Andrian, who is director of the Scottish Crannog Centre.  

Workers in Safety Harbor, Florida, discovered a 6,000-year-old knife in the city’s Marshal Street Park, and alerted the curator of archaeology at the Safety Harbor Museum of Regional History. “When they realized what they had, they got on the phone,” said city spokesman Brad Purdy.  

Iowa state archaeologist John Doershuk will survey land slated for a new Crawford County Memorial Hospital. “The potential exists for something like a series of burial mounds to be present that could cause serious discussions to take place. That’s a bridge to cross in the future,” he said.  

American writer Susan Spano moved to Rome and took in the sights, described here.  

The Russian government has confirmed that the bone fragments and teeth found last year in Yekaterinburg belonged to Alexei Nikolayevich and Maria Nikolayevna, children of the last tsar. Today marks the 90^th anniversary of the execution of the Russian Imperial family by the Bolsheviks.

German researchers have discovered the hippodrome of Olympia just east of the stadium, using geomagnetic mapping and georadar. It had been thought that the racetrack disappeared in floods during the Middle Ages, and was only known through the writings of Pausanias, who visited Olympia in the second century A.D.

Thai protesters who want to reclaim the ancient Khmer Preah Vihear temple from Cambodia have created more tension between the two governments.  

The bacteria Helicobacter pylori were found in the gastric tissue of two mummies from a cave in northern Mexico, suggesting that the infant male and adult male suffered from ulcers when they were alive in the fourteenth century.  

The World Archaeological Congress, meeting at University College Dublin, has urged Ireland’s government to develop protection measures for Tara/Skryne Valley, along the controversial M3 motorway through County Meath.   Maggie Ronayne of the National University of Ireland, Galway, has written an editorial on the World Archaeological Congress. She has also written about road development in Ireland, and corruption in development planning processes.  

Archaeologist James Adovasio, scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and others will search Florida’s Gulf Coast for traces of early American Indians this summer. “There is no question in almost all archaeological minds that the earliest examples of North American occupation are underwater,” commented Dave Watters, curator and head of anthropology at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh.  

Artifacts will be recovered from the USS Torrent, which sank 140 years ago near Port Graham, Alaska, while carrying federal troops to the new territory. The Coast Guard will assist Alaska state archaeologist Dave McMahon and others with the job.   

C. Brian Rose, president of the Archaeological Institute of America, has been appointed Deputy Directory of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Congratulations!