Thailand’s Foreign Minister, Noppadon Pattama, has resigned his post amid the opposition party’s calls for his impeachment, according to this report from Thailand. Mr. Noppadon is said to have approved a new map drawn by the Cambodian government and supported the Cambodian application to have the Preah Vihear temple listed as a World Heritage site.   Former Cambodian king Norodom Sihanouk said the controversy “causes undeserved and anachronistic grief to Cambodia and its people.”

Turkish development company Sultanahmet Turizm A.S. is building an additional 60 rooms at the Four Seasons Hotel in Istanbul. The annex sits atop and next to the ruins of the fourth-century palace built by Constantine the Great, and the company is also creating an archaeological park, employing 25 archaeologists. Gunhan Danisman, a member of the Chamber of Architects of Turkey, says the project is “unthinkable.” He adds as a comparison, “Go to the Roman Forum and start excavating to build a hotel.”  

It’s official: The Lupa Capitolina, the life-sized bronze statue of a she-wolf suckling two infants, dates to the thirteenth century; the twins themselves date to the fifteenth century. It had been said that this symbol of Rome was Etruscan, and forged in the fifth century B.C.  

In Copacabana, Bolivia, Sergio Chavez of Central Michigan University is excavating a ceremonial site dating back 3,000 years. “Starting from the oldest period, we have the Yayamama. And gradually we have … the Tiwanaku some 1,000 years ago, the Inca, the colonial period, the hacienda era, and the republic,” he said. The area will eventually be used as a market.   

Fragments of scrolls from Herculaneum will be scanned by an MRI machine at the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory in Richland, Washington.   

Interest in eating local foods prompted this article on hunter-gatherers. “The South Florida Indians ate anything slower and/or dumber than they were,” archaeologist Jerald Milanch told the Sun-Sentinel.  

Cobblestones laid in the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries will have to be removed from the Parade Ground at Ireland’s Kilkenny Castle to make way for a drainage trench. Much of the historic surface will remain untouched underground.  

Burning incense set off the fire alarms at England’s Royal Albert Memorial Museum during a cleansing ceremony performed by a delegation of Ngarrindjeri people from Australia. The museum was handing over four skulls that had been taken by explorers 140 years ago.

An intact Etruscan tomb containing seven funerary urns was unearthed in the central Italian city of Perugia. The urns had been placed on benches running along two sides of the tomb.

Until last month, divers were restricted to just 620 miles of Greek coastline. Now, new legislation reportedly permits tourists to explore Greek waters freely. “What is really bad is that this legislation not only contradicts constitutional laws that go back to the foundation of the Greek state on how our archaeology should be protected, but it also allows people to dive at great depths with the latest technology,” said Katerina Delaporta, head of the department of marine antiquity at the ministry of culture.  

Sixty artifacts confiscated from Italian smuggler Ugo Bagnato in South Florida will be returned to Colombia. “He had absolute callous disregard for what they were. He was only interested in money,” commented Carol Damian of Florida International University.  

Road construction in Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula has revealed a nineteenth-century Dena’ina house pit, cache pits for storing fish, and fire pits. “We found a spear point made of antler, and a harpoon tip also made of antler which was possibly used for hunting seal. We found bits of iron, some shards of Russian ceramics, and some window glass and bottle glass from rum or other spirits. It looked like they had fashioned a scraper from the glass,” said state archaeologist Dan Thompson.  

Drum roll please…The crystal skulls housed at the British Museum and the Smithsonian Institution are “of relatively modern manufacture,” according to a study published in the Journal of Archaeological Science.   

Anthropologist Meredith F. Small celebrates summertime barbecues as the perfect time to remember the human dietary shift to cooked meat at least 700,000 years ago.  

Visit the UNESCO World Heritage Center website to learn which sites have been added to the World Heritage List. Today’s new inductees include Baha’i holy places in Israel, Chief Roi Mata’s Domain in Vanuatu, and the historic city center of Berat in Albania.  

The World Heritage Committee has also criticized the restoration of Skellig Michael, a sixth-century monastic outpost on an island off Ireland’s Kerry coast. An altar has been destroyed, and sections of the South Peak oratory were reconstructed, rather than conserved.  

English Heritage has created a list of registered historic battlefields “at risk” of development, farming, or unregulated metal detecting.   England’s underwater heritage is also disintegrating. The wreck of the first British-made submarine, the AI, has been harmed by divers and shellfish fishing.  

Four burials that could predate the Roman invasion in 43 A.D. have been found in central England. “We’ll try for a radio-carbon date off them to get a more clear idea if they are late Iron Age or early Roman,” said James Harvey of the University of Leicester.