An engraved marble block stolen from the ancient Assyrian capital of Nimrud has been returned to Iraq from Syria.

Here’s another article on the wooden coffins discovered near the necropolis of Abydos in southern Egypt. The coffins came from a complex of 13 tombs dating to the Old Kingdom, or 3000 B.C.  

Trash from Naples is being dumped on the unexcavated portion of Pompeii, and a state of emergency has been declared in order to get more funding for the site’s faded frescoes and crumbling buildings. “To call the situation intolerable doesn’t go far enough,” said Culture Minister Sandro Bondi.  

New excavations are planned for the tunnel beneath the Pyramid of the Sun outside Mexico City. “We think it had a ritual purpose. Offerings were placed at the very end of the tunnel as part of the pyramid’s construction process,” said archaeologist Alejandro Sarabia. Teotihuacan was abandoned around 700 A.D.  

UNESCO voted yesterday to add Preah Vihear temple to the World Heritage list. In 1962, the International Court of Justice ruled that the 900-year-old Hindu temple, situated near the Cambodian-Thai border, belongs to Cambodia. Thailand’s opposition party has used the nomination of the temple as a political tool to attempt to undermine the current government.   This article lists more sites that made the cut, and has information about the Preah Vihear temple itself.   Three sites, one each from Mauritius, Saudi Arabia, and China, have also been added to the UNESCO World Heritage list.   

More information of the “first Parisians,” hunter-gatherers who camped along the Seine, is available at National Geographic News.

Canadian archaeologists excavating at Ucupe in northern Peru have discovered a 1,600-year-old tomb. The deceased was wearing a gold-colored mask and copper crowns, earrings, nose pieces, and ear flaps! Slight translation error with archaeologist saying “It will be a real pleasure to manipulate the data and compare them to sites like Sipan.” We suspect “analyze” is closer to what he’ll be doing than “manipulate.”

Here’s a biblical artifact with no known source!  It’s a painted stone tablet “probably found near the Dead Sea in Jordan” that was “found about a decade ago and bought from a Jordanian antiquities dealer by an Israeli-Swiss collector who kept it in his Zurich home.” The New York Times has a long article about it, but you will have to register to read it. The article says the painted text refers to a messiah who will rise three days after death, but pre-dates Jesus by a few decades. The Times article will likely be recycled in non-registration required venues over the coming days (such as the International Herald Tribune), for now, many shorter wire service items are out there. Ha’aretz has an okay summary.

This article discusses cultural resource management, or contract archaeology, work in Texas and especially Austin, noting “sometimes the finds are significant, such as a 19th-century limestone beer vault built by a German brewer that archaeologists uncovered when digging in the area around City Hall.”

Six skulls and a human ear bone held by the National Museums of Scotland and Edinburgh University are being handed over to a delegation of the Ngarrindjeri, an Aboriginal people from Australia.

Jeff Thorsen and his father revisited Grand Meadow, an important chert quarry in Minnesota, in the company of state archaeologist David Mather. The Thorsens sold the site to the Archaeology Conservancy in the 1990s. Grand Meadow chert has been found at sites throughout the Midwest.

Young Max Farrow “was digging around for Egyptian tombs in the back garden,” says his mom. No tombs, but a 300-year-old clay tobacco pipe.

A star exhibit at the Albert Hall Museum in Jaipur, Rajasthan, is a 2,200-year-old Egyptian mummy that was brought here from Cairo by the Jaipur royal family in 1887 from Cairo. As usual, children are fascinated by the mummy. This report notes “Ten-year-old Aarsha Rashid, from Udaipur said she is having a tough time to convince her little brother that all mummies are not evil.”