Maya cities in the northern lowlands of the Yucatan were occupied 1,000 years earlier than previously thought, according to research by George Bay of Millsaps College and Tomas Gallareta of Mexico’s National Institute of Archaeology and History. It had been thought that the Maya moved north after cities in the southern lowlands were abandoned ca. 900 A.D.

More than 900 artifacts seized by customs agents in Texas, Arizona, and Toronto have been handed over to Mexico. Among the objects are wooden spears, arrow heads, bows, fiber sandals, and textiles that were probably looted from caves in the state of Coahuila.

And, more than 2,000 artifacts were returned to Iraq from Jordan yesterday.  

Four hundred year’s worth of correspondence, notes, maps, and bills, and documents regarding slavery and the Civil War, have been found in the attic at the Poplar Grove plantation in Maryland, owned by members of the Emory family who settled there in the 1660s. “You really get a sense of the range of America through these papers,” said Edward Papenfuse, director of the Maryland State Archives, where the papers will be kept.  

Stone tools that may have been made and used by Neanderthals have been dug up at Beedings, in southern England. More that 2,300 tools were originally found there, but they had been thought to be fakes.  

German scientists have studied the 2,300-year-old remains of a Scythian man found in the Altai Mountains in 2006. Minimal wear of the man’s teeth showed that he ate mostly meat, and he had serious arthritis, chronic inflammation of the sinuses, a middle ear infection, and a healed broken arm.  

Construction of an elevated commuter rail system in Honolulu will most likely unearth iwi, or burial remains. “Presumably the city’s archaeologists have been doing their homework and they know were to find the sand deposits and where burials are likely,” said Thomas Dye, president of the Society for Hawaiian Archaeology.

The heart of Frederic Chopin lies within a pillar in a Polish church, where it is preserved in a liquid presumed to be cognac. Polish doctors would like to test tissue from the organ, to see if the pianist and composer suffered from the genetic illness, cystic fibrosis. 

The world’s oldest wheat comes from Çatalhöyük, according to DNA anaylsis of 8,500-year-old grains from the Neolithic settlement in southern Anatolia.

At a conference of Egyptologists, Rodolfo Fattovich of the Oriental Studies University of Naples, and Kathryn Bard of Boston University, presented their preliminary findings on the rigging ropes they discovered in a cave three years ago. “No ropes on this scale and this old have been so well preserved in their original context – in Egypt or elsewhere,” said Bard. Don’t miss the slideshow to the right of the article.  

A grand jury in Kentucky has indicted an Ohio man for removing an object of antiquity because he and others took a boulder from the Ohio River. The boulder is carved with a “crude face,” and the names of families who paddled out to the rock in the early 1900s. The rock is listed on Kentucky’s antiquities register.    The New York Times also has a story on “The Case of the Pilfered Rock.”   

A Bodhisattva Maitreya statue crafted in the second century A.D. was uncovered at the Badal Pur Buddhist monastery in Pakistan’s Taxila Valley.  

Bones, pottery, and the foundations of buildings were uncovered during the renovation of Front Street in Natchitoches, Louisiana. The city was founded in 1714.  

Primary school students will help test a summer solstice theory about Stonehenge this weekend. “For years scholars have claimed that the prehistoric people who built Stonehenge possessed advanced knowledge of mathematics, geometry, and astronomy, but with the help of primary school pupils we will lay out the monument’s design using only the most basic of techniques,” said John Hill of the University of Liverpool.