Roxanna Brown, director of the Southeast Asian Ceramics Museum at Bangkok University, died of an apparent heart attack in a Federal Detention Center in SeaTac, Washington, early this morning. Brown had been arrested in Seattle as part of a Los Angeles-based federal investigation into the trafficking of Southeast Asian antiquities.

A burial mound in East Sussex, England, is in danger of falling into the sea, so archaeologists began to dig, hoping to uncover the remains of a Bronze Age chief. But more recent pottery and clay pipes indicate that someone had already removed the grave goods.  

Navy technical teams will deploy autonomous undersea vehicles equipped with advanced mine-hunting sensors to survey four historic shipwrecks in Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island.  

Archaeologists from East Carolina University are looking for the remains of North Carolina’s first governor, Richard Caswell.  

Adam Ford, director of the excavation at Australia’s Anne Jones Inn, says that two bullet cartridges at the site match the kind used by police at the time of the gun battle with Ned Kelly’s gang of outlaws.

Archaeologists working in the fourth-century A.D. Pungnap Fortification in southern Seoul, Korea, found what could be the foundation of a Buddhist wooden tower.   

Yesterday it was announced that a bust of Julius Caesar had been found in France’s Rhone River. More details of the discovery are available today in the Times Online.  

Bill Middleton of the Rochester Institute of Technology will use information from NASA satellite images to map the Zapotec landscape in Oaxaca, Mexico. “We can start looking at the relationship between ancient cities and ancient human settlements in a way that no one has really been able to do before,” he said.  

How’s your geometry?  This article in Al-Ahram by mathematics professor Assem Deif investigates the numbers behind the Great Pyramid.

A marble bust of Caesar that could date to the founding of the French town of Arles in 46 B.C. was retrieved from the Rhone River. France’s culture minister, Christine Albanel, called the statue “the most ancient representation known today of Caesar.” Other statues were also found.

A third-century marble slab bearing three Roman nymphs was uncovered in southern Bulgaria. The site was built by Diocletian as a “favorite spot for relaxation and amusement of the Rome aristocrats,” said Mitko Madjarov, director of the Archaeological Museum in Hisar.  

Geologist Bob Burrell tells of his role in the discovery of an early sixteenth-century ship off the coast of Namibia while mining for diamonds.  

Museums around the world are opening new exhibitions. In Israel, a Dead Sea scroll of the Book of Isaiah will go on display this week for the first time in 40 years. The scroll dates to 120 B.C.  

Archaeological treasures from Afghanistan, including the Bactrian Hoard, will begin a tour of the United States later this month. Staff members of Afghanistan’s National Museum locked the Bactrian Hoard in a vault in the presidential palace for safekeeping during the Soviet invasion, where it stayed until 2003.   

The National Archeological Museum in Athens will display more than 1,100 objects of its 6,000-piece collection of Egyptian artifacts for the first time in six years.  

Canadian archaeologist Julio Mercader is opening a museum in Mozambique in order to keep its artifacts from leaving the country.