Two men arrested in Pakistan for carrying hundreds of looted Buddhist artifacts in a truck told police where to find additional artifacts stored in a warehouse in Karachi. All of the Gandhara objects have been handed over to archaeologists to be unpacked and recorded. “We are handling [the relics] with care since pieces were broken during offloading,” said Mohammad Shah Bokhari, director of the National Museum.

Archaeologist Ashley White has found the Indian village of Potano, where Spanish explorer Hernando De Soto made contact in Marion County, Florida, in 1539. White discovered medieval coins, Italian glass beads, bits of Spanish chain mail, pottery, nails, and a jaw bone from an Old World pig. The only other known De Soto site in Florida is in Tallahassee, where he wintered with his troops in 1540. “It gets rid of the guesswork now on the route through Marion County. Now, we know for sure he came up through the Black Sink Prairie to Orange Lake and looped around through Micanopy,” he explained. Other archaeologists assisted White with authenticating the De Soto artifacts. “Like other Spanish explorers, the De Soto expedition brought trade goods, things they could give the Indians to get them to be their friends, to pay them off, to provide bearers to carry supplies, to get food and to get consorts. When De Soto arrived, the Indians would have been cleaning hides, making pottery, carrying on with their lives. All that would change when De Soto shows up,” said Jerald Milanich, curator emeritus in archaeology of the Florida Museum of Natural History.

DNA analysis has shown that a skeleton uncovered beneath the foundations of a 3,000-year-old roundhouse on an island in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides was buried with a lower jaw, arm bone, and thighbone from different people. A second skeleton has been found in the village in a similar condition.  In addition, the researchers think that the bodies had been tied up in tight in mummy bundles many years after being preserved in nearby peat bogs. “Altogether, these results have completely changed our ideas about treatment of the dead in prehistoric Britain. Other archaeologists are now identifying similar examples now that the breakthrough has been made – beforehand, it was just unthinkable,” said Mike Parker-Pearson of the University of Sheffield.

Researchers from the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery will soon land at the island of Nikumaroro, where they will continue to search for evidence of aviator Amelia Earhart, who disappeared 75 years ago while attempting to fly around the world at the equator. They hope to find remains of her plane, based upon a photograph taken of the island’s shoreline a few months after her disappearance. Discovery News has photographs and diagrams to explain the operation.

Officials in Pakistan have seized dozens of artifacts that were plundered from the “Taliban-infested” northwestern section of the country. The police found the 2,000-year-old Gandhara statues, bronzes, and plaques mixed in with plastic and wooden objects while searching a flat-bed truck in Karachi. An investigation is underway, but Qasim Ali Qasim, director of the Sindh province archaeology department, thinks the artifacts were smuggled into Karachi one or two pieces at a time before being shipped out through Afghanistan. “The thieves and mafias involved in this business dig in the northwest, which is filled with Gandhara sites with little control by the authorities,” he explained.

Reports from China claim that a sealed bronze wine vessel discovered in a tomb in Shaanxi province contains liquid wine. The tomb dates to the Zhou Dynasty (1046 to 771 B.C.), and contained six vessels. The container in question has not been opened.

A sixteenth-century map created by cartographer Martin Waldseemueller has been found between the pages of a nineteenth-century book in Germany. Waldseemueller is said to be the first to document and name America, which he depicts as a “boomerang shape.” Only four other copies of the map are known to exist. “It seems to be a second edition and this is a unique map. Until now, we have no signs for a further map like this,” said Sven Kuttner of Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich.

Danish archaeologists from Aarhus University estimate there are 200 houses at the elite site they are excavating in northern Germany. They think they may have found the Viking town of Sliasthorp, which according to eighth-century texts, was a strategic military center for the first Scandinavian kings. They have also uncovered a long house that was burned down in the tenth century. Written sources indicate that Sliasthorp was attacked at that time. “Both Dannevirke and Hedeby – two of the world’s largest monuments from the Viking Age – could be controlled from this place,” said archaeologist Andres Dobat.

Some hydrologists and ecologists are concerned that new water systems installed at the Giza Plateau could erode the bedrock under the Sphinx and the pyramids, leading to their collapse. Others say the new system, which controls drainage from a nearby village, will stop automatically when the subterranean water levels reach a safe depth. “Such levels are natural,” said the Minister of State for Antiquities, Mohamed Ibrahim.