The British Museum is trying to raise enough money to purchase a brass astrolabe quadrant unearthed three years ago in an old inn outside the city walls of Canterbury. The astrolabe has been dated to about 1388, and is thought to have been carried as an every-day item by a cleric or merchant.

Archaeologist Mark Horton spotted a floor made of Portland cement at England’s Bristol Docks. The floor is thought to be the first industrial use of the material, invented by Joseph Aspdin in 1824. The floor once supported a ship-building factory designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel in 1839. “We already associate Brunel with a long list of world-firsts, but now we can add cement to this. His genius lay in identifying the revolutionary materials that built the modern world,” Horton said.

In Cambridge, the foundations of the world’s largest telescope from the late Victorian era were uncovered. “With its perfect circle looking in the ground rather like a prehistoric monument, in its time the telescope was referred to as an ‘imperial philosophical machine’: a tool by which western science could measure or control universal space/time. Interestingly enough, this is also exactly how many archaeologists interpret Stonehenge and other early monuments!” exclaimed Christopher Evans, director of the University of Cambridge Archaeological Unit.

A cave in Oregon has yielded 14,300-year-old feces thought to be the oldest biological evidence of humans in North America. “The pre-Clovis genie is sort of out of the bottle, and there’s no way of stuffing it back in,” commented Southern Methodist University archaeologist David Meltzer.

Two miles east of Old Jerusalem, Oded Lipschits of Tel Aviv University was excavating what was thought to be a Judean palace from 700 B.C. Now he thinks the building was used by Assyrian rulers. “The Assyrians kept a watchful eye, but didn’t let the locals feel a dominant foreign presence,” he explained.

Colonial-era root cellars built by Moravians have been discovered at a building site at Moravian College. The Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission had recommended that the root cellars be preserved, but the school has decided to dismantle them.

New excavations will take place at Rome’s Circus Maximus. “We will clean up the whole site to make it practicable and legible, and give it a simple curved enclosure,” said Eugenio La Rocca of Sapienza University.

Poor kid. Even Indiana Jones was only nicknamed Indiana.

Woolly mammoth populations declined as warming temperatures shrank their habitats at the end of the last Ice Age, and then human hunters finished them off, according to a new study led by Spanish researcher David Nogués-Bravo of the Museo Nacional Ciencias Naturales.

Excavators in Oxford, England, have uncovered a mass grave containing seven sets of human remains. “We’ve got legs and arms and torsos at the moment but we haven’t got any full skeletons,” quipped contract archaeologist Sean Wallis.  

A tiny silver Christian cross was unearthed in Nova Scotia at Grand-Pré, near the supposed site of St-Charles-des-Mines, an Acadian parish church. The Acadians were deported from Nova Scotia in 1755.  

FBI agents have determined that a parachute discovered in southwestern Washington did not belong to D.B. Cooper, who hijacked a plane in 1971, jumped from it, and disappeared.  

Rock art in northern China has been damaged by erosion, human activity, and a lack of protection. “Cracks, falling pieces, and collapses have made the previously clear pictures difficult to identify and some have even completely disappeared,” said archaeologist Zhou Xinghua.  

The lighting of the Olympic flame in Athens has sparked this essay on the pursuit of athletics by the wealthy in ancient Greece.  

Here’s another article on the repatriation of cultural artifacts around the world.