A scandal involving sex, blackmail, and corruption has hit Greece’s culture ministry, prompting two suicide attempts. Archaeologist Evi Tzekou reportedly attempted to blackmail Christos Zachopoulos, the ministry’s married chief of staff, with tapes of the two of them having sex. Some allege that she did so “on behalf of businesses wanting to clear archaeologically listed land for commercial use.” Here’s the latest on the case from Kathimerini.

The Greek newspaper also reports that a “family of farmers” was arrested for using a bulldozer to dig up an archaeological site in central Greece.

Dugout canoes that could be 1,000 years old appeared in southwest Florida’s Lake Trafford as the water levels dropped. Water levels are currently rising, but scientists collected samples from the canoes, and will have radiocarbon dates for them in a couple of months.

A virtual reconstruction of the Via Flaminia as it looked in the first century A.D. has opened at Rome’s Museum of the Diocletian Baths.

Read this firsthand account of sailing from Denmark to Dublin aboard the replica Viking long ship The Sea Stallion from Glendalough.

The sculptures known as the “Terracotta Tennis Warriors” combine the features of players such as Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, and Andy Roddick, and the style of China’s “Terracotta Army.” Get a better look at the figures here.

An intact 4,500-year-old tomb belonging to a priest named Neferinpu was unearthed in Abusir, Egypt, by Czech archaeologists.

Some Pleistocene cave bears may have given humans a little more competition for food than previously thought, according to a new study of bear bones from the Carpathian Mountains.

The firm Headland Archaeology has been keeping busy in its home city of Edinburgh, Scotland. The latest excavation is at the Grassmarket, where grain and livestock were bought and sold several days a week between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries.

The New York Times has picked up on the study of soil samples at the Maya site of Chunchucmil. Samples taken from a possible market area there contained high levels of phosphorus, indicating an abundance of organic materials had decayed there. Soils from modern Maya markets have similar test results.

The new theory on Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto‘s route through northern Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, and Arkansas, where he died in 1542, has reappeared again, as well. Archaeologists have different theories about his route, and what sorts of objects indicate a Spanish presence at a particular site.