Italian police discovered an illegal excavation near the Via Tiburtina, leading to an investigation and the recovery of some 18,000 artifacts looted from archaeological sites near Rome. No arrests have been made, but the names of five people have been turned over to prosecutors. Some of the artifacts were found while searching suspects’ homes. Their notebooks led police to additional illegal excavation sites in the Aniene River valley.

Egyptian authorities have recovered 40 pieces of Pharaonic Shawabti figurines  that had been stolen last year from Cairo University excavation warehouses in Saqqara. The artifacts had been hidden in the sand, along with a small limestone door and two reliefs engraved with hieroglyphs.

In preparation for a symposium on the disappearance of Amelia Earhart, The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) has released information on the artifacts recovered from Nikumaroro Island. Researchers think Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan might have crashed landed on the Pacific island in 1937. One of the objects is a glass jar that resembles a jar for a freckle vanishing cream popular in the 1930s. The castaways may have boiled drinking water in two other glass bottles held in a campfire with a handle made of twisted wire. “The bottles and other artifacts we have found at the Seven Site tell a fascinating, but still incomplete, story of ingenuity, survival, and, ultimately, tragedy. Whether it is Amelia Earhart’s story remains to be seen,” said Ric Gillespie, executive director of TIGHAR.  Here are some more photographs of the artifacts.

Simona Minozzi of the University of Pisa questions an interpretation which suggests that a plague victim buried in a mass grave in the sixteenth century was treated as if the living thought she was a vampire. The woman’s skeleton was unearthed on a Venetian island with her jaw wide open and a brick in her mouth. The grave was surrounded by stones, bricks, and tiles, so Minozzi thinks the brick may have simply fallen into the corpse’s open mouth.

The 1,600-year-old mosaic floor of a synagogue at Tiberias Archaeological Park in northern Israel has been badly damaged by vandals, who scratched part of the floor and hammered a hole in it, smashing tiles into dust. The mosaic and rock walls were also spray painted with graffiti. “It was the best of Jewish art of its time, of the late Roman and early Byzantine period,” said Uzi Dahari, deputy director of the Israel Antiquities Authority.

A tomb slab thought to be early evidence of the presence of Jewish culture on the Iberian Peninsula has been excavated from the site of a Roman villa. Dated to about 390 A.D., the slab is inscribed in Hebrew with the name “Yehiel,” and other letters yet to be translated. It is the earliest-known archaeological evidence for a Jewish resident in Portugal, and the only Jewish artifact to have been discovered in a Roman villa, according to Dennis Graen of Friedrich Schiller University, Jena.

A hepatitis B virus known as the genotype C2 sequence has been found in the sixteenth-century mummy of a child from Korea. Scientists from Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Seoul National University were able to map the entire ancient hepatitis B viral genome, which is thought to have been common in Southeast Asia. The information could help researchers understand how the virus evolved and originally spread.

Archaeologists working with UNESCO and the Jamaican National Heritage Trust are submitting Port Royal to the World Heritage List. The British city was a busy port of 7,000 people in the sixteenth century, known as the “wickedest city on Earth,” where pirates could find rum, women, and repairs for their ships. Two-thirds of Port Royal was submerged in 1692 by an earthquake and tsunami. The archaeologists are working to make the site a sustainable tourist attraction in order to assist the people of a nearby fishing village.