Scientists have determined that the skeletal remains discovered in Peru near the city of Chiclayo belonged to a high-status woman who was a priestess in the Lambayeque or Sican culture. She had been buried with seven other individuals, a llama, and a variety of objects, including a golden scepter, shells, and ceramics. She was between 25 and 30 years old at the time of her death in the thirteenth century A.D.

Alfonso Manas of the University of Granada suggests that a statue from Germany’s Museum für Kunst und Gewerbein is a likeness of a female gladiator. The figure is of a woman with a bandaged knee wearing only a loincloth. She is holding a curved object that in the past has been interpreted as a strigil, which is used in bathing. Manas thinks the item in her hand is a sica, a short sword used by gladiators. While her pose is similar to one taken by a victorious fighter, her lack of protective gear is curious for a gladiator, but could have indicated her low social status and have been meant to titillate. The provenance of the statue is unknown.

Four rock-cut tombs from the Greek and Byzantine eras were found in Alexandria’s eastern necropolis  during an excavation conducted by Egypt’s Ministry of State for Antiquities, ahead of a planned building project. One of the tombs features an open courtyard and walls coated with plaster and traces of red paint. Human remains and pottery have also been recovered. The site will become a protected area.

A section of the Palladion, the court used by the ancient Greeks for trying manslaughter cases, has been uncovered in downtown Athens. The room contained ceramic ballot boxes and coins, which may have been used by the judges to vote for innocence or guilt.

There are photographs of some of the 3,000 fragments of Buddha statues unearthed in China last month at National Geographic News. The statues are estimated to be 1,500 years old. Scientists are trying to figure out how they came to be buried together in a pit.

Kevin Hatala of George Washington University compared the 1.5 million-year-old footprints uncovered in Kenya at the Ileret site with footprints made by 38 Daasanach herders now living in Kenya who don’t wear shoes. His findings suggest that the hominid that left the prints may have had a gait different from modern humans. The footprints may have been left by Homo erectus, thought to be a direct human ancestor, or by Paranthropus boisei, an offshoot on the human family tree.

A team of researchers from the University of Cincinnati and the Southern Albania Neolithic Archaeological Project is investigating the rise of farming  during the Early Neolithic period in southeastern Albania, at the site of Vashtëmi. The 8,500-year-old site, located near a wetland, has yielded plant and animal remains. The farmers grew emmer, einkorn, and barley, and raised pigs, cattle, and sheep or goats. The bones of wild animals have also been found, suggesting that the early farmers were not completely reliant upon domesticated food sources.

Swiss archaeologists have opened the grave believed to belong to Jürg Jenatsch, a Protestant preacher remembered for his fighting skills and ruthlessness during the Thirty Years’ War. He later converted to Catholicism, was assassinated in 1639, and then buried in Chur Cathedral. The researchers want to confirm the identity of the bones in the grave, which were exhumed once before in 1959, with DNA testing. “Jenatsch was most certainly a man of his times – and those times were characterized by instability and a crisis of identities,” explained historian Randolph Head of the University of California, Riverside.

Fangjin Zhang, a student at England’s Loughborough Design School, is using scanners and 3D printers to try to restore damaged artifacts in the Emperor Qianlong Garden in China’s Forbidden City. The scans of damaged areas are “cleaned up” and then reproduced at a much lower cost than traditional restoration techniques. A similar process has been used to create reproductions of artifacts for traveling museum exhibitions and scaled-down replicas of dinosaurs.