The Boston Museum of Fine Arts will return the top half of the Weary Herakles statue to Turkey, where it will be reunited with its bottom half at the Antalya Museum. The top half was purchased in 1981; the bottom half was excavated from the site of Perge in 1980.

A tiny, 2,000-year-old golden bell was found in a drainage channel near the Old City of Jerusalem. The bell was probably sewn onto the garment of a high official.

The ancient city of Shekhem, located in the West Bank, is being excavated in part by the Palestinian Department of Antiquities. “The local population has started very well to understand the value of the site, not only the historical value, but also the value for their own identity,” said Gerrit van der Kooij of Leiden University.

An examination of elite Egyptian weapons from the Bronze Age shows that many of them were used in battle.

Two skulls discovered in a sand quarry in Somerset, England, in 1928 have been radiocarbon dated and found to be 10,000 years old. “Such open-air cemeteries are extremely rare in Europe and this is the only one known from the UK,” said Richard Brunning of the Somerset County Council’s Heritage Service.

A 10,000-year-old camp site has been unearthed in New Brunswick, indicating that Canada’s First Nations lived among the ice. “We had individual spear points that we knew were that old. But it’s just we never had the sites to give us contextual information – like what people were eating, how they were living, the structures they may have been living in, what the population size may have been,” said archaeologist Brent Suttie.

Why did the Inca build Machu Picchu? National Geographic Daily News explains five top theories.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Friday, July 22, 2011. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

Comments posted here do not represent the views or policies of the Archaeological Institute of America.