Germany has returned artifacts that were looted from Afghanistan’s National Museum  during the civil war of the early 1990s. Tens of thousands of artifacts are still missing.

Last year, France returned 297 royal protocol books to Korea. Now, the National Museum of Korea has made some of them available to view online.

Saxon coins and a silver pin were stolen from a locked cabinet in the Museum of St Albans in St Albans, England. The artifacts had been excavated from the grounds of the St Albans Abbey in 1969.

A large Byzantine cemetery  in Istanbul has been plundered repeatedly since 1995, when excavations by the local Archaeology Museum ended.

In Spain, the skeletal remains of 17 women shot by General Francisco Franco’s forces in 1937 are being exhumed from a mass grave. Known as the “17 Roses,” the women were killed for being related to people who opposed Franco’s regime.

A fourteenth-century stone road has been discovered at the southern gate of Vietnam’s Ho Citadel. The road was probably used by the royal family to travel two kilometers to the Nam Giao worship platform at Don Son Mountain.

The New York Times offers a wrap-up of recent DNA studies into the mixture of modern humans, Neanderthals, and Denisovans. “In a sense, we are a hybrid species,” said Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Tuesday, January 31, 2012. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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