The remains of 20,000-year-old huts lived in by hunter-gatherers have been unearthed in eastern Jordan. “It may not look very impressive to the untrained eye, but it is one of the densest and largest Palaeolithic open-air sites in the region,” said Lisa Maher of the University of California, Berkeley. These long-term residences were in use 10,000 years before the practice of agriculture began.

Scientists have analyzed a grisly collection of mummies created by Italian anatomist Giovan Battista Rini in the early nineteenth-century. “They have a wooden consistency,” said forensic anthropologist Dario Piombino-Mascali of the Institute for Mummies and the Iceman in Bolzano.

Archaeologists at Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia plantation, are excavating in the area known as Mulberry Row, a road lined with buildings in the slave quarters. “We’re getting the information here that we would need if we were able to reconstruct Mulberry Row,” said research manager Sara Bon-Harper.

The second conservation phase of the Khufu solar boat project, which is being conducted by the Egyptian government and a team from Japan’s Wasida University, is set to begin. The two 4,500-year-old boats were discovered in 1954 in a pit next to the Great Pyramid.

Early this morning, thieves wielding hammers broke into the Ancient Olympia Museum and stole between 60 and 70 artifacts after tying up the one employee on duty. Greece’s culture minister, Pavlous Geroulanos, has tendered his resignation over the lack of security.

An Iron Age army made up of life-sized stone warriors has been reassembled from thousands of fragments discovered on the island of Sardinia. The 2,700-year-old statues had been placed over the graves of elite individuals from the Nuragic culture, and may have been intended to represent them, or to act as their body guards.

The excavation of  “the old meetinghouse,” the first Tabernacle of the LDS church in Provo, Utah, continues. The nineteenth-century building had been torn down in 1919. “All of the descriptions you read in their journals say it was built with love, that they were also excited about building this, about having a meeting place where they could come,” said Richard Talbot of Brigham Young University.

More than 100 sets of human remains that were excavated from Niah Cave in the 1950s could be returned to Borneo. The skeletons were taken to the United States for study.