The Slemani Museum in the Kurdistan region of Iraq has taken the controversial position of buying back looted artifacts from smugglers. “The position of not just UNESCO but the international museum community is that we don’t buy back looted objects because it encourages looting,” said Stuart Gibson of the UNESCO Sulaimaniya Museum Project.

Dominic Perring of University College London thinks that the hundreds of skulls unearthed in the City of London could have belonged to Queen Boudica’s rebel Iceni tribesmen. He thinks the young men may have been enslaved by the Romans and forced to build their new military base.

Using remote-sensing technologies, a team of researchers has found traces of several walls, ditches, and post pits at Ireland’s Neolithic tumulus at Knowth.

More than 20,000 Eskimo artifacts dating to 500 A.D. have been returned to Alaska from the Harvard Peabody Museum, where they have been housed since the 1950s.

Students from the University of Arizona study the variety of food remains they excavate at Montpelier, the Virginia home of James and Dolley Madison.

At the core of Mexico’s Pyramid of the Sun, archaeologists have found what could be the original foundation dedicatory cache, in addition to seven human burials. The cache contained a green serpentine stone mask, ceremonial pots, and the bones of an eagle and other animals.

The Tehran Times reports that ancient coins smuggled out of Iran are being sold across the Afghanistan border. Excavation in the historic Sistan-Baluchestan Province stopped in 2008 due to a lack of funding, leaving the sites vulnerable to plundering and vandalism.

Flood waters from Tropical Storm Irene damaged New York’s Schoharie Crossing State Historic Site, and revealed two stone foundations associated with an eighteenth-century fort. A Mohawk Iroquois village stood nearby.

A second batch of artifacts and human remains will be returned to Peru by Yale University this week. The items will be taken to Machu Picchu’s Casa Concha Museum.

Archaeologists are using ground-penetrating radar to survey the ancient city of Isos, located in southern Turkey. Excavations at the site have uncovered ruins of baths and mosaics depicting Artemis.

Brett Dufur, a former mayor of Rocheport, Missouri, made it his mission to find ten boxes of artifacts that were lost after an excavation 29 years ago. The objects had not been processed, and therefore were not registered in any databases. “The town has burned to the ground several times, so we’re literally like a historic town with amnesia, because we’ve lost so much of our past,” he said.

Archaeologist Tony Pollard of Glasgow University plans to excavate battlefields of the Falklands War, which took place in 1982. “One of the worries will be that we will be over there to look for controversy, but it is certainly not on my agenda,” he said.