A wide range of foods may have been traded by the ancient Greeks, along with plenty of wine. Scientists have found DNA traces from nuts and herbs, olives, and ginger on jar fragments using methods borrowed from police forensics experts.

Here’s more information on the American Embassy’s involvement with the excavation of Mes Aynak, a Buddhist site situated on a copper mine, and other cultural heritage projects in Afghanistan.

Six 3,000-year-old wooden boats, textile fragments, wicker baskets, and containers of food have been unearthed near the edge of England’s Flag Fen Basin. “Often at an excavation, it takes much imagination for it to become apparent. This site doesn’t need that. It’s intact. It feels as if we’ve actually caught up with the Bronze Age people,” said Mark Knight of Cambridge University.

A house dating to the seventh century A.D. has been discovered in the Yorkshire Dales. “We uncovered a small, rectangular, partly stone-built building with two rooms and in it we found 16 pieces of charcoal impressed into the compacted soil floor,” said archaeologist David Johnson.

What noises could our earliest ancestors make? Bart de Boer of the University of Amsterdam created anatomically correct vocal tracts with plastic tubes in order to find out.

Well-preserved bone marrow from a mammoth thigh bone could give scientists enough information to clone the ancient beast.

Neanderthals may have been the first to build structures with mammoth bones, according to a study published in Quaternary International. No fossils have been unearthed at the 44,000-year-old Ukrainian site to confirm the identity of its suspected inhabitants, however.

Archaeologists have discovered Lapita pottery and evidence of long-term occupation in mainland Papua New Guinea. The Lapita culture developed on islands of the east coast of Papua New Guinea, and is then known to have spread east, as people settled islands in the Pacific. “This is a whole new chapter of Pacific history that nobody knew about,” said Ian McNiven of Monash University.

The Sinagua people, who lived in the Arizona desert some 1,000 years ago, survived an eruption of the Sunset Crater volcano and adapted to the changes it made in their environment.

The long-forgotten Old Town Cemetery was found beneath a softball field in Jeffersonville, Kentucky. It was in use until 1862 and became a park in the 1920s. The city is considering building a convention center on the land.

Bioarchaeologist Ellen Chapman of the College of William and Mary examined the skeletal remains of Sir Jacob Wheate, who was captain of the HMS Ceberus. Wheate died of yellow fever in 1783, and was buried beneath Bermuda’s East End Church.

A team of researchers from several American universities has uncovered the bones of South American animals on the Caribbean island of Carriacou. “We suspect that they may have been foods eaten by people of high status, or used in ritual events,” said anthropologist Scott Fitzpatrick.

Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities has announced the discovery of a basilica and a house in a Coptic city dating to the fourth century.

A statue of Amenhotep III, grandfather of Tutankhamun, has been unearthed in Luxor.