The remains of 42,000-year-old tuna and sharks have been found on East Timor, an island north of Australia. Susan O’Connor of Australian National University in Canberra says the fast-swimming, deep water fish “certainly suggest that people had advanced maritime skills,” in order to catch them. She also uncovered a 23,000-year-old fishhook made from a mollusk shell. Her team claims this hook is the earliest evidence of line fishing.

Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History announced the discovery at the site of Comalcalco of a brick bearing a fragmentary reference to the end of one era and the beginning of another in the Maya Long Count calendar. “Some have proposed it as another reference to 2012, but I remain rather unconvinced,” said David Stuart of the University of Texas at Austin.

Sheep wool, dog hair, and mountain goat hair have been identified in some of the blankets and robes woven by people living on the Pacific Coast of North America before the arrival of Europeans. “Dogs have a long history of interaction with humans, from companionship to guarding and hunting; but raising dogs for fiber production was a unique cultural adaptation in the Pacific Northwest,” said Caroline Solazzo of the University of York.

A report in the current Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice notes looting in 18 states has been perpetrated by methamphetamine addicts. “Archaeological fieldwork has become an increasingly dangerous occupation around the world,” it states.

In Ireland, the skeleton of a young man whose skull had been pierced by an iron arrowhead was found in a shallow grave, near an underground passage dating to the ninth century.

Coins found beneath Jerusalem’s Western Wall were minted 20 years after King Herod’s death, disproving the widely held belief that he completed the wall. “This bit of archaeological information illustrates the fact that the construction of the Temple Mount walls and [the adjacent] Robinson’s Arch was an enormous project that lasted decades and was not completed during Herod’s lifetime,” read a statement released by the Israel Antiquities Authority.

A contract archaeology firm and a mining company are battling over a report filed with Australia’s Department of Indigenous Affairs. The Yindjibarndi people claim that important archaeological sites have been destroyed because of the flawed or incomplete report. “These places are sacred in our belief, our culture, and our identity,” said Michael Woodley, a Yindjibarndi elder.

Archaeologists from the University of Sydney have finished an excavation in Nea Paphos, Cyprus, where they uncovered walls that had been built on top of an ancient theater during the Middle Ages and a nymphaeum constructed in the first century A.D.

A hand ax estimated to be 100,000 years old was found in Gloucestershire, England.

Alyson Thibodeau of the University of Arizona is researching  the pre-Hispanic turquoise trade between Southwest and Mesoamerica. “My real question is, how can we use turquoise found in the archaeological record to reconstruct exchanged relationships? How can we use turquoise to better understand how the different cultures and different societies of the Southwest U.S. are connected to one another?” she asked.