Orit Shamir of the Israel Antiquities Authority and Naama Sukenik of Bar-Ilan University have studied the plain, linen textiles found in the caves at Qumran in order to try to determine who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls. “They wanted to be different than the Roman world. They were very humble, they didn’t want to wear colorful textiles, they wanted to use very simple textiles,” explained Shamir.

A skull uncovered in southern China in the 1950s has been reevaluated by an international team of scientists. The skull shows signs of blunt force trauma that had completely healed before the individual eventually died some 150,000 years ago. “They hit each other, they squabbled, they had weaponry – so it became serious. But at the same time, they were helping each other out,” said Erik Trinkaus of Washington University in St. Louis.

The Global Heritage Fund is assisting Peru with the preservation of Marcahuamachuco, a fortress built in the Andes by an unknown culture. “We do know that the stone structures, with walls 10 to 15 meters (yards) high, were built between 350 and 400 A.D., but we don’t know when its inhabitants arrived or where they came from,” said Cristian Vizconde, chief archaeologist of Peru.

A home remodeling job in Warwickshire, England, led to the discovery of an Anglo-Saxon burial ground dating to between 650 and 820 A.D. “Detailed analysis of the skeletons has revealed an insight into the health of the middle Saxon population who clearly suffered periods of malnourishment and were subject to a wide range of infections indicative of lives of extreme hardship and often near-constant pain,” said archaeologist Stuart Palmer.

A fragment of a Maori sleeping mat or food bag, a piece of bird bone, and European textile fragments were found during the examination of rock shelters in New Zealand’s Roxburgh Gorge.

The shift in diet that accompanied the shift from hunting and gathering to farming may have impacted the shape of human faces and jaws, according to a study by physical anthropologist Noreen von Cramon-Taubadel of the University of Kent.

New CT scans of Ötzi the Iceman, whose frozen body was found in the Italian Alps 20 years ago, show that he suffered a deep cut over his right eye. “Maybe he fell down or maybe he had a fight up there, nobody knows. With this cut alone, at 3,250 meters, it would have been a deadly wound up there,” explained Wolfgang Recheis of the University of Innsbruck.

The remains of 44 young children thought to have belonged to the Kolla culture have been found at the site of Sillustani in southern Peru. Each child had been buried with a volcanic stone on its chest, and was surrounded by offerings. They are thought to have been sacrificed some 600 years ago during a period of war or conflict.

Human remains were uncovered from beneath a 103-year-old house in Sitka, Alaska. “Erring on the side of caution, we determined that we better treat them as if they might be culturally significant, and we determined that we wanted to contact the Sitka Tribe of Alaska, and that’s what we went ahead and did,” said Forest Service archaeologist Jay Kinsman.

What are the current prospects for archaeology in Libya? “The Department of Antiquities has neither the staff nor the resources to combat the tidal wave of development. Everything is vulnerable. There’s a need to develop, from a standing start, a cultural-resource management in Libya that doesn’t really exist at the moment,” said Paul Bennett, head of mission at the Society for Libyan Studies in London.

Michael Barton of Arizona State University thinks that colder temperatures may have required early humans and Neanderthals to travel farther to find food, providing them with more opportunities to mingle their genes. “One thing we’re seeing with large-scale globalization today is that there are local cultures that disappear. The same thing happened in the past,” he said.

Tony Pollard of Glasgow University found and reopened two of the tunnels dug during World War II by British prisoners of war held by the Germans at Stalag Luft III in Poland. The tunnels were made famous by the 1963 movie, The Great Escape.  

Graffiti made by punk-rocker Johnny Rotten in the mid-1970s has been examined by archaeologists. The results of their study have been published in the current issue of Antiquity.