Archaeologists working at the Greek city of Selinunte on the island of Sicily have unearthed its craftsmen’s district. “A concentration of certain industries and craftsmen in special districts does not only presuppose proactive planning; it is also based on a certain idea of how a city should best be organized,” said Gabriel Zuchtriegel of the University of Bonn.

A construction company is suspected of destroying a prehistoric archaeological site and the remains of a medieval church in southern Bulgaria. “We still don’t know what happened, but the bulldozer had flattened the entire settlement mound and the west wall of the church,” said archaeologist Milen Kamarev.

Anthropology and archaeology students at Indiana University South Bend have put a pig carcass to good use. The pig was buried two years ago by their professor, James VanderVeen, and has been excavated by multiple classes.

The Kellogg Company has resolved its differences with the Maya Archaeology Initiative over the use of a toucan in its logo. Kellogg will even donate $100,000 toward the construction of a Maya Cultural Center in Guatemala.

Petroglyphs along the banks of Egypt’s Nile River have been dated to 15,000 years ago, using a technology called optically stimulated luminescence. The rock art could be the oldest in Egypt. “The Palaeolithic rock art at Qurta reveals that the well-known cave art of the late Pleistocene in Europe was not an isolated phenomenon. Qurta puts North Africa firmly in the world of the earliest surviving artistic tradition,” said John Coleman Darnell of Yale University.

Human bones that have been housed in an English museum for more than 100 years could be much younger than previously thought. The label on their storage box suggested the bones had been recovered from a Neolithic long barrow, but radiocarbon dating indicates the bones date to between 1523 and 1799.  “Or it could be the bones are contaminated,” explained David Rice of the Gloucester City Museum.

A 4,000-year-old burial cist containing cremated human remains, a woven bag or basket, and amber beads has been excavated in Dartmoor, England.

Bullets fired in the seventeenth century were uncovered in Newbury, England. “Most of the bullets are consistent with use of a carbine rifle, a weapon that would have been a popular choice in the First Battle of Newbury, which we know took place on this street in September 1643,” said archaeologist Mike Lang Hall.

Two inscriptions, one in Latin and one in Arabic, were left behind in the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II’s castle in Jaffa, near the end of the sixth crusade. The Arabic inscription has been translated by scholars from Hebrew University of Jerusalem and is the only known inscription of its kind.

Computer software developed by Lior Wolf and Nachum Dershowitz from Tel Aviv University has been sorting through scraps of documents from the Cairo Genizah for the past two years. Now, more than 1,000 pairs of pages have been joined and confirmed by scholars.

Excavation of  the 1608 church at James Fort, the first permanent English colony, continues. The church is best known as the site where Pocahontas was baptized and married to John Rolfe in 1614.

Construction crews digging in New Orleans’ French Quarter found graves dating to the 1700s.