Superstorm Sandy  shut down Archaeology News for two days, and uprooted a tree in New Haven, Connecticut, that revealed a human skeleton. Authorities think the burial dates from the colonial era, when the site was used as a cemetery. The tree was planted in 1909 to commemorate the 100^thanniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth.

In the 1950s, a skeleton with metal spikes  through its shoulders, heart, and ankles was found in central England, but a report on the discovery has just been made available. The burial dates to between 550 and 700 A.D. Such treatment of the dead was considered to be appropriate for individuals thought to be capable of returning to life and causing problems for the living. Scholars are no longer sure where this particular rare burial is located. “Throughout the Anglo-Saxon period the punishment of being buried in water-logged ground, face down, decapitated, staked or otherwise was reserved for thieves, murderers, or traitors or later for those deviants who did not conform to society’s rules: adulterers, disrupters of the peace, the unpious or oath breaker. Which of these the Southwell deviant was we will never know,” said archaeologist Matthew Beresford.

And in Kent, an Anglo-Saxon feasting hall  dating to the seventh to ninth centuries A.D. has been found. Archaeologists suspect an entire complex of buildings rests on the site, where they have already excavated an early Christian church and monastery. “This is one of the only areas where you have got the full transition from pagan to Christian,” said Gabor Thomas of Reading University.

The remains of a carrier pigeon  carrying a World War II coded message attached to its leg by means of a tell-tale red capsule were recovered from the chimney of a house in Surrey, England. General Bernard Montgomery had his headquarters at a nearby hotel. “It could have been a secret message for him,” said David Martin, who found the bird. British code breakers are working on the message.

A wave triggered by a massive landslide flooded Geneva, Switzerland, 1,500 years ago, according to a study of sediment deposits at the bottom of Lake Geneva. The city, which was a trade center at the time, would have been flooded.

Now 500 years old, Michelangelo’s frescoes in the Sistine Chapel  are threatened by its 20,000 visitors per day. The famous ceiling was cleaned and restored in the 1990s, but is showing signs of wear and tear again. “The anthropic pressure with dust, the humidity of bodies, carbon dioxide produced by perspiration can cause discomfort for the visitors and, in the long run, damage to the paintings,” said Antonio Paolucci of the Vatican Museums. A new, high-tech air-purifying system is in the works to protect the frescoes. It could be ready in a year.

The ape-like shoulder blades of a skeleton thought to have belonged to a young Australopithecus afarensis child suggest that these early hominids could climb trees. Scientists have been debating whether or not A. afarensis was capable of climbing, in addition to walking upright on the ground, based upon the famous 3.2 million-year-old partial skeleton known as Lucy and a 3.6 million-year-old male skeleton known as Big Man. “Juvenile members of A. afarensis may have been more active climbers than adults,” adds paleobiologist David Green of Midwestern University. He and Zeresenay Alemseged of the California Academy of Sciences recently extracted the shoulder blade fossils, which were discovered in Ethiopia in 2000, from the surrounding rock.

A second set of human remains unearthed at a Franciscan friary in Leicester, England, may have belonged to Ellen Luenor, who founded the friary in the thirteenth century with her husband, Gilbert. The woman’s remains had been disturbed and reburied, along with those of other individuals. Archaeologists suspect that this occurred sometime during the seventeenth century, when the site was used as a mansion’s garden. “They were buried at a higher level than the church floor and the bones were not intact, which suggests that someone dug them up by accident and reburied them in a different spot, just not as deep,” said Mathew Morris of the University of Leicester. A male skeleton discovered at the site may have belonged to the last Plantagenet king, Richard III, who was supposedly buried in the friary church. DNA test results on those remains are due in another two weeks.

The excavation of a 600-year-old Hindu temple in Penatih, Bali, has been halted for lack of funds. “The Denpasar Archaeology Agency has already proposed funding for the Penatih excavation from next year’s budget,” said I Made Geria, head of the agency. Archaeologists suspect that the foundations of this building are part of a larger temple complex.

Archaeologists from New Zealand, Turkey, and Australia have finished a third season at the Gallipoli battlefield, located in Turkey, along the Dardanelles Strait. They have surveyed trenches, tunnel entrances, and dugouts in three separate areas. They also found bullets, boot fragments, shrapnel, a bayonet, and even a Roman camp. The Battle of Gallipoli was fought from April, 1915 to January, 1916. More than 120,000 soldiers were killed, and many more were wounded and sickened by unsanitary conditions.