An Alabama woman stopped last month at an airport in Macedonia with more than 250 ancient coins  and several artifacts has been convicted of attempting to smuggle them out of the country. She said she had been given the coins as a gift and was unaware of any criminal activity. She will serve a two-year parole in the United States and has been banned from returning to Macedonia for ten years. “A single coin which is worth good money, maybe was a gift, maybe… but 256 ancient coins?” commented one customs official.

In Fredericksburg, Virginia, archaeologists are excavating what is left of a brick row house that was destroyed by fire during the Battle of Fredericksburg in 1862. Historians and archaeologists think that Union troops took shelter in the home because they have discovered metal insignia from their uniforms, ration cans, pens, inkwells, smashed plates, and whiskey and beer bottles in the cellar. “The two images in that part of town, taken from two slightly different angles, both don’t have a building where you would expect one to be. In my view, that supports [the archaeologists’] interpretation that it was destroyed sometime in association with the battle,” said John Hennessy, chief historian of Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park. The foundation of the home was uncovered from beneath a concrete slab before the construction of a new courthouse next to the city hall.

Botanist Giulia Caneva and a team of graduate students from the University of Rome have assembled a data base of plant images  from carved stone artworks, paintings, and textiles from Italy. One surprising thing they found was that Italian orchids appeared in the artworks much earlier than expected. The flowers were used in 46 B.C. to decorate the Temple of Venus Genetrix and on the Ara Pacis, built in 9 B.C. Orchids and other plants remained a popular theme in Roman art until the arrival of Christianity. “My idea is that they are eliminating pagan symbols, and [those] that are related to sexuality,” she said.

The scuttled remains of a wooden schooner  built in 1903 have been found in the Channel Islands Marine Sanctuary. Known as the George E. Billings, the ship carried lumber from the Pacific Northwest to Hawaii, Mexico, South America, Australia, and southern California. It was eventually used as a sport-fishing barge before it was scuttled in 1941 off the coast of Los Angeles. “Now we can write the final chapter of not only the largest, but the last sailing vessel built by the Hall Bros. during their 30-year career of designing some of the finest ships sailing the Pacific,” said Robert Schwemmer of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Mitochondrial DNA obtained from the 700-year-old teeth of the first known New Zealanders  may help scientists track the migration routes of Polynesians through the Pacific. The DNA shows that each of the individuals in the study carried unique mutations, suggesting that a large population made the voyage, and the artifacts at the Wairau Bar archaeological site, where the people had been buried, all came from East Polynesia. “Now that we have identified specific markers in the mitochondrial genome of these individuals we can start to look for these markers in East Polynesian populations and perhaps identify an island or islands where we also find these mutations,” said Michael Knapp of the University of Otago.

A 1,700-year-old city featuring an 11-room villa complex has been unearthed in western Turkey. Six of the villa’s rooms contain mosaics. “The mosaics are decorated with animal and plant figures  that you cannot see anywhere today. They created the Anatolian panther, the Anatolian tiger, as well as a partridge and a rabbit. They are decorated with completely natural stones. You can see various shades of red, blue, and green,” said government official Osman Murat Süslü.

Charlotte Roberts of Durham University and Terry Brown of Manchester University have developed a system that analyses millions of gene sequences  in a matter of seconds. The new technology was used to identify tuberculosis in bone samples taken from 500 skeletons from across Europe. Scientists have been studying TB in skeletons dating from 100 A.D. to the nineteenth century in an effort to improve modern treatments and vaccines.

Archaeologists from the Regional Directorate of Culture in Cusco, Peru, unearthed a ceremonial pot and stones at Machu Picchu. The items are thought to have been left as an offering sometime between 1438 and 1470 A.D., but the pot is a couple of hundred years older.

Carl Lipo of California State University has proposed that the Rapa Nui “walked” their megalithic moai across Easter Island by rocking them from side to side. Incomplete and broken statues that litter the ancient roads of Easter Island support this idea because they lean forward, he says. That presumably wouldn’t happen if they’d been rolled along horizontally on logs. His team of 18 people “walked” a replica moai for 100 meters in under an hour using ropes. “It really hauls,” commented Lipo. Jo Anne Van Tilburg, director of the Easter Island Statue Project at the University of California, Los Angeles, is not impressed, however. She points out that the replica statue was not an accurate facsimile of the Easter Island moai. “What this work has done is disengaged the statues from the archaeological context,” she said. You can watch videos of the moai transport experiments conducted by both archaeologists at Nature News.

The remains of 11 people were returned to the Sto: lo First Nation  by the University of British Columbia, where they had been held since the 1950s. The repatriation was prompted by a renovation of the university’s Museum of Anthropology. The remains will stay at the Sto: lo Research and Resource Management Center until their local communities claim them or decide where they should be laid to rest.