A second Viking site may have been identified in the New World, on Canada’s Baffin Island. Archaeologist Patricia Sutherland of Memorial University in Newfoundland and Scotland’s University of Aberdeen returned to Tanfield Valley, located on the southeastern coast of the island, where a building made of stone and sod was unearthed in the 1960s. She has since found blade-sharpening tools bearing traces of copper alloys and smelted iron. Such metals are known to have been used by the Norse, but are unknown among the Arctic peoples of the region. She has also uncovered remains of Old World rats, a whalebone shovel similar to those found from Greenland, and yarn resembling that made by Viking women. She thinks that Vikings may have traded with local hunters and trappers for ivory and furs. “I think things were a lot more complex in this part of the world than most people assumed,” she said.

Archaeologists are investigating a 1,300-year-old archaeological site along the banks of the Babine River in British Columbia. There could be as many as ten long houses at the fishing village, in addition to 1,000 areas where food and other materials were stored over a long period of occupation that ended about 200 years ago. “It was really quite amazing to see the whole range of tools and weapons going back to probably long before Europeans arrived, right to the point where European goods were available and then even into much more recent times,” said Farid Rahemtulla of the University of Northern British Columbia.

Researchers from Oxford University say the early writing system known as proto-Elamite, which was used in what is now southwestern Iran 5,000 years ago, could soon be understood. Some 1,200 signs have been translated so far by Jacob Dahl of Wolfson College. He thinks that the system is so difficult to translate because the texts are lacking in consistent patterns—evidence of mistakes in writing. “The lack of a scholarly tradition meant that a lot of mistakes were made and the writing system may eventually have become useless,” he said. New high-quality images of the clay tablets will be made available online.

Construction crews in San Francisco uncovered the foundations of Old City Hall last month. The massive structure took 25 years to build, but it was only open for ten years before it collapsed during the 1906 earthquake. Before that, the land held the remains of 9,000 people who were buried between 1850 and 1860. “We will bury it all again,” said Rebecca Karberg, a historic preservation specialist for the federal General Services Administration.

Carbon dating of organic materials from archaeological sites has been calibrated for the variations in the amount of carbon-14 in the atmosphere against the known ages of tree rings since the 1960s. Tree rings provide a record that dates back about 14,000 years. Corals have also been used to try to calibrate the clock further back in time, but the levels of carbon-14 in the air and in the ocean are not identical. But new sediment cores  taken from Japan’s Lake Suigetsu provide a direct record dating back 52,000 years. Preserved leaves in the cores provided 651 carbon dates that can be compared to calendar dates, making it possible to obtain more accurate ages for older archaeological sites. “If you’re trying to look at archaeological sites at the order of 30,000 or 40,000 years ago, the ages may shift by only a few hundred years but that may be significant in putting them before or after changes in climate,” said geochronologist Christopher Bronk Ramsey of the University of Oxford.

People accused of looting led police to a previously unknown site in Rome’s Alban Hills where they found votive offerings dating from the fourth to the second century B.C. The life-sized terra cotta statues  and parts of statues were probably offered to the goddess Juno at a nearby sanctuary.

While trying to retrieve a runaway cat, Mirko Curti discovered a 2,000-year-old tomb in a cliff near Rome’s Via di Pietralata. “The cat managed to get into a grotto and we followed the sound of its miaowing,” he said. They found niches that probably once supported burial urns and bones that may have fallen from a tomb located further up the cliff face. The entrance to the tomb, which dates between the first century B.C. and the second century A.D., may have been opened by recent heavy rains.

The 2,000-year-old Sarpy Creek Bison Kill site in Montana has been hastily excavated with a backhoe to make way for the expansion of a coal mine. The prehistoric site is located on the Crow Indian Reservation, and was found last year during a survey required by the National Historic Preservation Act. “Basically what we have right now is this big hole that is roughly size of an Olympic swimming pool where there once was a really beautiful bison bone bed, and sitting next to that is a giant pile of extremely valuable butchered bison remains just laying out on the ground in the middle of nowhere, exposed to the weather with cows stomping around on them,” said Judson Finley of Utah State University. Finley thinks that, had it been carefully excavated, the site would have qualified for the National Register of Historic Places or as a UNESCO World Heritage site.

Morocco’s Communications Minister Mustapha Khalfi denied that radicals had destroyed ancient stone carvings in the High Atlas Mountains. The government organized a trip for journalists to the Yagour Plateau to view some undamaged carvings of the sun. “This kind of incident, contrary to our values, cannot take place in Morocco,” read a statement released by the culture ministry, following an investigation into the claims.

Additional medieval tombs near Timbuktu  were destroyed by extremists yesterday. “They arrived aboard six or seven vehicles, heavily armed. They flattened everything with a bulldozer and pulled up the skeletal remains,” said a local resident. Northern Mali is now under the control of rebels from a mixture of Islamist groups.