Rectangular coffins carved from limestone outcrops have been unearthed at a 1,000-year-old village in the Philippines. The village is located on Mount Kamhantik, on the island of Luzon, in the northernmost region of the archipelago. Coffins found in this region are usually carved from wood. Pottery jars, metal artifacts, and bone fragments from humans, monkeys, wild pigs, and other animals have been found in the coffins.

In the Archaeological Zone of Tingambato Michoacan, a worker cutting the grass discovered a 1,000-year-old funerary chamber when his foot sank four inches into the dirt and landed on a sandstone slab. Archaeologists found that the tomb, which was constructed with a floor and ceiling of sandstone and walls covered with stucco made of vegetable fiber, contained some 19,000 green stone beads, shell beads, and human remains. The beads may have been obtained through a trade network that linked the coastal towns together.

Italian scientists say they have discovered a 6,500-year-old filling in a human tooth that was found embedded in the wall of a cave in Slovenia. Claudio Tuniz, Federico Bernardini, and others at the Abdus Salam International Center for Theoretical Physics analyzed a portion of a fossilized adult jaw and several teeth while testing new equipment, and found a vertical crack in the enamel and dentin of one tooth. The damaged area had been filled with beeswax. “This would provide the earliest known direct evidence of therapeutic-palliative dental filling,” they concluded.

An ancient staircase in a wine cellar in central Italy led researchers into a pyramid-shaped cave carved by the Etruscans. The structure’s tapered walls had been carved in the tufa plateau so that only the top layer was visible from the surface. As the team of American and Italian archaeologists digs, the stairway continues into the earth. “We still don’t know where they are going to take us,” said Claudio Bizzarri of the Parco Archaeologico Ambientale dell’Orvietano. He estimates that there are at least five such structures under the city of Orvieto.

Neanderthals, like modern humans, used feathers as personal ornaments, according to a new analysis of data on bird remains from archaeological sites across Eurasia. Cut marks on the wing bones, which do not carry any meat, suggest that the long wing feathers were desired. Dark plumage was probably preferred, since the bones of ravens, crows, rooks, magpies, jackdaws, eagles, vultures, black kites, kestrels, and falcons were used. “I think this is the tip of the iceberg. It is showing that Neanderthals simply expressed themselves in media other than cave walls. The last bastion of defense in favor of our superiority was cognition,” said Clive Finlayson of the Gibraltar Museum.

Jeffrey Schwartz of the University of Pittsburgh and his colleagues defended their assertion that the child burial ground at Carthage was not a place for child sacrifice, as recorded in some ancient descriptions. “Some of this might have been anti-Carthaginian propaganda,” he explained. Schwartz thinks that markings on the tooth fragments found in the cremated remains show that they came from fetuses and stillborn babies. Other scientists have argued that cremation would destroy any evidence of an infant’s age at death.

Archaeologists will use ground-penetrating radar to look for traces of a Roman road and spike-filled pits from the Battle of Bannockburn, fought in 1314, in central Scotland. A police headquarters now stands on the possible site, where two standing stones near the entrance are thought to be traditional battlefield markers. King Edward II’s cavalry and foot soldiers traveled the Roman road in an attempt to relieve Stirling Castle. “Robert the Bruce dug pits on either side of the road to stop the English cavalry deploying on either side of the road and to constrict them to a narrow front. When they were met by Randolph they had no way around him and were defeated,” said Murray Cook, Stirling Council archaeologist.

A single human bone was found along the planned 20-mile route of Honolulu’s rapid transit line. “Excavation around the bone fragment will provide better information about the cultural layer in which the bone fragment was found and how best to plan for this area,” said Deborah Ward of the state Department of Land and Natural Resources. Hawaii’s Supreme Court halted all construction work on the project until archaeological surveys could be completed, in compliance with the state’s historic preservation and burial protection laws. The Kakaako area, where the bone was found, was called “burial central” by archaeologist Kehaunani Abad during the court case.

Karen L. King of Harvard Divinity School has found a reference in Coptic to “Jesus’ wife” on a scrap of fourth-century papyrus. The collector who owns the papyrus fragment has asked to remain anonymous, and its provenance is unknown, although the scholars who have examined it believe it to be genuine. King believes the scrap is a copy of a second-century Greek text. “This fragment suggests that some early Christians had a tradition that Jesus was married,” she said.