LiDAR equipment was used to map seven Neolithic horned cairns in Caithness, Scotland. “They are essentially burial and ritual monuments, much like the chapels and shrines of more recent times, and each of them is likely to have been used exclusively by individual local groups or communities,” explained archaeologist Graeme Cavers.

A French couple was arrested at the Cambodian-Thai border earlier this week with what appeared to the border officials to be ancient statues. The two people told the officials that they bought the statues, which they thought were modern reproductions,  from a market after visiting Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom.

Research into the artifacts recovered from the Dritt Mansion, built in York, Pennsylvania, in the eighteenth century, suggests that some of the items, including shoes found in the walls, a flattened toad, and a cat, may have been intended to protect the home from witches.

Tell-tale butcher marks on a ground sloth bone dated to between 13,435 and 13,738 years ago suggest that people migrated into northern Ohio earlier than the Clovis people by about 700 years. “There is a variety of other pre-Clovis evidence that has accumulated slowly and surely in recent years,” said Haskel Greenfield of the University of Manitoba.

Students at Montana State University were excited to learn that stone tools in the school’s collection had been sent there from Kenya for dating by Louis Leakey in the 1950s.

An equestrian bit dating to between 1750 and 1650 B.C. has been found among the skeletal remains of a donkey at the site of Tel-Haror in Israel. “Until the excavation at Tel Haror, archaeologists had only indirect evidence for the use of bits,” said archaeologist Joel Klenck.

Spy-satellite imagery and modern digital maps have been combined to give archaeologists a new tool for studying the ancient landscape. “You could do this with the naked eye using Google Earth to look for sites, but this method takes the subjectivity out of it by defining spectral characteristics that bounce off of archaeological sites,” said Jason Ur of Harvard University.

The reburial of 53 sets of human remains that were unearthed during dam construction near Kanab, Utah, has been scheduled for this spring. The 1,000-year-old burials were removed, along with 30 pit houses and storage structures.

Pakistan’s request to list Mehergarh, Rehman Dheri, and Harappa on the World Heritage List has been rejected by UNESCO, due to a lack of research, conservation, and public facilities at the sites.

Research has shown that the cargo aboard a shipwreck discovered in the Aegean Sea in 1993 had been intended for the Apollon Temple, which was located in the ancient city of Claros. The artwork and building supplies sank with the ship during a storm.

Federal officials claim that some of the artifacts seized from the Custer Battlefield Museum in Garryowen, Montana, were stolen from members of the Crow Tribe and therefore cannot be returned to the museum’s owner. The case against him for artifact fraud was dropped in 2009, but the government has held on to 22 artifacts.

A new, controversial genetic study of the remains of three Neanderthal females found in Croatia suggests that two of them had dark hair and tawny skin. It has long been thought that northern-dwelling Neanderthals were fair skinned, in order to process enough vitamin D. “There was a large population of Neanderthals in Europe. It’s impossible that an entire population has red hair or blue eyes,” said Tábita Hünemeier of Brazil’s Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul.

Common house mice traveled to Iceland and Greenland with the Vikings, leaving genetic traces in modern mouse populations. “We found no evidence of house mice from the Viking period in Newfoundland. If mice did arrive in Newfoundland, then like the Vikings, their presence was fleeting and we found no genetic evidence of it,” said Jeremy Searle of Cornell University.