Smithsonian unfolds an ugly story archaeologists have uncovered of the first “successful” English settlement in America – at Jamestown, where settlers got so hungry, they apparently ate a 14-year-old girl:

“The chops to the forehead are very tentative, very incomplete,” says Douglas Owsley, the Smithsonian forensic anthropologist who analyzed the bones after they were found by archaeologists from Preservation [...]

LiveScience wonders what we should do with the bones of this lost, wretched King Richard III:

The University of Leicester, which is overseeing the excavation and analysis of the remains, has jurisdiction over the remains, but various societies dedicated to the king have their own opinions.

Two groups, the U.S.-based Richard III Foundation and the Society of Friends of Richard [...]

A map from the Massachusetts Environment Department City Archaeology Program, found on archive.org.

PhysOrg has the details on the latest royal presence in Cairo:

Czech archaeologists have unearthed the 4,500-year-old tomb of a Pharaonic princess south of Cairo, in a finding that suggests other undiscovered tombs may be in the area, an official from Egypt’s antiquities ministry said Saturday.

…

Mohammed El-Bialy, who heads the Egyptian and Greco-Roman Antiquities department at the Antiquities Ministry, [...]

BBC reports on the linguists who have started puzzling out how to read and write in proto-Elamite:

“I think we are finally on the point of making a breakthrough,” says Jacob Dahl, fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford and director of the Ancient World Research Cluster.

Dr Dahl’s secret weapon is being able to see this writing more clearly than ever [...]

New Scientist may have uncovered the bones of Richard III, the king either most villainous or most misunderstood of Plantangenet:

What exactly has been found?
The body of an adult male has been excavated from what is believed to be ruins of the choir area of the Grey Friars church in Leicester. It’s now a car park in the city [...]

Wired (suitably enough) gets all hepped up over traces of a prehistoric Starbucks in Cahokia:

In a new study, researchers have found the first direct evidence of black drink — not in shells from Florida or Mississippi, but in ceramic beakers at the ancient city of Cahokia outside what’s now St. Louis, Missouri. The finding hints at a trade [...]

LiveScience looks at faint traces of deadly poisons that prove Paleolithic culture rose in Africa at the same time it did in Europe:

“Our research proves that the Later Stone Age emerged in South Africa far earlier than has been believed and occurred at about the same time as the arrival of modern humans in Europe,” study researcher Paola [...]

The Wilmington, NC, Star News celebrates a rare Floridian trace of a Hernan De Soto’s march from Tampa Bay up through Tennessee, into Arkansas and down to New Orleans. The 16th century Spaniard and his 600 men made some of the earliest European maps of the United States – and finally, we’ve found physical evidence of one of America’s [...]