Several of the sea otters that frequent Bennett Slough Culverts at Moss Landing in central California are in the habit of smashing mussels on waterside boulders to extract their meat. An interdisciplinary team of researchers has identified telltale evidence of this behavior, including visible patches of wear on points and ridges of the rocks facing the water, as well as a distinctive breakage pattern in the shells, with the left side intact and the right side broken in half diagonally. Underwater middens at the site are estimated to contain tens to hundreds of thousands of similarly smashed shells. Natalie Uomini, an archaeologist at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, says this type of research shows a new way to apply archaeological methodology to animal behavior. “Archaeology is a set of tools that allow us to study past behavior,” she says. “But there’s nothing inherent about it that says it has to be used on humans.” 

Near the end of the dig season at a necropolis on the western bank of the Nile in Aswan, Egypt, a team led by Antonio Mozas-Calvache of the University of Jaen discovered a tomb with an unopened coffin visible inside. The approximately two-by-eight-foot chamber was largely closed off and its entrance far too narrow for the archaeologists to squeeze through. These limitations forced Mozas-Calvache and his team to improvise. They mounted a remote-controlled camera at the end of a 12-foot-long pole, pushed it inside the chamber, and used it to photograph the contents.

The team used the images to generate 3-D models of the tomb, including a detailed representation of the 3,800-year-old coffin. They were able to read hieroglyphs on the coffin, which revealed the mummy’s identity to be Shemai, a previously unknown brother of late 12th Dynasty (ca. 1981–1802 B.C.) governor Sarenput II. Given advances in technology, says Mozas-Calvache, “I think that our work would have been impossible to carry out 10 years ago.”

Click below to see a 3-D model of the coffin. 

Remnants of the foundation of a former cotton mill that later served as the main barracks for a Confederate prison in Salisbury, North Carolina, were unearthed during a recent excavation. The prison, which opened in late 1861, was known as a relatively pleasant spot in its early years, with recreational activities including baseball games that may have matched prisoners against guards. By late 1864, however, its prisoner population had swelled to 10,000—four times the number the entire complex was designed to hold. Many prisoners took up residence in the yard, where they dug sleeping holes and, in some cases, escape tunnels. Thousands died of disease or were gunned down by guards in response to uprisings. The prison was abandoned near the end of the Civil War, and Union troops destroyed its buildings, whose bricks were later harvested, sold, and used to construct many of the structures that now line Salisbury’s Main Street.

In an empty lot owned by the Historic Salisbury Foundation, archaeologists led by Timothy Roberts, project director for Cultural Resource Analysts, found bits of rubble, mortar, and brick left behind by these harvesters. “We’re seeing almost the ghost of the building,” says Roberts. Nevertheless, he was still able to trace the outline of its foundation. The team found a range of artifacts, mostly dating to after the war, including glass medicine bottles from a local drugstore known as Kluttz’s, and glass liquor bottles. One item that may have belonged to a prisoner is a piece of bone with a copper pin in it. Roberts believes it was part of the case of the type of folding knife prisoners used to dig their sleeping holes and escape tunnels.