In February archaeologists uncovered the first new tomb in Egypt's Valley of the Kings since 1922. Otto Schaden, director of the University of Memphis Amenmesse Project, found traces of a vertical shaft just steps away from where Tutankhamen's tomb was discovered over 80 years ago. The shaft ended in a large chamber.

Initial reports sounded tremendous: The first glimpses through the door revealed several coffins and numerous clay jars. Some researchers speculated that the find, named KV-63, might be the tomb of Queen Nefertiti. But no mummies were found; the coffins were instead filled with embalming supplies, linens, and pottery fragments. One coffin even had chunks of limestone inside. "We've got a lot of strange stuff to work on," Schaden says.

Schaden's best guess is that the chamber was a sort of sacred storage room, filled with the leftovers from embalming sessions. "For some reason, they couldn't just dump it by the roadside," he says. "But they didn't bury it with the deceased."

Andrew Curry

Read about the chemistry of mummies.

46 Oldest Writing In New World Found

Courtesy of Science/AAAS

Workers digging in Mexico unearthed a stone slab bearing the oldest script ever found in the Western Hemisphere. The 3,000-year-old artifact offers evidence that the Olmec, the earliest major Mesoamerican civilization, had a written language.

"No one had the clinching evidence to prove that this group of people was literate," says anthropologist Stephen Houston of Brown University. "The discovery of the Cascajal block makes that so, very securely." The length of the inscription, along with the patterns and sequences of the carvings, strongly identify it as language, not religious iconography or decoration.

Measuring about 14 inches long by 8 inches wide, the tablet contains a total of 62 glyphs, including some recognizable as insects and corn. Some occur in pairs and could be poetic couplets, common in later writings of the region. "It's one of the great finds of Mesoamerican archaeology," Houston says. "But it carries a lot of challenges." Without more samples of the script to study, the meaning of the text may be forever lost.

Jennifer Barone

54 Peruvian Dig Uncovers First Western Observatory

In May archaeologist Robert Benfer of the University of Missouri at Columbia announced the discovery of the remains of the Americas' oldest known astronomical observatory. The Temple of the Fox, located in the Chillón Valley in Peru, probably served as a rough farmers' almanac, flagging key annual events to the movement of the sun and stars, he says. Radiocarbon tests date it to about 2200 B.C., some 800 years before star-tracking structures were believed to have existed in South America.

Benfer named the temple after uncovering a mural of a fox, an animal linked to plant cultivation in Andean mythology. The site has also yielded a female mummy, a sculpture of a man playing a trumpet, and a huge frowning face made of mud plaster. The temple's offering room faces a boulder several hundred feet away that was modified to resemble a head. The two landmarks point to the rising sun on the Southern Hemisphere's summer solstice. The local Rio Chillón floods near this date, marking the start of the growing season. On March 21, when the floods subside, the two landmarks point to the rising Andean constellation of the fox, associated with rainfall and agriculture.

Looters drawn to a nearby pyramid very nearly discovered the temple themselves. "One inch below the bottom of the looters' pit, we hit the walls," says Benfer. "It was that close."

Anne Casselman

Check out one of the world's first computer: the Antikythera Mechanism.