Five polished axes, 25 chisels made out of sea shells, and pottery have been found in Villa Clara, Cuba.

An archeologist from the Provincial Center for Environmental Studies and Services, Rául Villavicencio, confirmed that five polished axes, 25 chisels made from sea shells, and various ceramic fragments were found.

Villavicencio said that previously the area had only produced archaeological evidence of hunter-gatherer civilizations.

The new find was made in firm ground, 600 meters from the coast, leading investigators to believe that the area might have been a settlement with houses built on piles very close to the water with agricultural fields inland by more fertile land.

Researchers have still not determined if the objects are the result of cultural exchanges with ceramist civilizations relatively close to the area or produced by the inhabitants of the area.

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Two privies, one dating back to the 18th-century, have been excavated in Halifax, Nova Scotia, at the future site of a new apartment building.

“The early outhouse, the late 18th-century one, is one of the most significant early deposits we’ve found in Halifax, given that it could be associated with Charles Morris, who was one of the most prominent people in the city,” Niven said Friday.

Morris was married and had children, he said.

“It’s a little time capsule. It’s really a statement about their lives.”

Dexel recently demolished the Victoria Apartments at the corner of Morris and Hollis streets and moved a two-storey building that once stood just to the south of the apartment building.

The structure that was moved was built in the 1760s by Charles Morris, the colony’s surveyor general and a founding father of Halifax.

“The house that they moved was his office,” Niven said.

The mandarin’s former mansion, which was located beside the Victoria Apartments on Morris Street, has also been torn down.

Archeologists sifting through the site found the remains of about 100 bottles dating from the late 18th century to the first quarter of the 19th century.

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Police in Italy have sealed off an illegal archaeological dig and have recovered 108 stolen artifacts.

The artefacts were excavated from tombs dating to the Daunian era, which preceded the Roman empire, in the southern region of Puglia.

The pieces were expected to be trafficked on the illegal antiquities market.

Several sites were sealed off by police near the town of Rodi Garganico, in the province of Foggia on the Adriatic coast after routine checks by the Italian tax police, Corrado Palmiotti told AKI.

“It’s an area rich in archaeology,” he said.

Police said they had made no arrests.

Several vases, ornamental objects and spearheads were recovered by police on the Gargano peninsula. The objects date from between the 6th and 4th-centuries BC.

Daunia refers to the civilisation that dominated northern Puglia for more than 1,000 years until around the 4th century BC.

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Pottery, china, bottles and bones have been found in a privy, dating back to 1760, which was found under the site of a future parking lot in Annapolis, Maryland.

The artifacts were found buried in a long-abandoned privy behind the house at 26 West St. The construction crew alerted city officials as soon as the brick outline of the privy became visible Wednesday.

Thomas W. Bodor – a consulting archaeologist retained by the Historic Preservation Commission to oversee such discoveries at construction sites – said yesterday that the privy appears to have been dug around the same time the house was built, about 1760. It is next to another abandoned privy, that was dug about 1860.

“We can tell the people who lived here had a nice collection of pottery off of which they were eating,” Bodor said of the earlier privy site.

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Pottery found in St. Augustine, Florida, may be a clue to finding a lost Spanish colony in the Solomon Island.

Three years after St. Augustine was founded, Alvara de Mendana, nephew of the governor of Peru, set out with two ships and 150 soldiers and sailed west to find gold and a new trade route to China.

Mendana’s 1568 voyage found nothing, so he returned to Peru.

But a relentless lust for gold pushed the Spanish to dispatch more colonizing fleets. And one founded a colony somewhere in the Solomon Islands, northeast of Australia.

No one knows its exact location or why the colony disappeared, but Martin Gibbs of the University of Sydney’s Department of Archaeology has done extensive research and thinks he has a few clues. He came to St. Augustine last week to look for some clues in possible similar objects.

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