SAVANNAH, Ga. (AP) — A museum in Georgia’s oldest city on Wednesday welcomed a truckload of treasures from the earliest period of U.S. history — 17 cannons that experts believe sank to the bottom of the Savannah River during the American Revolution and remained undiscovered for nearly 240 years.

Workers carefully hoisted the big guns one-by-one from the back of a truck and wheeled them inside their new home at the Savannah History Museum, which will put them on display just in time for the Fourth of July celebration of America’s 250th birthday.

“They look brand new,” said Andrea Farmer, a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers archaeologist who was part of the team that researched and preserved the cannons. “They could pretty much be fired if someone wanted to.”

The artifacts were discovered in 2021 when a dredge scooping sediment from the riverbed as part of an Army Corps project to deepen Savannah’s shipping channel pulled up a cannon in its metal jaws. The crew soon dug up two more.

In the course of just over a year, a total of 19 cannons were hoisted from the location just downstream from Savannah, which is where Georgia was founded in 1733 as the last of Britain’s 13 American colonies.

After being pulled from the river, most of the cannons left Georgia for several years to undergo cleaning and preservation work at a Texas lab.

One of the Revolution’s bloodiest battles was fought in Savannah

Archaeologists initially assumed the cannons likely dated to the Civil War. But further research indicated they’re likely almost a century older and sank during the buildup to the American Revolution’s bloody siege of Savannah.

Savannah was under British occupation in the fall of 1779, when colonists planned an attack to retake the city with help from French allies.

When French ships carrying troops were spotted off the Georgia coast, British forces scuttled at least six ships in the Savannah River downstream from the city to block the French vessels.

The land battle that followed was one of the bloodiest of the war. British forces killed nearly 300 colonial fighters and their allies, and wounded hundreds more.

The Savannah History Museum sits right next to the battlefield. Its staff on Wednesday hoisted the cannons, weighing up to 1500 pounds (680 kilograms) apiece, onto custom display mounts that staffers likened to giant wine racks.

The cannons will be part of a new exhibit on Savannah’s role in the American Revolution, which is scheduled to open Fourth of July weekend, said Samantha Moss, the museum’s curator.

“Our great team has been prepping for months — building mounts and planning how we can safely display these very large, very special artifacts,” she said.

Cleaning the crusty cannons took years

Each of the iron cannons emerged from the river covered by a thick crust of mud and minerals.

Two were left in that raw state and put on display at the museum. The other 17 were sent to Texas A&M University, which has a lab that specializes in preserving underwater artifacts. Its staff spent years painstakingly cleaning the big guns and coating them in paint and wax to prevent rusting and corrosion.

“A lot of them have scour marks on the side from anchors or dredging, so there’s some scarring on the cannons,” said Chris Dostal, a professor of nautical archaeology who leads Texas A&M’s Conservation Research Lab. “But most of them look pretty exceptional.”

Most of the cannons arrived with wooden plugs still sealing their bores, which remained packed with cannonballs and gunpowder charges.

Dostal said radiocarbon dating of the wooden stoppers placed them roughly in the late 1700s. His team shared the cannons’ measurements and other details with experts in London, who concluded three of them were very likely forged by the British military.

The rest appeared to be of French design but bore no telltale markings. Dostal said he suspects those guns may have been cast in America around the time of the war.

Other artifacts found with the cannons included pieces of anchors and a portion of a ship’s bronze bell. Like the cannons, none of them bore engravings indicating which ship they came from.

That means many details of the cannons’ origins remain a mystery.

“You don’t have all of the information,” Farmer said. “You’re trying to piece it together as best as you can.”

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Kuwait briefly shut the country’s main airport Wednesday after Iranian drones heavily damaged a terminal building and killed one person — the latest salvo in a series of back-and-forth attacks by Tehran and Washington that have tested a fragile ceasefire.

The strikes came as semiofficial Iranian news agencies said the country had stopped communicating with mediators about extending a ceasefire in the war with the U.S. and Israel. A regional official said Tehran wanted the truce in Lebanon enforced before returning to talks. U.S. President Donald Trump said negotiations were continuing.

Those talks have dragged on for weeks, and repeated exchanges of strikes in the Gulf region and Israel’s broadening war in Lebanon are further straining the efforts.

All the while, Iran has maintained its stranglehold on the Strait of Hormuz — a crucial artery for the world’s oil and natural gas — and the U.S. has continued its blockade of Iranian ports, ensuring that global fuel prices remain high and the effects of the conflict are felt well beyond the region.

Iranian drones hit Kuwait’s main airport

Kuwait’s Foreign Ministry said at least one person was killed and others wounded in the strike on the airport. It said Kuwait reserves the right to respond to Iran and that it will “neither accept nor tolerate” the attacks.

Earlier, Defense Ministry spokesperson Brig. Gen. Saud Abdulaziz Al-Otaibi had said that “a number of hostile drones” had targeted a passenger building at Kuwait International Airport.

Civil aviation authorities said the airport partially reopened later in the day, with Kuwait Airways flights resuming from a different terminal than the one that was hit. No other flights would be operating, they said. The airport only reopened Monday after closing early in the war.

The U.S. military said Iran fired two missiles at Kuwait that fell apart en route, and that it “downed multiple drones” targeting American forces in the country.

The military also said U.S. and Bahraini forces intercepted missiles aimed at the Gulf kingdom, which is home to the U.S. Navy’s 5th fleet. Bahrain’s Defense Ministry said its military intercepted and destroyed three missiles and a number of drones fired by Iran.

The U.S. military said it launched strikes on an Iranian military ground control station on Qeshm Island in the Strait of Hormuz.

Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard acknowledged that it targeted the headquarters of the 5th Fleet and U.S. military facilities in another country, but did not name Kuwait.

Both the U.S. and Iran said they were retaliating for earlier attacks or attaempted attacks.

Iran’s Foreign Ministry condemned the U.S. strikes on Qeshm Island, where it said a telecommunications tower was struck, and other previous strikes. It called them “acts of aggression” that it said violated the ceasefire.

A senior Emirati diplomat called on Wednesday for “a firm, unified, and cohesive Gulf position” against Iran following the attacks.

“This aggression does not target a specific state, but rather all of us,” Anwar Gargash wrote on the X platform.

Iranian news agencies report pause in communication with mediators

Iran’s Fars and Tasnim news agencies, both believed to be close to the Guard, reported that Iran’s negotiators have stopped communicating with ceasefire mediators as tensions flared in Israel’s separate but related fight against the Iranian-backed Hezbollah militant group in Lebanon.

A regional official involved in the mediation, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the talks, told The Associated Press that Iran had not communicated at all on Tuesday after saying that a ceasefire needed to be enforced in Lebanon for negotiations to continue.

Trump called reports of a cessation in talks “false and erroneous.”

“The conversations between us have been going on continuously, including four days ago, three days ago, two days ago, one day ago and today,” Trump said in a social media post. “Where they lead, one never knows, but as I told Iran, ’It’s time, one way or another, for you to make a Deal.”

The war with Iran is increasingly tied to Israel’s war in Lebanon

Despite repeated outbreaks of violence, the declared ceasefire in Lebanon is officially in place. No side has formally withdrawn or declared the ceasefire over, but attacks continue. Israeli forces have moved deeper into Lebanon than at any time in over a quarter of a century while Hezbollah has launched rocket and drone attacks.

As the attacks continue, Lebanon has emerged as a key sticking point in Trump’s efforts to sign a ceasefire deal with Iran.

Tehran insists that any larger potential truce in the war there must also quell the fighting in Lebanon. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wants to keep the issues separate and is under heavy domestic pressure to strike Hezbollah as he prepares for new elections this fall.

The fighting has exposed a rift between close allies Israel and the U.S., with the U.S. pushing for restraint and Israel seeking to step up the military pressure on Hezbollah.

A person familiar with the situation said Netanyahu and Trump had a “tense” conversation earlier this week. The person spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak to the media. The person didn’t elaborate on the details of the call.