Thursday, May 06, 2004

"They kept hitting us with their Coach bags!" Wasps hit Sri Lanka tourist site

Sri Lanka's famous rock fortress at Sigiriya has partially reopened after a swarm of wasps stung dozens of tourists at the weekend.

Buddhist monks had lit lamps and incense sticks to pacify the wasps, believed to have been disturbed by children throwing stones at a nest.

Dozens of tourists were taken to hospital with swollen limbs.

Hundreds of thousands of visitors each year visit the World Heritage Site, 150km north-east of Colombo.


Archaeologists to return to dig at Citadel stadium

Archaeologists plan to dig on the site of The Citadel's Johnson Hagood Stadium this summer to recover the bodies of as many as 200 people, including Confederate dead, from what used to be a pair of graveyards.

About 40 Civil War soldiers, including Marines and the first crew of the H.L. Hunley submarine were recovered in 1999 and 2000 from beneath the stadium.

Now, as the west stands are being removed for a stadium renovation, archaeologists plan to recover the others from the site which, before it was built, was the Seaman's Burial Ground and a graveyard for the Harriett Pinckney Home for Widows and Orphans.


Historic Indian Head classified as N.J. endangered site

Dennis Palmer stood on the high, sandy bank along the western side of the Maurice River and wondered about those who watched the water flow past this site.

Although just a few hundred yards from Sherman Avenue, the place known as Indian Head is a quiet step back into centuries past.

"You look at this land and realize that someone was standing in the same place you are probably 5,000 years ago," said Palmer, executive director of the Landis Sewerage Authority, which owns the site and 1,800 acres of surrounding forests and wetlands.

"This is a place to be treasured," Palmer added. "It's a step back into the history of the human race."


All for one and. . .Dutch garden may hold Musketeers' skeletons

Are the three musketeers and four swashbuckling chums buried under an unassuming Dutch garden in the town where legendary swordsman D'Artagnan was killed?

Police plan to turn over an investigation into the discovery of the seven skeletons to archaeologists in the southern Dutch town of Maastricht, which has a history of battles going back to Roman times.

"Specialists are determining how long the bodies have been there," a police spokesman said Tuesday.


Gold hoard was 'the find of a lifetime'

BRONZE Age gold unearthed by metal detectors in North Wales was yesterday officially declared treasure of international importance.

It was the metal detectors' equivalent of winning the lottery, a treasure trove inquest heard.

Three enthusiasts from Liverpool and the owner of the land at Rossett, near Wrexham, where the hoard was discovered, will be sharing the value of the find.

A gold Bronze Age Ringlemere Cup, found in Kent in 2001, was valued at £270,000.


Oldest Evidence of Bedding Found

An Upper Paleolithic camp, once submerged by the waters of the Sea of Galilee, has yielded the world's oldest evidence of bedding, according to Israeli archaeologists.

Known as Ohalo II, the site was abandoned by Stone Age fishermen and hunters nearly 23,000 years ago, following a flood.

"Calm, relatively deep, water covered the site, and the immediate deposition of fine clay and silt layers began. Together, the water and sediments sealed the site and protected the remains for millennia," archaeologist Dani Nadel and colleagues wrote in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.


Turkmen diggers find royal mausoleum

Archaeologists have made a sensational discovery in Turkmenistan -- a royal mausoleum -- local media reported Wednesday.

The Margianskaya expedition led by Victor Sarianidi, a prominent Russian archaeologist, has been digging on the site of an ancient settlement called Gonur in the delta of the Murgab River in the eastern Mary region, some 200 miles east of the country's capital, Ashgabat, Turkmenistan.ru said.

The walls of the mausoleum are decorated with stone and gypsum mosaic. The scientists discovered a unique chariot with bronze wheels in a burial chamber and splendid bronze things and sacred sheep in others.


Destroying a link to the Hohokam

Priceless 1,500-year-old Hohokam sites have been destroyed by workers on the expansive La Osa Ranch development northwest of Tucson, state experts say.

When George Johnson International Inc. owned about 19,000 acres near Ironwood Forest National Monument, it did nearly $9 million of damage to prized archaeological sites on hundreds of acres of adjacent state land, state experts say.

Many of the sites are clustered around a platform mound, a monumental feature used as an elevated service for public and private functions. Such mounds, which would have required a group effort to build, are clues to Hohokam social organization.


Maya updates Archaeologists announce discoveries at the ancient Maya site of Waka' in northern Guatemala

DALLAS (SMU) -- An international archaeological project, sponsored by Southern Methodist University, headed by Dr. David Freidel of SMU, and Guatemalan archaeologist Héctor Escobedo of Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala, is attempting to combine scientific research of the ancient Maya past of Guatemala with conservation and development in an effort to save a vital section of tropical rainforest in the Department of Petén.

The Waka' Archaeological Project, which began research at the site (located approximately 60 km west of the famous Maya site of Tikal) in 2002, is part of an alliance of government and non-government agencies trying to halt a cycle of destruction in Guatemala's largest national park, Laguna del Tigre.

The ancient Maya center, known from ancient Maya inscriptions as Waka', and known today as El Perú, was once an important economic and political center of the Maya world and formed one corner of a triangle of major sites that also included Calakmul (Mexico) to the north, and Tikal to the west. The site, composed of 672 monumental structures and untold numbers of small house structures, sits atop an escarpment six kilometers north of the San Pedro Mártir River. Oil prospectors discovered the site in the 1960's.


And in related news: Mayan Queen's Tomb Found in Rain Forest

While excavating an ancient royal palace deep in the Guatemalan rain forest, archaeologists made a rare discovery - the 1,200-year-old tomb and skeleton of a Mayan queen.

Archaeologists announced the find Thursday, and said the woman appears to have been a powerful leader of a city that may have been home to tens of thousands of people at its peak. They found her bones on a raised platform, with evidence of riches scattered around her body.

"We find clues of people's existence in the past all the time, from the garbage they left or the buildings they built. ... But when you actually come face-to-face with human beings, it's a deeply sacred moment for all of us," said David Freidel, an anthropology professor at Southern Methodist University, which sponsored a team of 20 archaeologists excavating the site.