Discoveries at an ancient Maori village site near Carters Beach, 6km west of Westport, are driving an archaeological breakthrough of international significance.
Project co-ordinator Chris Jacomb, who is also regional archaeologist for New Zealand Historic Places Trust, said outstanding examples of New Zealand's earliest stone tools had been uncovered at the Buller River site and had already generated widespread interest.
An investigating team completed work at the site last week and left thrilled with discoveries made during this year's three-week project, he said.
The site's high preservation and very early evidence made it of international significance, Mr Jacomb said.
Dragon Lair update One-eyed dragon in Tran Dynasty dig
The preliminary report of a team from the Vietnam Institute of Archaeology (VIA), digging since January at a temple dedicated to An Duong Vuong King, may confirm history books that the site dates back to the Tran dynasty.
Associate Professor Pham Minh Huyen, who led the five-member group at the site in Hanoi's outlying district of Dong Anh, said that her team dug six holes and found numerous arterfacts, mainly ceramics, tiles, and bricks distributed among three layers.
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The work also made a discovery regarding a local legend surrounding the temple in the inner compound of the citadel. Local people used to believe in a one-eyed dragon at the An Duong Vuong Temple, also called the Thuong (Upper) Temple.
Art thieves! Egyptian art stolen
THIEVES have taken £15,000 worth of ancient Egyptian figurines and a human skull from Bagshaw Museum, Wilton Park.
The figurines, known as Shabtis, are carved from stone and jade. They are small statuettes which were buried with the dead to work as servants in the afterlife.
The burglars smashed a double-glazed window and broke through shutters to reach the religious artefacts overnight last Friday.
Possible art thief in action:
Did they eat lots of. . .you know. . . . Pumpkintown dig finds ancient colony
Trudging through thick gray mud at this northern Greenville County farm, it doesn't take long to find fragments of ancient history sticking out of the soil, be it a smooth piece of Indian pottery or the jagged-edged stone of an arrowhead.
This place, nestled in the floodplains of the south Saluda River, has long been a resting ground for American Indian artifacts. The earth beneath it is a virtual Atlantis of some of the earliest American life.
"In a sense, it's a concentration of history," said Frances Knight, an archaeologist from Illinois who moved to Greenville about a year and a half ago and has been following the Marietta dig. "It gets at understanding people of the past."
NAGPRA update 'U' to return burial remains to tribe
The University Board of the Regents approved yesterday the repatriation of the Canadian burial remains of the Whitefish River band, an indigenous people from the Ojibwe Great Lakes tribe that has not seen the remains for more than 60 years. The approval marks the University’s first international burial remains repatriation.
Originating from Old Birch Island cemetery in Lake Huron, the 16 to 18 human remains, which also include cultural artifacts, were excavated in 1938 by University anthropology Prof. Emerson Greenman and later preserved by the Museum of Anthropology.
By 1983, the Whitefish River people began talks with the University to reclaim the burial remains. After more than two decades, last month, both sides finally reached an agreement to repatriate, which only required final approval from the regents to go through.
Ancient birds, Stone Age music
All winter long, the cacophony of sound at Sunayu, on the eastern shore of Lake Kussharo in eastern Hokkaido, is almost entirely comprised if the bugling and whooping of swans.
There, Whooper Swans crowd into the narrow ice-free strip along the lake edge where geothermal activity warms the sand and where visitors gather to greet and feed these winter immigrants from Russia. The noise can sometimes be so deafening that I have heard it frequently from one of my favorite birding localities -- the outdoor hot spring of a local lodge that is nearly a kilometer away in the woods.
It's a haunting sound, rising to a crescendo as pairs meet and greet, as families displace each other and as birds arrive and depart the flock.
Keep reading, it really does have an archaeological point.
Olmec update Mother Culture, or Only a Sister? (Free reg required)
n a coastal flood plain etched by rivers flowing through swamps and alongside fields of maize and beans, the people archaeologists call the Olmecs lived in a society of emergent complexity. It was more than 3,000 years ago along the Gulf of Mexico around Veracruz.
The Olmecs, mobilized by ambitious rulers and fortified by a pantheon of gods, moved a veritable mountain of earth to create a plateau above the plain, and there planted a city, the ruins of which are known today as San Lorenzo. They left behind palace remnants, distinctive pottery and art with anthropomorphic jaguar motifs. Most impressive were Olmec sculptures: colossal stone heads with thick lips and staring eyes that are assumed to be monuments to revered rulers.
The Olmecs are widely regarded as creators of the first civilization in Mesoamerica, the area encompassing much of Mexico and Central America, and a cultural wellspring of later societies, notably the Maya. Some scholars think the Olmec civilization was the first anywhere in America, though doubt has been cast by recent discoveries in Peru.
Fight! Fight! Indian artifacts cloud project
Environmentalists who've been fighting an industrial park going up near Mammoth Cave National Park have a new focus for their opposition -- the discovery of prehistoric Indian remains and drawings nearby.
The artifacts were discovered in January and February, after construction crews for the Kentucky Trimodal Transpark, which broke ground last year, accidentally punched an opening in a previously unknown 2,000-foot-long cave nearby.
Experts from Western Kentucky University and the University of Kentucky then discovered the bones of two Indians and several ancient drawings on hardened mud and limestone rock, in an area since sealed for its protection.