Helicopter rescues of 1,500 tourists stranded at Machu Picchu were suspended yesterday because of the continuing heavy rains. Flooding and landslides have killed eight people, and 6,000 have been left homeless in the region around Cuzco.

Looters used bulldozers to destroy more than ten Han-Dynasty tombs in China’s east Jiangsu Province. Scholars know that much about the sites from the few fragments of coffins and artifacts that were left behind. “Ancient tomb robbery is rampant in China. Sometimes our archaeologists’ job is like that of a firefighter, we rush here and there to rescue robbed, ancient tombs,” said Xu Weihong of the Terracotta Warriors Museum.  

Toltec ceramics have been found in a 1,100-year-old tomb at the Maya site of Tonina in southern Chiapas, Mexico. “It is clear that this is a new wave of occupation, the people who built this grave of the Toltec type,” claimed archaeologist Juan Yadeun. But archaeologists not involved with the dig are more cautious. “One tomb, even if it is very fancy, isn’t going to answer big things about the trajectory of Maya history,” said David Stuart of the University of Texas at Austin.  

An eleventh-century structure, called a “substantial Viking house,” has been found on the north shore of the Liffey River in Dublin. “We are also finding some evidence of a dwelling next to this one, so it does look like there was some kind of organized settlement here,” said archaeologist Colm Moriarty.   

At University College London, fragments of parchment have been pieced together into part of the Gregorian Code, a collection of Roman laws spanning from A.D. 117 to 305, that had been thought lost forever. “The fragments bear the text of a Latin work in clear calligraphic script, perhaps dating as far back as A.D. 400,” said historian Benet Salway.  

New dates obtained from teeth excavated from Pego do Diabo, Portugal, indicate that the last Neanderthals in Europe died out 37,000 years ago.   

In primates, brain and body mass have been subject to separate selection pressures, according to a study by a team of English scientists. Their research may help explain the small brain size of the Hobbits, a.k.a. Homo floresiensis.  

Here’s a rerun of an article on the second American Indian mound to be damaged in Oxford, Alabama. “It’s been flattened like a pancake. There is just grass over it now,” said Harry Holstein of Jacksonville State University.   And there’s another article on how University of Alabama archaeologist Robert Clouse answered questions about the mounds in front of Oxford city council. 

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Thursday, January 28, 2010. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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