Analysis of vessels from Pueblo vessels unearthed in the U.S. Southwest shows that people drank a cacao-based beverage imported from southern Mexico or Central America. Dorothy Washburn of the University of Pennsylvania says that southwestern societies traded turquoise for this Mesoamerican cacao. “Turquoise workers may have been paid in cacao, as was the case in Mesoamerica. That would have given a nonelite population access to cacao that we found in their bowls and pitchers,” she said. 

Environmental damage due to the excessive exploitation of natural resources caused the collapse of Pre-classic Maya civilization at the cities of Nakbe, Wakna, and Tintal, according to Richard D. Hansen of Idaho State University. 

Canada will return some 20,000 smuggled items, including coins, pottery, seals, jewelry, and instruments, to Bulgaria. 

Road work in Georgetown, a neighborhood of Washington, D.C., has revealed layers of buried road surfaces dating to the first half of the nineteenth century. “The original road surface was actually level with that house at the time it was built. Now you have to walk down the steps to the front door,” said archaeologist Aaron Levinthal. 

The bones of more than 20 people have been unearthed near a chapel on the smallest Channel Island of Herm. The burials are orderly and probably several hundred years old.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Friday, March 18, 2011. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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