The West Tavaputs Plateau agreement is intended to protect the rock art in Utah’s Nine Mile Canyon from the dust and vibrations generated by the Bill Barrett Corporation, which is drilling for natural gas nearby. “This is a first step. I don’t see this as the end, but a chance to make sure details of the agreement are being carried out,” said Pam Miller of the Nine Mile Canyon Coalition.   “It’s a stand-alone, binding legal agreement,” adds Ti Hays, public-lands attorney for the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

The NAACP, the Society for the Preservation of African-American History and Antiquities, and other groups claim that a study carried out be Virginia’s Department of Historic Resources at the site of a an historic African-American burial ground was flawed and inaccurate, resulting in the construction of a parking lot for Virginia Commonwealth University on top of the burials.    

Will the bones of an eighteenth-century man thought to be ex-pirate Edward Salter be turned over to his descendants for burial? The remains were excavated in 1986 from North Carolina land that had once belonged to Salter, and were put in storage at the office of the state archaeologist. The state acknowledges that proper procedures, intended to alert any possible next of kin, were not followed at the time.   

Zahi Hawass, head of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, has talked to reporters about the huge 2,500-year-old tomb at Saqqara that has been in the news over the past couple of days. “These tombs belonged to middle class Egyptian families, not royalty, and had no names on them. They were reused by many people and can give us lots of information on burial customs and religion at the time,” he said.   This article mentions the smaller, second tomb.  

A second statue has been unearthed at the ancient Hindu temple discovered on the Indonesian Islamic University campus in Yogyakarta. The statue depicts Nandi, the sacred bull that carried Shiva; a statue of Shiva’s son, Ganesha, was found last month.   

Here’s a quick wrap-up of the year’s archaeological work in southern Syria.

 Twenty-nine artifacts have been seized by police in southern Iraq before they could be smuggled out of the country.

A team of German and Russian scientists has been able to distinguish between 30,000-year-old human mitochondrial DNA taken from the Markina Gora skeleton, unearthed in 1954, and modern contamination from people who had handled the bones.   

There’s more information on the 200 geometric earthworks in the Amazon Basin that have been spotted in satellite images. It had been thought that some of these areas had been uninhabited. “Traditionally, if you would have asked an anthropologist or archaeologist how many people lived [in these Amazon uplands], they’d say almost zero. And so this is astounding that there were 60,000 people making a go of it where there aren’t supposed to be any,” said William Woods of the University of Kansas.   

Discovery News has posted photographs of the huge rock-hewn tomb discovered at Saqqara.