China has reportedly sentenced four tomb robbers to death.

The U.S. government returned 18 Maya artifacts to El Salvador that had been stolen from an archaeological site and sold on the Internet by a Salvadoran couple. Other objects were recovered in El Salvador, but many that had been sold in Japan, Britain, Canada, and France have not been found.  

Computational modeling techniques are helping archaeologists interpret how humans and the environment interact. “Although soil erosion is a natural process, through the models we are able to investigate the contribution of different agricultural practices used by prehistoric societies to land degradation and how it influenced the evolution of these communities,” said Helena Mitasova of North Carolina State University. 

Is this what China’s terracotta warriors looked like with paint? 

Here’s a photograph of all that remains of a wooden canoe made by the Lenape sometime between A.D. 1420 and 1580. The canoe was pulled from New Jersey’s Sand Pond in the 1930s.  

Alice V. M. Samson of Leiden University, and Bridget M. Waller, of the University of Portsmouth, suggest in their new article in Current Anthropology that the bared teeth shown in the art of the Taino may have signaled non-aggression and benign intent, contrary to the negative interpretation assigned by early European observers.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Friday, May 14, 2010. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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