The 1,600-year-old tomb of a Maya king was discovered in Guatemala, beneath a pyramid at the site of El Zotz. The well-sealed tomb also contained the remains of six children, wood, textiles, and painted stucco in excellent condition. “When we opened the tomb, I poked my head in and there was still, to my astonishment, a smell of putrification and a chill that went to my bones,” said Stephen Houston of Brown University.

The 1,200-year-old tomb of a high-ranking official has been unearthed in Peru, at the Huaca Las Ventanas archaeological site. He had been buried sitting up with a winged eye mask, a ceremonial knife, and a metal cup.  

A second Neolithic “Venus” figurine has been found in Scotland, close to the spot where the first “Orkney Venus” was discovered last year. “It’s difficult to speculate on the precise function or meaning of these figurines. They could even be children’s toys,” said Peter Yeoman of Historic Scotland.  

When did the human foot develop? Anthropologist Brian Richmond of George Washington University is filming people walking on sand, and comparing the film and footprints with a 1.5 million-year-old track way in Kenya. “Sure enough, they were walking with a long stride, they had an arch in the foot the way we have,” he explained.  “Meet the family” at this gateway to more articles from NPR’s series, “The Human Edge.”  

The sea salt industry boomed along England’s Solent coast until the nineteenth century. Volunteers will help archaeologist Frank Green excavate the area around the last two sea salt boiling houses in the town of Lymington. “It wouldn’t be over-emphasizing it to say that you could judge how sophisticated a society was by the availability of salt,” he said.  

Here’s another article on the 300 looted antiquities recovered by Italian police and put on display in Rome’s Colosseum.  

Looters’ holes have been found at Dalkhuni Fort, a Sassanid structure in southwestern Iran.  

A burial ceremony was held this morning in Fromelles, France, for the Australian and British soldiers who were killed there during World War I. They had been buried at the battlefield in mass graves by German soldiers.  

Human remains taken from marked graves at a church mission site on Labrador’s north coast by anthropologist William Duncan Strong in the late 1920s will be returned by Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History. “We are deeply saddened by this incident,” said museum president John McCarter.  

Jaromir Malek keeps the archive of Howard Carter’s Tutankhamun project at the Griffith Institute at Oxford University. He is making all of the documents available online. “We can’t make Egyptologists work on the material if they are not inclined to do so. But we could make sure that all of the excavation records are available to anyone who is interested,” he said.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Monday, July 19, 2010. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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