Evidence of cannibalism in the fifteenth century among the Xiximes people has been discovered in northern Mexico. Jesuit missionaries had written of the practice as part of a Xiximes ritual that was conducted after each corn harvest.

Jim Woods of Idaho State University and Alejandro Pastrana of the Mexico National Institute of Anthropology and History are studying how special obsidian beads were produced 1,200 years ago in Mexico. “What I find interesting is that at first the beads seem like such simple, mundane things, but it has turned out to be quite a challenge for modern archaeologists to replicate making them and to understand their significance,” explained Woods.

Here’s a video from Texas about the historic drought and the exposure of American Indian artifacts in dry lake beds. “The looter and scavenger come and dig up the site. They just destroy all that and leave it to the side. And that’s just what this is, it’s the things that they picked trough,” said Brad Demsey of the US Army Corps Engineers.

Inci Delemen of Istanbul University discussed what she thinks Turkey needs to do to protect its cultural heritage from looters. She has been a member of the excavation team at Perge, where the recently returned “Weary Herakles” was found, since 1990.

There’s also an update on the search for the school opened by Mary MacKillop in southeastern Australia in 1866. “We found a coin on the last day dating from 1860 and literally in the last 10 minutes in the last few centimeters of soil they found a ceramic ink bottle,” said Heather Burke of Flinders University.

The face of Simon of Sudbury, an Archbishop of Canterbury in the fourteenth century, has been reconstructed from his partially mummified skull. Simon of Sudbury was beheaded by peasants during the Great Rising of 1381.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Monday, October 3, 2011. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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