The remains of 116 people have been uncovered in a ninth-century cemetery in southeastern Mexico. “The 66 burials in urns correspond to individuals belonging to the Mayan elite and the other 50 – placed in different positions around them – to their companions in the afterlife,” said Ricardo Armijo of the National Anthropology and History Institute.

A mass grave containing nearly 300 people has been found beneath a church in a remote mountain village in northern Italy. About one-third of the bodies, which date from the mid-sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, were naturally mummified.

A DNA study of coconuts shows that there are two distinct groups, one that was first cultivated in the Pacific basin and the other in the Indian Ocean basin. “The big surprise was that there was so much genetic differentiation clearly correlated with geography, even though humans have been moving coconut around for so long,” said plant evolutionary biologist Kenneth Olsen of Washington University in St. Louis.

Two cannons were recovered from a shipwreck off the coast of northeastern Florida, near the St. Augustine lighthouse. The weapons were made sometime after 1776 in Scotland.

Scholars from the Israel Antiquities Authority say that a 2,000-year-old ossuary recovered from looters three years ago is genuine. The box is inscribed with the names “Miriam daughter of Yeshua son of Caiaphas, priest of Maaziah from Beth Imri.”

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Wednesday, June 29, 2011. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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