Free Republic

Unearthing the lost Peking Man After years of searching, a new initiative aims to trace these historic missing fossils, says Ching-Ching Ni Monday, April 10, 2006 After years of searching, a new initiative aims to trace these historic missing fossils, says Ching-Ching Ni It's a mystery that has baffled the world for more than half a century. Whatever happened to the fossils of the prehistoric human ancestor known as Peking Man? Their discovery in the late 1920s and 1930s in limestone caves on the outskirts of Beijing, then called Peking in the West, was one of the 20th century's greatest...

Unearthing Welsh history (Filed: 01/04/2006) An archaeologist digs deep in his pocket to find a medieval town, reports Jonny Beardsall That an amateur archaeologist was prepared to pay £32,000 for 4.5 unremarkable acres at Trelleck, Monmouthshire, must mean Welsh sons of the soil are salivating with glee. But so convinced is Stuart Wilson that the field is the site of a lost medieval town, he still insists it was money well spent a year after he bought the land. Broken but valuable: archaeologist Stuart Wilson holds a roof tile dug up at the site Mr Wilson, 27, and friends at...

Unearthing Bulgaria’s Golden Age By Nicholas Glass Published: December 2 2005 15:09 December 2 2005 15:09 There was nothing unusual about the village shop in the depths of the countryside, 75 miles east of Sofia. What astonished the young archaeologists wanting cigarettes was the shopkeeper’s jewellery. Her necklace and earrings were exquisite: the beads so small and perfectly worked that her customers assumed they were modern, the gold of a high carat. But how could a shopkeeper afford such trinkets in a country where the average monthly salary is £100? The archaeologists didn’t know it but the shopkeeper’s jewellery was...

Unearthing canyon's cluesMysteries of Anasazi revealed in Chaco's centuries-old corn By Jim Erickson, Rocky Mountain News May 15, 2004 CHACO CANYON, N.M. - As Rich Friedman twists the handle of the T-shaped auger, the steel blades bite into loamy brown soil in a field where scientists suspect Anasazi farmers grew corn 1,000 years ago. Friedman is part of a Boulder-led research team that collected 60 soil samples around the Chaco basin this month in an ongoing effort to determine where the Anasazi grew all the corn they would have needed to feed the thousands who periodically gathered in the canyon....