Archeology

Archaeologists will excavate hundreds of fragments of an ancient wooden boat entombed in an underground chamber next to Giza's Great Pyramid and try to reassemble the craft, Egyptologists announced Saturday. The 4,500-year-old vessel is the sister ship of a similar boat removed in pieces from another pit in 1954 and painstakingly reconstructed. Experts believe the boats were meant to ferry in the afterlife the pharaoh who built the Great Pyramid.

A 2,100-year-old bronze and iron computer that predicted eclipses and other astronomical events also showed the cycle of the Greek Olympics and the related games that led up to it, researchers reported today. The research team also has been able to decipher all the month names from the heavily corroded fragments of the so-called Antikythera mechanism, providing the first concrete evidence that an astronomical scheme devised by the Greek astronomer Geminos was put to practical use.

British researchers think they have solved the decades-old mystery of why ancient Britons transported massive rocks 250 miles from Wales to Salisbury Plain to construct the massive but enigmatic Stonehenge monument: They believed the stones possessed healing powers.

Sometimes serendipity makes history. In this case, it may have uncovered history. This year, Israeli writer Yaron Svoray came to Germany to research the underground operation that whisked Nazi officials to South America to escape justice after World War II. Svoray was chatting with a local about his project when the man mentioned that a nearby plot of land had served as a dump during the Third Reich.

Carved tools and ornaments from Russia paint a rare picture of the time about 45,000 years ago when modern humans migrated out of Africa to colonize Europe, researchers reported Friday in the journal Science. "The big surprise here is the very early presence of modern humans in one of the coldest, driest places in Europe," said lead author John Hoffecker of the University of Colorado at Boulder. Russia "is one of the last places we would have expected people from Africa to occupy first."

On the heavily forested eastern slopes of the Andes, Peruvian farmers have discovered a massive ruin whose unusual size and shape promise to shed new light on the relationship between the Chachapoyas and the Inca warriors who destroyed their civilization.

ITALIAN police have unearthed the hidden cache of a group of grave robbers, recovering ancient Roman marble reliefs depicting stunningly lifelike gladiators locked in mortal combat, officials said Wednesday. The 12 panels were buried in the garden of a home near Fiano Romano, 25 miles north of Rome. Officials hailed it as a major archeological find and a blow to the illegal antiquities market. Archeologists said the work offers a glimpse into early gladiator fights.

A 2,500-year-old city influenced by the Olmecs -- often referred to as the "mother culture" of Mesoamerica -- has been discovered in Mexico, hundreds of miles away from the Olmecs' Gulf Coast territory, archeologists said Wednesday. Two statues and architectural details at the site, known as Zazacatla, indicate that the inhabitants adopted Olmec styles when they changed from a simple, egalitarian society to a more complex, hierarchical one.

Three Australian caves have yielded a treasure trove of fossils of ancient kangaroos, marsupial lions and giant lizards that roamed the outback for hundreds of thousands of years. These so-called megafauna went extinct about 45,000 years ago, shortly after humans arrived on the continent. Researchers, writing in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature, suggest that the extinction was the result of the human use of fire for hunting -- and not climate change, as some scientists have suggested.

Archeologists working near Stonehenge in England have discovered what appears to be an ancient religious complex containing a wealth of artifacts that may finally illuminate the lives and religious practices of the people who built the mysterious monument 4,600 years ago.