Archeology

Some mysteries are such fun you almost don't want to know the truth. That may help explain why people are fascinated with crystal skulls. Happy to share the spotlight with the latest Indiana Jones movie, the Smithsonian's Museum of Natural History in Washington is putting its crystal skull on display starting today. "People like to believe in something greater than themselves," Smithsonian anthropologist Jane MacLaren Walsh said, and crystal skulls are mysterious and beautiful. But she studied the Smithsonian skull and those in other museums and concluded they are all fakes, made in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Macedonian archaeologists say they have discovered a well-preserved statue of the goddess of love in the ruins of an ancient Roman city near Skopje, Macedonia. Archaeologist Marina Oncevska said Thursday that the 5-foot-6-inch-tall marble Venus is a masterpiece of ancient art executed in the late classical Greek tradition. It dates to the second or third century. She says archaeologists found it Tuesday in the ruins of Scupi on the northwest outskirts of Macedonia's capital. "The smoothness of the marble and the beauty of the statue give us the clue that this masterpiece came from one of the best artistic schools in the Mediterranean," Oncevska said.

Scientists in Panama have unearthed hundreds of animal fossils dating back 20 million years, which could shed more light on how and when the American continent became connected. Geologists from the Smithsonian Institution, which has a permanent base in Panama, said engineers digging to widen the Panama Canal have uncovered more than 500 fossils, including teeth and bones of rodents and crocodiles that lived before a land bridge linked North and South America. Scientists believe the South American and Caribbean tectonic plates collided about 15 million years ago, causing volcanic activity that eventually formed a thin strip of land linking the Americas and separating the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.

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 rare 2,500-year-old marble discus was found last week by an Israeli lifeguard diving in the underwater antiquities site of Yavne-Yam, an ancient port city settled in the middle Bronze Age and inhabited until the Middle Ages. Today, the nearby beach is named for the kibbutz of Palmahim. The convex object is believed to have been fixed to the front of ancient ships as a talisman, its shape and painted circles suggesting the pupil of a forward-looking and vigilant eye to protect mariners from misfortune.

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.

The tie that binds John and Rebecca Jackson is about 4 feet by 14 feet, woven of herringbone twill linen. It once led to their romance; years later, it still dominates their thoughts and fills their conversations. It brought Rebecca, an Orthodox Jew, to the Catholic Church; it led John to suspend himself from an 8-foot-tall cross to study how blood might have stained the cloth.

A vast region of the Amazon forest in Brazil was home to a complex of ancient towns in which about 50,000 people lived, according to scientists assisted by satellite images of the region. The existence of the ancient settlements in the Upper Xingu region of the Amazon in north-central Brazil means that what many experts had considered virgin tropical forests were in fact heavily affected by past human activity, the scientists reported Thursday in the journal Science.

Israeli archaeologists Wednesday unveiled a 2,100-year-old Jerusalem perimeter wall -- along with beer bottles left behind by 19th century researchers who first discovered the stone defenses. The wall, on Mt. Zion at the southern edge of Jerusalem's Old City, dates back to the Second Jewish Temple, which was destroyed by the Romans in AD 70.

Archaeologists have unearthed gold jewelry, weapons and pottery at an ancient burial site near Pella in northern Greece, the birthplace of Alexander the Great, the Culture Ministry said this week. The excavations at the vast cemetery uncovered 43 graves dating from 650 to 279 BC, shedding new light on the early development of the Macedonian kingdom, which stretched as far as India under Alexander's conquests.