Artifacts

Back in the 1950s and 1960s, what many people really lusted after for their suburban dream home wasn't a spa or a tennis court, but an underground bomb shelter. Death lurked in the atom, and the Russkies--later, the Chinese--stood ready to bomb America into submission. By the early 1960s, fear of nuclear holocaust had become a national mania as the federal civil defense distributed millions of pamphlets explaining how citizens could build their own bomb shelters.

A Native American group's attempt to block construction of a home in Malibu suffered a setback Monday when Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Diane Wayne tentatively ruled that the city has taken adequate precautions to protect artifacts on the property. Next week Wayne is expected to make final her decision rejecting a claim by the American Indian Movement, which wanted to prevent construction on what it says is an ancient Chumash burial ground.

He works as a blacksmith in one of Baghdad's swarming Shiite slums. But at least once a month, Abu Saif tucks a pistol into his belt, hops into a minibus taxi and speeds south. His goal: to unearth ancient treasures from thousands of archaeological sites scattered across southern Iraq. Images of Baghdad's ransacked National Museum, custodian of a collection dating back to the beginning of civilization, provoked an international outcry in the early days of the war in 2003.

White-haired and missing several teeth, a 79-year-old retired steel salesman sat barefoot in a stained undershirt at his modest Cerritos home Wednesday, trying to explain how he had ended up at the center of a major federal smuggling investigation. It all started when Robert Olson took a trip in the 1970s to Thailand, where he said he picked up an ancient bronze ring and was required to buy it after it broke in his hand.

Two dozen homes and a medical building were evacuated for about four hours Friday after a man dropped off an unexploded mortar shell at an adjacent Huntington Beach fire station, authorities said. About 10:30 a.m., the man dropped off the World War II-era 81-millimeter mortar round -- still in its original box -- at the fire station at the intersection of Heil Avenue and Springdale Street.

State Senate leaders chastised UC Berkeley administrators Tuesday for trampling on the civil rights of Native Americans by not returning the remains of thousands of their ancestors held in storage at a campus museum. Sen. Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento), the incoming Senate leader, accused the university of discriminating against Native Americans by keeping the bones and artifacts at the Phoebe A.

A 2,400-year-old funerary urn has been returned to Greece and put on display, part of a campaign to reclaim illegally exported antiquities from museums and art dealers around the world. The marble urn depicting two women in a banquet scene was displayed Monday at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens. The vessel was first located at an international arts fair in Maastrict, the Netherlands, last year and traced to a Swiss dealer who agreed to hand it over without conditions, the Greek Culture Ministry said.

It was early January. The team charged with stabilizing the scorched, slide-prone mountains above suburban Orange County had hiked for miles up twisting ravines when they spotted odd aluminum globules and jagged hunks of steel rooted in the earth. A U.S. Forest Service "smoke jumper" -- trained to vault out of airplanes into wildfires -- recognized the tangled debris. "Looks like an airplane wreck to me," he said. They pinpointed the coordinates and phoned Forest Service officials.

During the time of the Zhou Dynasty 3,000 years ago, when China was still a small nation-state in the middle of a continent, its kings kept sending imperial armies to invade and conquer lands hundreds of miles to the east. Time and again, however, the people of the east, in what is modern China's Shandong province, managed to defeat the imperial soldiers. In campaign reports from the time, the sorehead losers wrote that the eastern people were "Dong Yi," meaning stubborn, uncouth barbarians of the east.