Burials

Rosaleen Tallon kissed her three children good night and went to sleep feeling at peace. The terrorist responsible for the death of her brother, New York firefighter Sean Patrick Tallon, was dead. Her two boys and her little girl had been assured that the "bad man" behind the attacks that claimed their uncle was gone. But when Tallon awoke Monday to the news that Osama bin Laden had been buried at sea, she was stunned. That was one corpse she would like to have seen for herself, Tallon said, her fiery words underscoring the change this suburban science teacher has undergone in the last decade.

"The past is never dead. It's not even past," William Faulkner wrote in 1951, two years after winning the Nobel Prize for literature. It's one of his best-known lines, but I don't think I ever truly understood it until I came to Oxford. For more than three decades, since I first read "As I Lay Dying" as a high school senior, I regarded such a sentiment as a key to Faulkner's writing — which continues to resonate because it comes drenched in history, in the interplay of the past and present, the bitter weight of heritage, the understanding that we cannot be cut free of our roots — without quite realizing that it was also a key to his life . Without quite realizing, in other words, the extent to which it has to do with Oxford, the college town 85 miles southeast of Memphis where Faulkner was raised and where he lived and died and where he is buried, and where, beginning with his third novel, "Sartoris" (1929)

As a combat medic in Vietnam with the Army's 1st Air Cavalry Division in 1968 and 1969, John A. Smith III risked his life repeatedly to rescue wounded comrades. He was wounded three times and awarded the Bronze Star for valor. After years of surgeries and rehabilitation, Smith moved from New York to San Diego in 1982 and took a job with the U.S. Post Office. He rarely talked of his combat experiences, but he routinely visited veterans in local hospitals, served as the announcer at the Veterans Day parade and volunteered at the California Veterans Home in Chula Vista.

Snow had fallen at dawn one recent morning and the tombstones were dressed in white when Masako Hiraiwa took her daily stroll through Aoyama cemetery. A stray cat slipped daintily past a row of old stone markers. Such a peaceful setting seemed an unlikely inspiration for a social rebellion women are waging against an ancient Japanese cultural tradition: being buried with their husbands' families. You might call it the final frontier for women's equality in Japan. The battle has struck Hiraiwa's own extended clan broadside.

Alaska researchers have found the cremated remains of a 3-year-old child whose parents were among the first immigrants to North America, crossing over the then-existing land bridge from Asia to the New World through the region known as Beringia. The 11,500-year-old remains were found buried on the banks of the Tanana River in the hearth of what appears to be a summer home for the early Beringians, the earliest known habitation for these first American settlers. Archaeologists already know quite a bit about these early people based on sites where the groups gathered briefly to hunt, skin and consume large game, said archaeologist Frank E. "Ted" Goebel of the Center for the Study of the First Americans at Texas A&M University, who was not involved in the current research.

Stepping gingerly across a small mesa of manganese-stained stones, Alfredo Acosta Figueroa explained how the giant image of the creator etched into the earth guides the souls of mothers and children west toward Old Woman Mountain. The image of Cicimiti, more detectable from the sky than on foot, is just one of many geoglyphs, Native American burial sites and ancient relics that Figueroa says are threatened by solar projects being fast-tracked near Blythe and other remote expanses in the Southern California desert.

With a push from Los Angeles City Councilman Bill Rosendahl and a nudge from the city's Cultural Heritage Commission, a long-running dispute over a historic rancho-era cemetery in Pacific Palisades has been laid to rest. In a deal that will help preserve the little-known Pascual Marquez Family Cemetery, neighbors have agreed to sell a portion of the land in front of the burial ground at a greatly reduced price. The space will allow for landscaping and provide access to winding San Lorenzo Street.

The evening shadows have to fall just right. And the grave shouldn't be on a slope. In traditional Hmong culture, the burial site matters for eternity, to the living and the dead and the spirit world that connects them. So the old Hmong men ? once young soldiers in a CIA-backed "secret" war in the jungles of Laos ? light candles for Gen. Vang Pao, their leader in that war, and hope that he will be allowed to be buried in Arlington National Cemetery. They fought a war on behalf of the Americans and lost everything: their land, their way of life, their country and the lives of tens of thousands of their people.

L.A. has flunked another history test. Not the kind with questions about George Washington and the Constitution. This was a test of our ability to protect our local history ? specifically one particular patch of land where many, if not most, of L.A.'s founders were buried. Now the long rest of some of those early Angelenos has been disturbed. Bones from one of the city's early cemeteries were dug up by accident during the construction ? ironically enough ? of a history museum.

A UCLA-led team reported Monday that it had discovered a 6,000-year-old facility in an Armenian cave that contained everything necessary to produce wine from grapes, including a grape press, fermentation vats, storage jars, wine-soaked pottery shards and even a cup and drinking bowl. The ancient winery is at least 1,000 years older than any similar installation previously known, and it was found in the same cave where researchers in June announced the discovery of the world's oldest leather shoe.