Pyramids

You can see it for miles, looming over the birch forests and wildflower fields and construction sites crammed with future dachas for Russia's rich and ruthless. Stabbing up toward heaven from its hilltop perch, the pyramid gleams white under the blast of northern sun. Twelve stories high, 55 tons of fiberglass, swarming with Russians desperate to rearrange their energy fields and cure their karma.

Desert winds blow, sands shift, archaeologists dig, and one day you find a pyramid. Egyptian authorities announced Tuesday that they had discovered what's left of the base of a pyramid estimated to be 4,300 years old. The site near Saqqara has been under excavation for 20 years, and its pyramid is believed to have belonged to Queen Sesheshet, the mother of King Teti, who ruled the Sixth Dynasty about 2291 BC.

BEFORE the torrential rain and the ankle-deep mud, before the quarter-sized blister and the mouse-sized cockroach, before all that, I climbed a 2,000-year-old Maya pyramid, watched the red orb of the sun sink into the jungle canopy and felt the thrill of being an anachronism. Modern society has no claim on this place. In every direction, unbroken jungle spread in green waves. Monkeys crashed through the trees below. Dragonflies patrolled the pyramid's summit in jerky circles.

For centuries, human captives were brought hundreds of miles to be sacrificed at a pyramid in the oldest city in North America, just north of modern Mexico City, an archeologist says. DNA tests on more than 50 skeletons from the Pyramid of the Moon at the Teotihuacan ruins reveal they were from faraway Mayan, Pacific or Atlantic coastal cultures. The victims, many of them beheaded, were killed at different times from AD 50 to AD 500, to dedicate new stages of pyramid construction.

Archeologists have uncovered the 1,300-year-old skeleton of a ruler or priest of the ancient Tiwanaku civilization together with precious jewels inside a much-looted pyramid in western Bolivia. The bones are "in very good condition," Roger Angel Cossio, the Bolivian archeologist who made the discovery, said Wednesday.

Archeologists have discovered a 1,500-year-old pre-Hispanic pyramid in a working-class district of Mexico City. The base of the unnamed pyramid is the same size as that of the giant Pyramid of the Moon at the archeological site of Teotihuacan, an hour's drive northeast of the capital. Archeologist Jesus Sanchez said Wednesday that the latest find was built by the same people who constructed Teotihuacan between AD 400 and 500, and that he has evidence it was used for ceremonial purposes.

Researchers have unearthed geometrically cut stone slabs in Bosnia that they said could form part of the sloping surface of what they believe is an ancient pyramid beneath a huge hill. Archeologists and other experts began digging at the central Bosnian town of Visoko last week to explore the theory that the 2,120-foot hill covers a step pyramid, which would be the first found in Europe.

Mexico said Friday that it accepted the recommendations of a U.N. committee that criticized a now-suspended plan to install lights on the ancient Teotihuacan pyramids to make it accessible for nighttime visits. Julio Castrejon, a spokesman for Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History, added that although the institute "totally accepts" the U.N. findings, officials are not dropping the idea of lighting ruins to encourage more tourism and boost local economies. He was responding to the UNESCO World Heritage Committee, which monitors historical and natural heritage sites around the globe.

Mexico and Egypt share a rare historical distinction: a superabundance of monumental pyramids and other relics of ancient civilizations. But although foreign experts have helped lead the exploration of Egypt's rich archeology for more than a century, specialists from Mexico have never been invited. Until now. For the first time, a Mexican archeological team has been selected by Egypt's top antiquities authorities to work in the famous Upper Nile Valley.

It's not the first place you'd expect to run into an architect, a shrink, a poet and a nuclear physicist: 23 feet below ground, in a shadowy labyrinth of volcanic rock that once may have held the ashes of kings, the bodies of sacrificed children or an oracle whose cryptic pronouncements swayed the fate of 100,000 people. Then there's this imposing thought: Directly above you, held in place largely by its sheer brute mass, is several million tons of stone.