The Utah Historic Preservation Office and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management announced their plans to nominate archaeological and rock art sites in Nine Mile Canyon for the National Register of Historic Places. Energy companies are drilling in the canyon, and vibrations and chemicals from the heavy equipment could damage the rock-art panels.   This editorial calls for the end of truck traffic in Nine Mile Canyon.

Here’s a summary of what preservationists have tried to do to save Ireland’s Hill of Tara from highway construction. Their new argument suggests that the downturn in the country’s economy requires Ireland to save its historic resources as tourist destinations.  

Peru’s foreign minister, Jose Antonio Garcia Belaunde, attended negotiations in New York City with representatives from Yale University. Last spring, Peru threatened to take Yale to court in order to secure the return of artifacts from Machu Picchu. “The fact that the minister feels that it’s appropriate for him to intervene suggests that there is a desire to reach an understanding,” said Yale archaeologist Richard Burger.  

New Bedford, Massachusetts, became an economic superpower known as the Whaling City in the nineteenth century, and then a center for textile production. Industrial archaeologist Mark Foster saved 1,800 books and ledgers in the Merchants Bank from rare book dealers, and got them into the hands of the New Bedford Whaling Museum’s librarian.   

A Roman villa has been unearthed at a supermarket site in Budapest.

Six villagers from the Maya Tzeltal and Tzotzil cultures were killed by Mexican police during a raid on the archaeological site of Chinkultic. Hundreds of villagers have occupied the entrance to the site for a month, protesting government management policies. Sixteen police officers were injured in the clash.

And, archaeologists had been pressing for criminal charges to be filed against the organizers of a Placido Domingo concert at Chichen Itza over the weekend. “These monuments are not there so that rich people can hold events at them,” said Cuauhtemoc Velasco, a leader of the archaeologists’ union.   Here’s a short report on the concert itself.  

The National Museum at Herat in western Afghanistan was robbed of 1,300-year-old artifacts by a “very dangerous gang.”  

Satellite images have revealed an adobe pyramid near Peru’s Nazca River and the site of Cahuachi, according to Nicola Masini and Rosa Lasaponara of Italy’s National Research Council.   

Yucca was among the crops grown 1,400 years ago at Joya de Ceren, a Maya village buried in ash from the Loma de Caldera volcano ca. 600 A.D.  Beans, maize, squash, cacao, guava, and chili were also cultivated.  

Using a technique called uranium series dating, scientists have found that Europe’s Palaeolithic cave paintings were created over periods of thousands of years. “If we can date the art, then we can relate that to the artifacts we find in the ground and start to link the symbolic thoughts of these individuals to where, when, and how they were living,” said archaeologist Alistair Pike of Bristol University.  

In central Sweden, archaeologists have found traces of an undisturbed, eleventh-century stave church. A woman had been buried inside it.  

A fragment of a sarcophagus that once held the remains of a Jewish high priest from the Second Temple Period has been found north of Jerusalem. The piece of limestone had been reused 1,000 years ago.   

Researchers entered the caves beneath the French city of Caen. “During the summer of 1944 here, in Caen, 15,000 Caen refugees experienced some of the most terrible conditions imaginable. By visiting these galleries we can better understand what they went through,” said historian Marc Pottier.  

Artifacts discovered in Wakulla Springs, Florida, indicate that people may have instituted Spring Break earlier than previously thought.