Egyptian archaeologists say they have unearthed tombs, pottery and other artefacts that could alter the accepted time frame of the unification of Pharaonic Egypt. Gaballah Ali Gaballah, secretary general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, told reporters that the site is near the Nile Delta town of Simbillawein, about 60 miles north of Cairo.
Terming the discovery as "exciting and very significant," Gaballah said the site includes a cemetery and huge quantities of artefacts dating back 5,000 years. He said four months of work at the site have so far yielded artefacts from both the pre-dynastic and early dynastic periods. Among the pieces discovered are burial items, engraved pottery, cylindrical seals and inscriptions, said Gaballah.
A cemetery including some 100 tombs, probably belonging to the first and second dynasties, was also covered at the site, which was buried under farmland. Gaballah said the findings at Simbillawein might indicate that the unification of Egypt occurred earlier than believed.
Scholars of ancient Egypt maintain that the country was originally divided into two hostile states. They credit King Menes, one of the last pre-dynastic kings, with unifying Upper and Lower Egypt and launching the Pharaonic civilisation, which lasted 3,000 years.
Gaballah said two other sites discovered near Simbillawein are expected to give a "more coherent picture" of the time frame of the first Egyptian state.
Archaeologists believe Simbillawein, like the
rest of the Delta, may be preserving an
enormous wealth of antiquities beneath its
fertile land.
Gaballah did not say how the Egyptian
archaeologists came to find the site. Other
experts have said a farmer ploughing his
field informed the government after finding
some artefacts.
8 June 99
Ancient Mayan Site under Threat
Archaeologists fighting developers
With a real estate development in the works, archaeologists are fighting for a chance to study a site they say could provide clues to the fate of a famed ancient culture along the Gulf of Mexico.
The site, now just a cluster of dirt-covered mounds called El Dorado, is in the 200-acre Mandinga mangrove swamp along the Jamapa River, just 13 miles south of the port of Veracruz.
The Mandinga Swamp Promotion and Construction company had started draining the swamp and parceling it to create a luxury housing project with a marina when the government's National Anthropology and History Institute discovered the plan in November.
The institute got injunctions to stop construction and has been negotiating with the developer over ways to save the site. A few months before the work started, Annick Daneels, a Belgian archaeologist at Mexico City's National Autonomous University, had completed a study indicating the five-acre El Dorado site was important.
Archaeologists say it could hold clues to the fate of the Olmecs, best known for the colossal, mysterious stone heads they carved. They flourished from 1200 BC to 400 BC, then their culture disappeared. Daneels, who has been working in Mexico for 17 years, estimates El Dorado was inhabited from around 800 BC to AD 1200, and appears to be the only site in the area with such a prolonged period of habitation.
"There is a small ceremonial site there, and from what I have been able to determine from superficial evidence, it had a long period of occupation. That alone makes it more than quite important," she said.
Daneels and Fernando Winfield Capitaine, former director of the Jalapa Museum of Anthropology, said El Dorado could have been peopled by Zoques, a people suspected of being direct descendants of the Olmecs. Winfield, an anthropologist, believes the Zoques lived in "chieftainships," communities much like the city-states of medieval Europe.
Among them was La Mojarra, another swamp "chieftainship" 20 miles south of the port of Alvarado where archaeologists found a huge stone pillar a decade ago with one of the continent's most important hieroglyphic inscriptions. Winfield said the Zoques lived in relative harmony with the Totonacas to the north and traded salt for other goods with the Tlaxcalas, enemies of the Aztecs in the highlands of central Mexico.
Real estate agents in Veracruz state estimate the Mandinga Swamp real estate project, divided in 2,700-square-foot plots, is worth $1 million and will eventually, if successful, be worth at least $10 million. Mandinga Swamp Promotion says it was not aware the area included an archaeological site. It has not yet accepted the institute's proposal that it help finance a study of the area.
Luis Alberto Lopez Wario, director of the
institute's archaeological safeguards
department, said the institute has proposed a
five-month study of El Dorado by six noted
archaeologists so the agency can determine
which areas can be developed and which should
be protected as archaeological sites.
8 June 99
The wolf known as B45 trudged from Salmon, Idaho, through forests and down verdant valleys. She traversed the Snake River and loped across brush and cattle ranches. She crossed Interstate 84 and ventured into the Blue Mountains of Oregon.
Not in 36 years had there been a wolf in Oregon, not until this 2-year-old female, caught up in the ancient urge that drives lone wolves deep into the forest to seek their own kind, crossed 150 miles of wilderness and a political divide as big as any in America.
Outraged Oregon legislators demanded that the wolf, a breakaway from a pack reintroduced by the federal Fish and Wildlife Service into central Idaho, be trapped and removed. Ranchers threatened worse. Conservation groups, elated to see a wolf again in Oregon, took out gleeful ads in the newspapers: "SF [single female] looking for sharp-fanged SM who's not afraid to fight for what he wants."
In March, B45 was caught in a net and hauled back to Idaho. But the story of the ranging wolves wasn't over. Last month, biologists documented evidence of a new breeding pair near Jackson Hole, Wyo., miles from the packs reintroduced in 1995 to Yellowstone.
The 4-year-old program that brought wolves back to the northern Rockies has been a wild success. Idaho now has 115 adult wolves and a dozen litters of pups; Yellowstone has 110 adults, with 10 or 11 new litters. Northwest Montana, where Canadian wolves established a foothold on their own around Glacier National Park, has eight litters.
In fact, packs have become so big that wildlife officials predict this year will mark a turning point in the federal reintroduction program: a major dispersal of juvenile wolves ranging into new lands, joining to form new packs.
Oregon, Washington, Wyoming, Utah and Colorado could all expect wolves to return if the natural migrations are not checked, wildlife officials say. Based on current trends, California's northern Sierra could see wolves again within a few decades. 8 June 99
