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The Ministry of Culture finished with the recuperation of the archaeological site of Quebrada Santo Domingo in Laredo district of Trujillo, reports Andina news agency.

The eradication of invasive crops, pipes and perimeter fences began at 9:00 a.m. on Wednesday, July 8 and lasted until 4:00 p.m.

About 70 people, including members of the Decentralized Cultural Department of La Libertad (DDCLL) and members of the National Police of Peru (PNP) of the Tourism Division and Environmental Protection participated in the recovery.

“Today we are doing, more than anything a cleansing, of which an extrajudicial intervention has already been done on May 20, we’ve come to find that they have again invaded. So we will put greater emphasis on protection, in the security zone,” said prosecutor Javier Paredes.

During the clean up, the activity of invaders was evident. The site was being used to cultivate crops and for settlements. Prior to the clean up, the invaders withdrew their belongings peacefully.

“Our obligation is to exercise the powers laid down by law. In that sense our duty to persevere is in legal actions, which we will exercise as many times as necessary,” said director of DDCLL Maria Elena Cordova Burga.

Author: Hillary Ojeda | Source: Peru this Week [July 09, 2015]

UNESCO's World Heritage Committee approved the listing of the five Spanish Roman Catholic sites built in and around what is now the city of San Antonio, including the Alamo fort, where in 1836 some 180 Texans fighting for independence from Mexico fought to the death against Mexican General Santa Anna's army of several thousand soldiers.

The site comprises architectural and archaeological structures, farmland, residencies, churches and granaries, as well as water distribution systems, UNESCO said.

The complexes "illustrate the Spanish Crown's efforts to colonize, evangelize and defend the northern frontier of New Spain," UNESCO said.

It said the San Antonio Missions were also an example of the interweaving of Spanish and Coahuiltecan cultures, including the decorative elements of churches, which combined Catholic symbols with indigenous designs inspired by nature.

Source: AFP [July 06, 2015]

Scholars and curious visitors have spent more than a century trying to unravel those mysteries and more work needs to be done.

That's why nearly 30 top archaeologists from universities and organizations around the nation called on the U.S. Interior Department on Tuesday to protect the area surrounding Chaco Culture National Historical Park from oil and gas development.

In a letter to Interior Secretary Sally Jewell, they talked about the countless hours they've spent in the field, the dozens of books they've published about the Chaco society and their decades of collective experience studying its connection to modern Native American tribes in the Southwest. They call Chaco a distinct resource.

"Many of the features associated with this landscape — the communications and road systems that once linked the canyon to great house sites located as far away as southeast Utah and which are still being identified to this day — have been damaged by the construction of oil and gas roads, pipelines and well pads," the archaeologists said.

They're pushing for the agency to consider a master leasing plan that would take into account cultural resources beyond the boundaries of the national park. They're also looking for more coordination between federal land managers, tribes and archaeologists.

The Bureau of Land Management is revamping its resource management plan for the San Juan Basin and all new leasing within a 10-mile radius of Chaco park has been deferred until the plan is updated, likely in 2016.

Wally Drangmeister, a spokesman for the New Mexico Oil and Gas Association, said the BLM's existing plan already takes into account cultural resources. He said there has been a push by environmentalists to tie Chaco to development in the Mancos shale more than 10 miles from the park.

Environmentalists have been calling for protections for the greater Chaco area, and Drangmeister said that expansive definition could put the whole San Juan Basin off limits.

The basin is one of the largest natural gas fields in the U.S. and has been in production for more than 60 years. More development is expected in some areas since technology is making it easier for energy companies to tap the region's oil resources.

Some archaeologists have theorized that Chaco's influence spread far and wide from its remote desert location. A World Heritage site, Chaco includes a series of great houses, or massive multistory stone buildings, some of which were oriented to solar and lunar directions and offered lines of sight between buildings to allow for communication.

Steve Lekson, a professor and curator at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History, has spent years studying Chaco and its influence over the Southwest. He likened the process to learning how to play baseball after discovering home base and the pitcher's mound.

"You keep poking around and find more bases and the warning tracks and all that stuff. You need the whole picture to understand how the game is played," he said. "Of course, Chaco being a political system or major regional system is much more complicated than baseball. You need enough of the package intact so you can actually understand the structure of the thing."

Lekson and others said the hope that there's more to be discovered doesn't mean energy development should come to a halt.

"I don't think anybody is saying that, but we need to pay a lot of attention to how that's done and be cognizant of the larger issue," he said. "It shouldn't be a site-by-site thing."

The archaeologists' letter comes on the heels of a tour of the Chaco area by U.S. Sen. Tom Udall, D-New Mexico, and Interior Deputy Secretary Mike Connor. The two met with land managers and others after the tour.

Connor said there are Navajo allottees who want to develop their resources and other Native Americans who want to protect those resources.

"It's a balancing act throughout all of BLM's lands and I think Chaco is particularly unique," he said. "The more I learn about it, the more I was struck by the more we all have to learn."

Author: Susan Montoya Bryan | Source: The Associated Press [July 01, 2015]

In an area of Colombia so vast and remote that contact has still not been made with some tribes thought to live there, Mike Slee used a helicopter to film hundreds of paintings depicting hunters and animals believed to have been created thousands of years ago. He said: “We had crews all over the place and helicopters filming all over Colombia. As a photographer, Francisco Forero Bonell discovered and took the pictures for my movie.”

The extraordinary art includes images of jaguar, crocodiles and deer. They are painted in red, on vertical rock faces in Chiribiquete national park, a 12,000 square kilometre Unesco world heritage site that is largely unexplored. There are also paintings of warriors or hunters dancing or celebrating. “It is the land that time forgot,” Slee told the Observer.

There had previously been only vague reports of rock art in the area, which is known as Cerro Campana, he said: “There’s no information, maps or communication. It’s such a massive central part of Colombia.” Though some paintings had previously been found and photographed elsewhere in Chiribiquete, this Cerro Campana art has never been filmed or photographed, Slee said: “It was an absolutely stunning moment to be able to get the footage.”

Slee used a helicopter to gain access to the area, as the terrain is impenetrable – thick vegetation, forested rock peaks and valleys, sheer cliffs and giant rock towers soaring through a rainforest canopy.

Professor Fernando Urbina, a rock art specialist from the National University of Colombia, was struck by the “magnificent naturalism” of the depictions of deer when shown the photographs.

“They reveal the hand of a master of painting,” he said, adding that the paintings could be up to 20,000 years old. He was particularly interested in a human figure in a seated position whose arms appear to be folded over his shoulders, a ritual position in Amazonian cultures. “A seated man has special significance as the sage of the tribe,” he said.

The art may have been painted by the Karijona tribe, a few of whose members still live in the region. The seated position might suggest a prisoner or slave, Urbina said.Jean Clottes, a French prehistorian, and author of Cave Art – a book covering key sites such as Lascaux in France – described the images as exciting and well-preserved, but said it would be hard to determine their age because radiocarbon dating could not be used, as they were painted with mineral-based materials derived from iron oxide rather than the charcoal used in European rock art.

The species depicted are thought to include capybaras, snakes and anteaters. Slee described the art as a wildlife chapel. “The peoples who once lived here have left in pictures testimony of their awe and respect for the wild,” he said. “When I saw the images, I honestly felt an affinity with the artists. They were attempting to capture the power, grace, spirit and essence of the animal in pictures. Perhaps it was to make the hunt better next day, but there is clearly careful observation in their art. It’s what contemporary photographers, painters, film-makers set out to do when they create a wildlife project.”

Slee made his name making natural history films and directed the movie Bugs! 3D, about two rainforest insects, narrated by Judi Dench. In 2012, the Observer reported that his Flight of the Butterflies 3D had captured butterflies in unprecedented detail, moving scientists to tears at an early screening. Over the past three years, Slee has been exploring Colombia to make Colombia: Wild Magic, which will be in cinemas next year. Through spectacular footage, it portrays “a majestic tropical wilderness” – but one he said was threatened by humans who are “taking more than they are giving”. With swooping aerial footage and detailed close-ups, it reveals a landscape of canyons and caves, lakes and lagoons, rivers and rock masses with “the largest varieties of living things on the planet”, including unique species of hummingbird and endangered jaguar.

Drawing on the expertise of a dozen scientific advisers, the film warns of threats from the world’s “craving” for natural resources such as gold and emeralds. Slee said: “We’ve got illegal gold-mining polluting the rivers, we’re overfishing the seas, the habitat destruction is massive. We’re taking out the rainforest, we’re losing species every week. We have the most beautiful country on Earth and we are in danger of destroying it. There are places that no Colombian has been. It’s mainly because, when you think of Colombia, you think of kidnapping and drugs.”

Bonell, a Colombian conservationist and photographer, was inspired to become executive producer of the film, describing the region as “one of the few areas on our planet that still remains unspoiled and unexplored”.

The film has been produced by British company Off The Fence, and will be distributed free in schools in Colombia, as well as cinemas, “spreading the word about what their country has and the need to protect it”, Slee said. Slee hopes to return for another large-scale expedition focusing on the rock art. “We’ve probably only scratched the surface,” he said. “There are believed to be many hundreds of these cave paintings dotted throughout that central region.”

Author: Dalya Alberge | Source: The Guardian/Observer [June 24, 2015]

The problem isn’t just being noticed by academics in museums — archaeologists have seen changes in the field.

“It’s kind of a whole series of problems coming together at the same time to sort of create a perfect storm,” said Max Friesen, a University of Toronto archaeologist working on a dig in Canada’s Northwest Territories.

“You have the potential melting of the permafrost, you have sea level rise, you have in some cases changing weather patterns.”

Friesen said he’s alarmed by the rapid deterioration. Until recently, he said, organic artefacts made of materials like wood or animal hides, were abundant around the region because they were preserved by permafrost or silty soils.

“It’s a very rich data base that’s being lost all across the Arctic,” he said.

Source: Associated Press [June 14, 2015]

The destruction of a 600-year-old geoglyph in Trujillo made headlines in April after agricultural invaders attempted to erase the structure to make room for crops.

Since the incident was discovered investigators have searched the region to find out that hundreds in the area have been destroyed and remain in danger.

El Comercio reported yesterday, two months after the destruction, that the geoglyphs continue to face invasion and threats from agricultural invaders.

On May 21, the Ministry of Culture announced 250 hectares of previously destroyed geoglyphs had been restored.

Despite few advancements, in the district of Laredo in Trujillo, the Santo Domingo gorge is still seeking protection and continues to be invaded.

Residents in the Santo Domingo area told El Comercio that the lands had in fact been sold about four years ago to lawyers. They paid between S/. 3,000 and S/. 4,000 for each lot obtained.

Author: Hillary Ojeda | Source: Peru This Week [June 03, 2015]

According to the Mexican Secretariat of Foreign Affairs – a department within the Mexican government – UNESCO will now offer the nine sites “special protection”, with the heritage body and government working together to impose, promote and implement humanitarian international law at the locations.

Included under the new agreement are the pre-Columbian era cities of Palenque, Teotihuacan, Chichen Itza, Yucatan, El Tajin, and Uxmal, as well as the ancient Mayan city of Calakmul and the archaeological zones of Monte Alban and Paquime.

"This corresponds as much to the intention that Mexicans' cultural heritage will progressively have greater protection as it does to commitments by the Mexican government to impose, promote and implement humanitarian international law," said a statement by the Secretariat.

The registry process has taken two years to complete, with several institutions including the Secretariat and the National Anthropology and History Institute starting the process in 2013.

The sites will now prepare plans ahead of potential natural or man-made disasters, with UNESCO striving to combat cultural trafficking and working towards prevention or mitigation of damage to the heritage sites.

Author: Tom Anstey | Source: Leisure Management [May 11, 2015]

When the first ones were discovered 100 years ago, archaeologists marvelled at the ancient relics, some of them foetuses, their little bodies amazingly intact.

But now the mummies, which are believed to be the oldest on earth, are melting. Mariela Santos, curator at the University of Tarapaca museum, noticed a few years ago that the desiccated skins of a dozen of the mummies were decomposing and turning into a mysterious black ooze.

"I knew the situation was critical and that we'd have to ask specialists for help," said Santos, whose museum stores and displays the so-called Chinchorro mummies, which date back as far as 5000 BC and are among archaeology's most enigmatic objects.

Within weeks, university staff members had contacted Harvard scientist Ralph Mitchell, an Ireland native who specialises in finding out why relics are falling apart. A bacteria sleuth of sorts, Mitchell has taken on assignments that included identifying a mysterious microflora breaking down Apollo spacesuits at Washington's National Air and Space Museum, analysing dark spots on the walls of King Tut's tomb and studying the deterioration of the Lascaux cave paintings in France.

Mitchell launched an investigation of the mummies' deterioration and this year issued a startling declaration: The objects are the victims of climate change. He concluded that the germs doing the damage are common microorganisms that, thanks to higher humidity in northern Chile over the last 10 years, have morphed into voracious consumers of collagen, the main component of mummified skin.

Mitchell believes that the case of the disintegrating Chinchorro mummies should sound a warning to museums everywhere.

"How broad a phenomenon this is, we don't really know. The Arica case is the first example I know of deterioration caused by climate change," Mitchell said. "But there is no reason to think it is not damaging heritage materials everywhere. It's affecting everything else."

Conservation of the fragile mummies has been a constant concern of researchers and curators since German researcher Max Uhle's archaeological expedition to Arica ended in 1919. Named after the nearby beach district where Uhle uncovered them, the Chinchorro mummies - about 120 of which are at the museum - are considered special for many reasons in addition to their age.

The community that made them was at the early hunter-gatherer stage of social evolution, compared with more advanced mummy-making civilisations such as the Egyptians, who had progressed to agriculture and trade, said Bernardo Arriaza, a professor at the University of Tarapaca's Institute of Advanced Research.

"Chinchorro mummies were not restricted to the dead of the top classes. This community was very democratic," said Arriaza, who for 30 years has led archaeological digs on the 500-mile stretch of Chilean coastline where most of the mummies have been found.

Arriaza spends some of his days at a dig on a cliff overlooking Arica. A score of partially unearthed mummies, possibly of the same family, cover a sloping area about 50 feet across. It's one of many sites that construction has revealed, in this case digging for a pipeline.

Vivien Standen, an anthropology professor at Tarapaca and co-author with Arriaza of dozens of papers on the Chinchorro mummies, said they are also unusual in that they include human foetuses.

"That's a very special facet, the empathy that it demonstrates, especially compared with modern times where foetuses are simply abandoned," Standen said.

Volcanic pollution of drinking water evident in the presence of arsenic in the mummies' tissue may hold the key to why the community began mummifying its dead.

"Arsenic poisoning can lead to a high rate of miscarriages, and infant mortality and the sorrow over these deaths may have led this community to start preserving the little bodies," Arriaza said. "Mummification could have started with the foetuses and grown to include adults. The oldest mummies we have found are of children."

Chinchorro mummies have survived into modern times only because of the arid conditions of the Atacama Desert, said Marcela Sepulveda, the university archaeologist who made the initial contact with Harvard's Mitchell.

Sepulveda said it was possible that other groups in Latin America were doing the same thing, "but what is unusual here is that thanks to the climate, the mummies have been conserved."

Arriaza and Sepulveda both direct laboratories with high-powered electron microscopes dedicated to the analysis of materials found on and around the mummies. Continued decomposition of the mummies jeopardises their research, they said.

"Just raising them from the ground introduces the challenge of not breaking them," said Santos, the museum curator. "But over the last several years, the higher humidity - and how to deal with it - has presented a whole new challenge."

After months of growing cultures of microorganisms collected from the skins of the decomposing Chinchorro mummies and comparing their DNA with known bacteria, Mitchell identified the transgressors as everyday germs "probably present in all of us" that suddenly became opportunistic.

"It was a two-year project to identify and grow them and then putting them back on the skin to show what was breaking down," said Mitchell, a professor emeritus who donated his time to the Chileans.

Mitchell had used the same painstaking process to identify the bug causing stains on the walls of King Tut's tomb in Egypt, and to conclude that the germs weren't introduced after the tomb was discovered in 1922 but probably were on the walls of the crypt when the boy king was entombed about 1300 BC.

Similarly, Mitchell used microbial analysis to investigate the erosion of Maya monuments at Chichen Itza at the request of the Mexican government. He found that the application of a polymer coating, far from protecting the ancient carvings and buildings as intended, was actually abetting the destructive microorganisms that were causing the stone work to crumble.

He also has an ongoing project at the USS Arizona monument at Pearl Harbor, where bacteria that thrive in the oil leaking from the battleship's fuel tanks are accelerating the disintegration of the sunken World War II vessel.

Mitchell began specializing in microbial damage to cultural relics in the mid-1990s, when the Italian government invited him to look at widespread damage to centuries-old frescoes at churches and palaces.

He identified Italy's main problem as industrial pollution, and thus came to the sad conclusion he has arrived at several times since: Isolating the problem doesn't always lead to a practical solution.

Mitchell seems more optimistic in his work with the Chilean mummies. Over the next two years, he and the faculty at the University of Tarapaca will be working on possible solutions to the deterioration. He thinks humidity and temperature control offer the best chance of stabilizing the relics.

Mitchell and the archaeologists feel a sense of urgency: The Chilean government has budgeted $56 million for a new museum scheduled to open in 2020 to house the mummies, and everyone wants the right climate controls built in to the new structure to safeguard the relics.

"The next phase of the project is to look at how you protect the mummies and at possible physical and chemical solutions to the problem, which we don't have yet," Mitchell said. He and the Chileans will experiment with different combinations of humidity and temperature to determine an optimal ambience.

Optimally, each mummy will be encased in its own glass cubicle in the new museum and have its own "microclimate," Arriaza said. But the irony is not lost on him and his fellow archaeologists that mummies that survived millenniums in the ground are proving fragile in the face of changing conditions of modern times.

"I'm not optimistic we can save them," said Standen, the anthropology professor. "From the moment they are taken out of the ground, they start deteriorating."

Author: Chris Kraul | Source: LA Times [May 08, 2015]

The mummy was found Tuesday morning in a fetal position, tied with a rope, in a cardboard box near trash outside an archeological site in the  Pre-Incancity of Chan Chan.

"[The cleaners] thought it was rubbish and put it in the compactor but one cleaner opened it up and discovered it was a mummy,'' said David Carrasco, municipal security at Huanchaco District, according to Reuters.

If it wasn't for the one cleaner, it's very possible the ancient discovery would have been thrown out for good.

According to local media reports, the mummy, believed to be an adult because of the size of its teeth, was taken to the police station.

Police have reportedly not ruled out the possibility that the mummy was left in a cardboard box in a botched robbery attempt from its original burial location at the archaeological site. The mummy was found in a building in front of the site.

The skeletal remains will be sent to the Ministry of Culture for analysis to determine its age.

Chan Chan is the largest Pre-Columbian city in South America. It flourished as a major capital of 30,000 people until its conquest by the Inca Empire in 1470.

The Minister of Culture told Peru's El Comercio newspaper that the mummy may be pre-Hispanic and may belong to the Chimu culture.

Source: Fox News Latino [April 16, 2015]

The photos above demonstrate that between March 1 (the first photo) and April 11 (the second photo) of this year, the geoglyph was removed from the earth and tilled by agricultural invaders.

The Peruvian Association of Rock Art (APAR) reported that the individuals responsible were indeed people who strived to rid the site of any archaeological evidence in the hopes of irrigating and occupying the land for agricultural purposes.

Representative of APAR, Victor Corcuera determined that the invaders did the damage intentionally as they only drove their machinery on the geoglyphs and left the remaining land un-furrowed, according to El Comercio.

Archaeologists have determined that the geoglyphs design belongs to a phase later than that of the Chimu culture. The figure was considered one of the most well-known of the geoglyphs recorded in the region.

José Carlos Orrillo Puga, photographer of the photos, believes these perpetrators will continue to destroy the sites. “There are dirt roads leading to other sectors where geoglyphs remain intact,” Puga said.

Archaeologist Gori Tumi Echevarria told El Comercio, “The destruction of the Triple Spiral is a disgrace to the Peruvian archaeology, which can not allow the evidence to be destroyed and go unpunished.”

The Ministry of Culture announced this year that it does not have the resources to protect more than 1,000 of Peru’s archaeological sites. Recent denouncements of invasions and destruction of sites has the Ministry struggling to protect its sites.

Author: Hillary Ojeda | Source: Peru this Week [April 16, 2015]

The artifacts, valued by the authorities at $107.6 million, were described in papers filed in State Supreme Court in Manhattan as having been looted from India and other places in southern Asia and smuggled into the United States by the dealer, Subhash Kapoor.

In their complaint, prosecutors said Mr. Kapoor, 65, had cached the items in an assortment of hideaways in Manhattan and Queens. They were confiscated during raids that began in 2012 and continued through last year.

The seized items included bronze and stone statues of Hindu deities, many of them ancient masterworks worth several million dollars each.

The authorities said their goal in gaining custody of the items was to set in motion the return of the stolen objects to India and their other countries of origin. Officials also hope to prosecute Mr. Kapoor, an American citizen, in the United States. Currently he is awaiting trial in India on charges of plundering archaeological sites and conspiring with black market traders to send illicit artifacts overseas. American officials are planning to extradite him after his case is settled.

Mr. Kapoor, whose defunct gallery, Art of the Past, sold hundreds of objects to prominent American museums and collectors, has denied any wrongdoing.

“At the present time we are at a distinct disadvantage because Mr. Kapoor is in an Indian jail and all the facts in this matter are known by him,” said Kenneth J. Kaplan, a lawyer for Mr. Kapoor. Manhattan prosecutors declined to comment on the case.

Since an initial raid on Mr. Kapoor’s gallery by Homeland Security Investigations agents in 2012, three of his associates have agreed to criminal penalties in exchange for cooperating with investigators, according to officials and lawyers. The case, which now extends to four continents and is being pursued in conjunction with Indian officials, has been named Operation Hidden Idol.

Mr. Kapoor’s office manager, Aaron M. Freedman, 43, of Princeton, N.J., pleaded guilty in 2013 to six counts of criminal possession of stolen property valued at $35 million and, according to his lawyer, helped officials track down some of Mr. Kapoor’s hidden storage locations.

In addition, Mr. Kapoor’s sister, Sushma Sareen, a 61-year-old Queens resident, pleaded guilty in November to a misdemeanor charge of obstructing justice and was sentenced to conditional release. In 2013, she had been charged with receiving and possessing several million dollars’ worth of ancient bronze statues, which remain missing. She is also cooperating, according to investigators.

Federal authorities have identified 18 American museums as owning a total of 500 items sold or donated by Mr. Kapoor. Several museums have recently turned in objects judged to be illicit, while others have said they are satisfied that their Kapoor items were legally acquired.

Author: Tom Mashberg | Source: The New York Times [April 14, 2015]

He says thawing permafrost is endangering sites and artifacts dating back thousands of years.

"Instead of having the archaeological remains and the houses and whatnot being stable, they're actually eroding out of the cliff face," he said.

"As you walk along the beach, you can actually see all the artifacts, animal bones, and even pieces of houses that are slumping down the slope and will eventually wash out into the ocean."

Friesen says researchers need to act quickly and prioritize which sites should be excavated before their contents are destroyed.

Source: CBC News [April 13, 2015]