Unmarked graves: The discovery represents a significant scholarly mystery, as researchers both at WMCAR and in the College's Department of Anthropology say that evidence of the formal interment of dogs dating from the Colonial period is unprecedented. Photo courtesy of William & Mary Center for Archaeological Research

William and Mary

by Joseph McClain

Laboratory analysis by the College of William and Mary’s Center for Archaeological Research (WMCAR) has revealed that the bone fragments found this summer in two unmarked graves on campus are the remains of dogs interred some two centuries ago.

The discovery represents a significant scholarly mystery, as researchers both at WMCAR and in the College’s Department of Anthropology say that evidence of the formal interment of dogs dating from the Colonial period is unprecedented.

Joe Jones, WMCAR director, said the nature of the burial sites and the deteriorated condition of the remains pointed toward interpretation that the sites held the remains of young children. Both graves were carefully excavated rectangular shafts, consistent with human burials. In addition, Jones said the graves were aligned east and west, congruent with Christian burial practices of the Colonial period.

“When we first identified the sites, we treated the remains as human because they were buried like people,” Jones said. WMCAR archaeologists discovered the two graves on July 13. They were monitoring the removal of the paving of James Blair Drive, an element in an ongoing effort to avoid damage to William & Mary’s archaeological heritage during construction work. The James Blair work is part of a larger project involving installation of piping for a new heating and cooling system.

Jones said that whenever they uncover suspected human remains, established protocol requires that archaeological work be stopped and the find reported to the Virginia Department of Historic Resources (VDHR).

“If we get an inkling they might be human graves, we stop work and report it. We don’t take any chances,” Jones said. With the state’s approval, the contents of the graves were extracted from the sites behind Tucker Hall and taken to the WMCAR labs on campus. Work on the piping project resumed shortly thereafter.virginia,

Jones said that each grave held only a scant handful of remains dispersed throughout the soil matrix filling the graves. Most of the individual pieces were smaller than a fingernail. WMCAR faunal expert Elizabeth Monroe was able to make a conclusive determination of the remains only after separating the bones from the soil, Jones said.

WMCAR has dated the graves to the late 17th to mid 18th Century. Jones and other researchers have said that they know of no other formal interments of dogs from the early Colonial period.

“I don’t know of any instance of the formal, intentional interment of animals in the 18th Century, either dogs or cats,” said Joanne Bowen, a research professor in William & Mary’s Department of Anthropology and zooarchaeologist at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. “We find them in the 19th Century. But in the Colonial period, people didn’t think of their dogs and cats in the same way we do now.”

Jones added that excavations of prehistoric Native American sites sometimes reveal dog burials, but those features are typically oval-shaped and do not have the east-west alignment, typical of Christian burials of the historic period.

“There has been no shortage of archaeology on domestic sites of this particular time period throughout the Mid-Atlantic region,” Jones said. “And despite a long history of such investigations, we know of no documented or undocumented examples of dog burial features like this on sites occupied during the early Colonial period.”

The Washington Post

by Juan Forero

SAN MARTIN DE SAMIRIA, PERU – To the untrained eye, all evidence here in the heart of the Amazon signals virgin forest, untouched by man for time immemorial – from the ubiquitous fruit palms to the cry of howler monkeys, from the air thick with mosquitoes to the unruly tangle of jungle vines.

Archaeologists, many of them Americans, say the opposite is true: This patch of forest, and many others across the Amazon, was instead home to an advanced, even spectacular civilization that managed the forest and enriched infertile soils to feed thousands.

The findings are discrediting a once-bedrock theory of archaeology that long held that the Amazon, unlike much of the Americas, was a historical black hole, its environment too hostile and its earth too poor to have ever sustained big, sedentary societies. Only small and primitive hunter-gatherer tribes, the assumption went, could ever have eked out a living in an unforgiving environment.

But scientists now believe that instead of stone-age tribes, like the groups that occasionally emerge from the forest today, the Indians who inhabited the Amazon centuries ago numbered as many as 20 million, far more people than live here today.

“There is a gigantic footprint in the forest,” said Augusto Oyuela-Caycedo, 49, a Colombian-born professor at the University of Florida who is working this swath in northeast Peru.

Stooping over a man-made Indian mound on a recent day, he picked up shards of ceramics and dark, nutrient-rich earth made fertile hundreds of years ago by human hands. “All you can see is an artifact of the past,” he said. “It’s a product of human actions.”

The evidence is not just here outside tiny San Martin de Samiria, an indigenous hamlet hours by speed boat from the jungle city of Iquitos. It is found across Amazonia.

Outside, Manaus, Brazil, Eduardo Neves, a renowned Brazilian archaeologist, and American scientists have found huge swaths of “terra preta,” so-called Indian dark earth, land made fertile by mixing charcoal, human waste and other organic matter with soil. In 15 years of work that is still ongoing they have also found vast orchards of semi-domesticated fruit trees, though they appear like forest untrammeled by man.

Along the Xingu, an Amazon tributary in Brazil, Michael Heckenberger of the University of Florida has found moats, causeways, canals, the networks of a stratified civilization that, he says, existed as early as A.D. 800. In Bolivia, American, German and Finnish archaeologists have been studying how pre-Columbian Indians moved tons of soil and diverted rivers, major projects of a society that existed long before the birth of Christ.

Many of these ongoing excavations follow the work of Anna C. Roosevelt. In the 1980s on Marajo Island, at the mouth of the Amazon, she turned up house foundations, elaborate pottery and evidence of an agriculture so advanced she believes the society there possibly had well over 100,000 inhabitants.

Her initial conclusions, published in 1991, helped redirect scientific thinking about Amazonia, with younger archaeologists who followed buttressing and building upon her findings.

“I think we’re humanizing the history of the Amazon,” said Neves, 44, a professor at the University of Sao Paulo. “We’re not looking at the Amazon anymore as a black box. We’re seeing that these people were just like anywhere else in the world. We’re giving them a sense of history.”

The number of scientists who disagree has diminished, but influential critics remain, none more so than Betty J. Meggers, director of Latin American archaeology at the Smithsonian Institution. She said the new theories are based more on wishful thinking than science.

“I’m sorry to say that archaeologists like to produce sensational refutation of previous theories,” said Meggers, whose 1971 book, “Amazonia: Man and Culture in a Counterfeit Paradise,” holds that the region is unfit for large-scale habitation. “You know, this is how you get your promotions.”

There is also concern among some that the new theories could pose a danger to the Amazon. If the forest were not as unspoiled as previously thought, they wonder, then wouldn’t that serve as a green light to developers today?

“Just because the indigenous had complex societies that managed the forest can’t justify the large-scale transformations in the Amazon today,” said Zach Hurwitz, a geographer who consults International Rivers, a Berkeley, Calif.-based environmental group that has raised concerns about dam building projects and mineral exploration.

A STUDY OF CONTRASTS

In some ways, the theory that the Amazon may have been a wellspring of civilization should come as no surprise in the 21st century. In a long perilous journey along Ecuador’s Napo River in 1541, Spanish friar Gaspar de Carvajal, a chronicler of the European conquest, wrote of “cities that gleamed white,” canoes that carried dozens of Indian warriors, “fine highways” and “very fruitful land.”

But until recently, scientists and explorers had all but rejected his work as fantastical, the diaries of a man who would write anything to justify to investors back in Spain that the hunt for El Dorado would bear fruit.

In sharp contrast, explorers in the 20th century noted that the Amazon held no pyramids or stone aqueducts, like those of Mexico. And the people they encountered belonged to small bands – Amazonian Indians who appeared to be little more than human relics forgotten by time.

Roosevelt, a professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois, said that was because the civilizations encountered by Europeans quickly disintegrated, victims of disease.

But until their demise, she said, their cultures were anything but primitive. “They have magnitude, they have complexity,” she said. “They are amazing.”

A FEEL FOR THE LAND

Archaeology in the Amazon is not easy. Few rock formations meant that any building had to rely on wood. Left untended – or abandoned – they would soon be quickly swallowed by the jungle.

So those scientists who go today rely on new technologies to unearth the past, from satellite imagery to ground-penetrating radar to remote sensors to find ceramics.

Oyuela-Caycedo, the University of Florida archaeologist, and Nigel Smith, a geographer and palm tree expert, have yet to use these tools here, a short boat ride from this town, San Martin de Samiria. Instead they have been trying to get a feel for the land beneath their feet.

On a recent morning, using a soil coring device, Oyuela-Caycedo extracted a heavy, black dirt in a spot he calls Salvavidas, or Lifesaver. It was terra preta, black, nutrient-rich, as good for agriculture as the soil in Iowa.

“It is the best soil that you can find in the Amazon,” said Oyuela-Caycedo, who wore netting over his face to protect him from mosquitoes. “You don’t find it in natural form.”

Three feet deep here, and stretching nearly 100 acres, this terra preta could have fed at least 5,000 people. The forests here were also carefully managed in other ways, Oyuela-Caycedo believes, with the Indians planting semi-domesticated trees that bore all manner of fruit, such as macambo, sapote and jungle avocados.

Bits of colorful ceramics – matching that found elsewhere in the Amazon – seem to show that those who lived here were the Omaguas, the same people Gaspar de Carvajal encountered nearly 500 years before.

There is no doubt, Oyuela-Caycedo said, that the Omaguas faced hardship: insects, poisonous snakes, poor soils. But their environment had vast potential, he said, and the Omaguas exploited it before their civilization was brought to heel by disease.

“The only thing they had to do was to change and transform the landscape,” Oyuela Caycedo said. “And that is what they did.”

Wall Street Journal

by Alistair MacDonald

The Terror and Erebus in an 1845 drawing. Their fate remains unknown.

Canadian scientists’ announcement Monday that they failed to find the final resting place of British naval hero Sir John Franklin deepened one of the most enduring mysteries of the Arctic.

In May 1845, Franklin set sail from England with 134 men aboard two ships, the Terror and Erebus, to search for the fabled Northwest Passage through the Canadian Arctic to the Pacific Ocean. Five sailors left the ship in Greenland. The rest were never heard from again.

Last week, a six-man government survey team, supported by the Canadian Coast Guard vessel the Sir Wilfrid Laurier and its near 50-man crew, surveyed hundreds of square miles of frigid sea floor hoping to succeed where some 100 other expeditions failed—discovering the fate of the ships and a crew whose demise has been attributed to factors from lead poisoning to cannibalism.

For Canadians, the disappearance is “a Victorian gothic horror story that played out across the Arctic,” said Ryan Harris, a government archeologist who is leading this summer’s search.

Their government believes that locating the expedition’s resting place will bolster its sovereignty over the sea lane Franklin sought. Though the Franklin expedition was British, London has signed over caretaker rights to Canada.

Franklin, the veteran of two Arctic expeditions and the Battle of Trafalgar, was from a line of British explorers seeking a northern link to the Pacific. The then-global superpower kitted his ships with the latest technology, including a water-distillation system and heating.

On July 26, 1845, a whaler made a last sighting of Franklin’s ships as they hovered at one entrance into the Arctic. Experts believe the expedition journeyed on for more than a year, becoming trapped in ice off King William Island the next September.

Victorian England idolized explorers, and Franklin’s disappearance inspired plays, songs and a 12-year search. Financed mostly through Franklin’s wife and the British Navy, some 36 expeditions sought the lost crew.

Early searchers found the bodies of some sailors, some in formal graves that identified the crew members by name. They also recovered sailors’ possessions and other relics among native Inuits.

In 1859, a Royal Navy search party found a message under a cairn on King William Island that detailed how the crew had abandoned their ships after being trapped in ice for a year. Its writer said Franklin had died in 1847 and remaining crew would head to Back’s River, hundreds of miles to the south. The British gave up looking.

Canada’s search continues. In the 1960s, it has sent its army to look. Amateurs have put fortunes and lives on the line after catching what they call the “Franklin bug.”

At age 17, David Woodman packed hiking boots and a sleeping bag and headed north from his home in London, Ontario, to begin a search that has spanned 30 years and 10 expeditions. For the past three summers, he has remained in Vancouver, as he and other explorers say they have been unable to obtain government permits to search. Recently, Mr. Woodman bumped into members of the current expedition and tried to muscle in. “I told them, ‘I would come and wash socks,’ ” he said.

Louie Kamookak, an Inuk hunter raised in the region where the ships are believed to have disappeared, has been advising the Canadian government in their searches. He said his interest began when he was told by his great-grandmother of a silver teaspoon and grave she had seen when young, which he believed were Franklin expedition relics. Mr. Kamookak has been looking ever since.

Many mysteries remain. High levels of lead were found in sailor’s bodies, leading to theories that their deaths were hastened through poisoning from lead-sealed canned food or via the water-distillation system. Blade cuts on bones have been interpreted as a sign of Inuit attack; native testimony backs up claims of Inuit cannibalism.

But all theories have counterarguments. Even the note’s claim that the crew would break for Back’s River is disputed, given how far away it is.

One hope is to garner clues from the ship’s log, which Mr. Woodman and others believe would be sealed on a ship or in Franklin’s grave. Archeologists believe that if the wrecks are found they will be well preserved, given the depth they are expected to be submerged at will have protected them from the sea’s ebb and flow.

“There are thousands of theories to grasp onto the Franklin story, because we don’t really know what happened,” said Mr. Woodman.

Mr. Harris’s survey, working from Inuit testimony from the time, searched just east of O’Reilly Island, north of the Canadian mainland.

On Monday, Mr. Harris said they came back empty-handed, after scouring about half of the area they had pinpointed. His next trip, he said, would have to wait for another year.

EurekAlert

About 12,900 years ago, a sudden cold snap interrupted the gradual warming that had followed the last Ice Age. The cold lasted for the 1,300-year interval known as the Younger Dryas (YD) before the climate began to warm again.

Tyrone Daulton is pictured with the transmission electron microscrope he used to search in vain for shock-synthesized nanodiamonds, evidence that a extraterrestrial object such as a meteorite killed off North American megafauna. Photo: Tyrone Daulton

In North America, large animals known as megafauna, such as mammoths, mastodons, saber-tooth tigers and giant short-faced bears, became extinct. The Paleo-Indian culture known as the Clovis culture for distinctively shaped fluted stone spear points abruptly vanished, eventually replaced by more localized regional cultures.

What had happened?

One theory is that either a comet airburst or a meteor impact somewhere in North America set off massive environmental changes that killed animals and disrupted human communities.

In sedimentary deposits dating to the beginning of the YD, impact proponents have reported finding carbon spherules containing tiny nano-scale diamonds, which they thought to be created by shock metamorphism or chemical vapor deposition when the impactor struck.

The nanodiamonds included lonsdaleite, an unusal form of diamond that has a hexagonal lattice rather than the usual cubic crystal lattice. Lonsdaleite is particularly interesting because it has been found inside meteorites and at known impact sites.

In the August 30 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team of scientists led by Tyrone Daulton, PhD, a research scientist in the physics department at Washington University in St. Louis, reported that they could find no diamonds in YD boundary layer material.

Daulton and his colleagues, including Nicholas Pinter, PhD, professor of geology at Southern Illinois University In Carbondale and Andrew C. Scott, PhD, professor of applied paleobotany of Royal Holloway University of London, show that the material reported as diamond is instead forms of carbon related to commonplace graphite, the material used for pencils.

“Of all the evidence reported for a YD impact event, the presence of hexagonal diamond in YD boundary sediments represented the strongest evidence suggesting shock processing,” Daulton, who is also a member of WUSTL’s Center for Materials Innovation, says.

However, a close examination of carbon spherules from the YD boundary using transmission electron microscopy by the Daulton team found no nanodiamonds. Instead, graphene- and graphene/graphane-oxide aggregates were found in all the specimens examined (including carbon spherules dated from before the YD to the present). Importantly, the researchers demonstrated that previous YD studies misidentified graphene/graphane-oxides as hexagonal diamond and likely misidentified graphene as cubic diamond.

The YD impact hypothesis was in trouble already before this latest finding. Many other lines of evidence — including: fullerenes, extraterrestrial forms of helium, purported spikes in radioactivity and iridium, and claims of unique spikes in magnetic meteorite particles — had already been discredited. According to Pinter, “nanodiamonds were the last man standing.”

“We should always have a skeptical attitude to new theories and test them thoroughly,” Scott says, “and if the evidence goes against them they should be abandoned.”

Another longtime member of Bethel A.M.E. Church, Clinton Strand, was living in New Jersey at the time the plant was built, but said he heard from others that gravestones had been found during its construction.

Chandler was a teenager when the sewage plant was built and cannot recall any graves being moved at the time.

Another local family also has passed down oral history about a burial ground being on the property.

Gail Walczyk, a genealogist who has documented many local cemeteries, says her great-great-aunt, Elizabeth Evans Kelly, was buried in an unmarked grave at the site when she died in 1910 at age 114.

Walczyk says the area was a “potter’s field” — an area where impoverished local residents were buried.

“Family folklore says that she was buried where the sewer treatment plant is,” she said about Kelly, who was born on Smith Island in 1796 and was renowned for having heard the Rev. Joshua Thomas in 1814 preach on Tangier Island to British troops just before they went into battle against the Americans in Baltimore.

The Rev. Kirk Mariner included an account of Kelly being an eyewitness to the Parson of the Island’s famous sermon in his book, “God’s Island: The History of Tangier,” including mention of her burial on North Street.

“Every time I pass there I wonder,” Walczyk said of the sewage plant.

A search of back News editions and Onancock Town Council minutes during the period from 1954 — when the State Water Control Board began to pressure the town to address pollution in Onancock Creek — to October 3, 1960 — when the town council voted to borrow $10,000 to make the final payment to the company that constructed the sewage treatment plant — turned up no mention of a burial ground, for the poor or anyone else, being located on the property or of graves being moved at the time the original plant was built.

But the council did on June 8, 1959, vote to pay $1,309.01 to the Board of Public Welfare — an entity charged according to the Virginia Code of 1922 with caring for “the dependent, defective, and delinquent classes” — for the balance due on the Riley property, where the plant is located.

A deed dated July 18, 1958, shows the town bought the property from Ola M. Riley, a widow, for $10 “and other valuable consideration” and that Riley reserved a lifetime estate in the property as well as the right of ingress and egress.

David Donnelly at site of ancient Huron-Wendat Nation village in Vaughan. Donnelly says landowner failed to consult with natives before bulldozing the site. Photo: Gail Swainson.

QUEBEC  -The province must ban the bulldozing of important native sites by developers without the consultation or even notification of First Nations people, says a spokesperson with the Huron-Wendat nation.

“We are not against development, but there should be a duty to consult so we can work together,” said Luc Laine, Ontario spokesperson for the Quebec-based Wendake First Nation. “We are pretty upset with what is going on out there, particularly with what is happening at Teston Rd.”

Laine’s comments came after the archaeological excavation this month of a small soybean field at the northeast corner of Teston Rd. and Jane St. in Vaughan.

Laine says native stakeholders only found out about the dig by accident, although it is thought to be on or near the site of a historically and culturally important Huron village from the 13th and 14th centuries. He contends this dig should have led to some form of notification.

The three-week excavation, which included tearing up the field with earthmoving equipment, was wrapped up by archaeologist Keith Powers last Monday.

The dig site is also just metres away from a mass grave containing the remains of some 400 Hurons, discovered in 2005 during the widening of Teston Rd.

When Huron-Wendat officials heard of the dig a few weeks ago, their Toronto lawyer David Donnelly frantically emailed Tourism and Culture Minister Michael Chan and Vaughan planning officials, demanding without success that the work be halted until the Huron-Wendat could be drawn into the process.

“In the old days, at least the First Nations got muskets and beads when we took their sites,” Donnelly said. “Now they can’t even get a phone call returned.”

There is currently no legal requirement that First Nations be consulted in such cases, though there is a patchwork of legal decisions and a consultation recommendation from the Ipperwash Commission of Inquiry, which found that 8,000 native village and burial sites have been destroyed province-wide.

A 2004 court decision in Ontario also ruled that the province has a duty to consult with native stakeholders when selling property.

But there are no provincial regulations currently in place requiring consultation when native sites are found on private property, although a set of guidelines is “imminent,” says ministry spokesperson Danelle Balfour.

“The ministry is updating the standards and guidelines for archaeology to bring more consistency and predictability,” Balfour said. “Aboriginal engagement will be a key part of the new standards and guidelines.”

Balfour said the ministry has been in contact with the Huron-Wendat since the Teston Rd. dig came to light and will have further talks next week, all aimed at getting a process in place requiring notification of First Nations groups when village or ossuary sites are discovered on private land.

When York Region road crews uncovered the Teston Rd. gravesite remains in 2005, the region called an immediate halt to construction — as required under provincial law when human remains are found — and notified native groups. A study determined that the burial site was a Huron-Wendat ossuary.

In the end, the road was moved slightly to accommodate a new gravesite, and the bones were later reburied with ceremony under the eye of elders representing First Nations from across Ontario and Quebec.

Landowner Gold Park Homes refused to comment on the matter when contacted. No development application has been received for the site. However, Powers, the archaeologist, said the developer informed him they were proceeding with a dig because “they wanted to make sure there was nothing on the site to impact development.”

Powers said Gold Park officials were told best archaeological practices dictated that First Nations representatives should be notified of the dig, but they refused. Powers was asked by Donnelly, ministry and Vaughan officials at the site to stop excavation until proper notification could take place but he told them Gold Park wanted the dig to continue.

“They didn’t want anything to hold this up. They wanted to go fast,” Powers said. “They didn’t want to contact aboriginal groups. That is clear. But I don’t want to be the bad guy here. I did what my employer said to do.”

Based on what he uncovered at the site during his dig, the village site is likely located mostly in a forested area adjacent and to the north of the field, Power said.

The tips of longhouse shadows found at the northern edge of the field and the small scattering of artifacts at the site all led him to deduce the village is in the forested area, which is environmentally protected and can never be built on, Powers said.

The village, which is considered important both archaeologically and historically, would likely contain storage pits, hearths, post moulds and other longhouse remains. There are even possibly more burials.

andina.com

Nazca Lines in Ica, south of Lima. Nazca Lines in Ica, south of Lima

LIMA- American researcher David Johnson has advanced a theory that Nasca Lines may be related to water. He thinks that the geoglyphs may be a giant map of the underground water sources traced on the land.

The Nasca Lines are located in the Peruvian desert, about 200 miles south of Lima. The assortment of perfectly-straight lines lies in an area measuring 37 miles long and 1-mile wide.

The Nasca plain is one of the driest places on Earth, getting less than one inch of rain a year. So, when Johnson started his research in 1995, he became aware of the scarcity of water in the region and the effect that this had on agricultural production and the quality of life.

While looking for sources of water, he noticed that ancient aqueducts, called puquios, seemed to be connected with some of the lines.

The expert said that a high percentage of potable water of the mountain chain moves through underground filtrations and that the pre-Hispanic population knew perfectly the cartography of water.

He said that lines like the ones in Nasca would be “a language to communicate where underground wells and aqueducts are located”.

Johnson gave each figure a meaning: the trapezoids always point to a well. The circles to a place where the fountain is located. And the complex figures as well. For example, the hummingbird points to a giant well with its beak.

Field works along 1,700 kilometers of the Peruvian and Chilean coast, including very ancient civilizations such as Caral and Arica, support the theory that “way to communicate” would be a common practice among all pre-Hispanic cultures.

The Nasca Lines, which have been the focus of debate for over 70 years, consist of giant geometric forms (triangles, trapezoids, parallel lines) as well as biomorphs (birds, plants, and mammals) etched into the surface of the desert of southern Peru, especially in the drainage of the Rio Grande de Nasca.

Johnson has been researching these ground drawings since the 1990s, publishing some books about his theory. Some of them are: “The Relationship Between the Lines of Nasca and Water Resources,” 1997. “The water lines of Nasca,” 1998, “The Correlation Between the Lines of Nasca and Subterranean Water Resources,” 1999.

In 2002, together with Donald Proulx and Stephen Mabee, he wrote “The Correlation Between Geoglyphs and Subterranean Water Resources in the Río Grande de Nazca Drainage.”

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delmarvaNOW.com
by Carol Vaughn

ONANCOCK — Could Onancock’s new $12 million wastewater treatment plant be built on top of a burial ground?

A worker at the site alleges the manager for the construction project swore workers to secrecy after human skeletal remains were found on the site last year.

Paul Smith, a pipe layer who was laid off last week from the nearly completed project, on Tuesday morning brought a collection of bones he says were found there to the Onancock Town Office.

“We found bodies all over that job site,” said Smith, who until he was laid off worked for Galway Bay Corp. of Mount Braddock, Pa., the company building the plant.
“It must have been an old cemetery,” he said.

Smith said workers told the manager about finding bones that appeared to be human, but he told them to keep quiet.

“If we say anything, we’re…done, is what he told us,” Smith said, adding, “It was all about the mighty dollar.”

The bones Smith handed over to the town included a human jawbone, some teeth, a femur attached to a hip socket and another leg bone — all of which he said were dug up during the plant’s construction.

He also said another worker had found a complete human skull.

The remains were turned over to the Accomack County Sheriff’s Office and will be taken to the medical examiner’s office in Norfolk for identification, Major Todd Godwin said.

A second worker, Thomas Parks of Onancock, said he also found at the site “probably 20 or 30 bones” that appeared to be human. He also was told by his boss not to say anything.

“I just started stockpiling them,” Parks said, adding that the manager’s dismissal of the discoveries troubled him. “I was really frustrated about him not saying anything about it — this is my home; I grew up here.”

Galway Bay President Greg Maynard said Tuesday afternoon he became aware of Smith’s allegations only a half hour before when he received a telephone call from Onancock Town Manager Sandy Manter.

Manter was out of town Wednesday and a receptionist at the town office referred all inquiries to the Sheriff’s Office.

Maynard said after speaking with Manter he called the project manager, who denied knowing about human remains being found at the site.

The manager in question had “no knowledge of it happening; it was never reported to him by the workers,” Maynard said.

Some 20 to 30 workers were on the job and many knew about the grisly discoveries, Smith said.

“All the electricians knew. Anybody that was on a backhoe knew,” Parks said.

Smith said he kept the bones he found inside a shed at his home. “It was an emotional burden,” he said, but added he feared his livelihood would be endangered if he revealed their existence.

Parks moved back in with his parents after he was let go from the job and said the bones he found, mostly leg bones, are packed away somewhere among his stored belongings, in a box from the job site labeled “mixed parts.”

“That’s just a bad joke,” he said.

Parks said he originally thought reburying the bones himself once construction was completed would be “a respectful thing,” but says he now plans to turn them over to the authorities.

Last fall two nineteenth-century headstones were found at the plant site and an archaeologist was brought in to investigate. He concluded they likely came from a cemetery in Belle Haven.

Smith said he and other employees were “told to get out” and given three days off without pay during the period when the archeological survey was going on.

Workers found the skeletal remains about 200 feet north of where the headstones were found, in a location between an old concrete tank and some metal tanks, Smith said.

Parks said the hole from which he saw human remains being pulled out was “at least six to eight feet deep.” The location is now covered by concrete, wires and pipes, he said.

Archaeologist George Bey examines a sherd of pottery found buried in the floor of a home at Kiuic.

The Maya ancients who built the ruins of Kiuic (kee-week) here fled those doorways in a hurry, an international archaeology team now realizes. Left behind may be frozen-in-time clues to the fabled collapse of their civilization.

“Why did they leave? That’s the question,” says archaeologist George Bey of Millsaps College in Jackson, Miss. The ancient Maya fled Kiuic, nestled in the Puuc (pook) foothills of the Yucatan, around 880. “Things were going full-bore, construction was underway. And things stopped,” Bey says.

Archaeologists have explored Kiuic’s ruins for more than a century, but working since 2000, Bey and colleagues are now reporting the first evidence of this rapid abandonment. USA TODAY was invited to the site to see what has been uncovered in the latest excavations.

The “classic” Maya peopled the lowland forests of Central America during Europe’s Dark Ages, building a civilization of pyramids, palaces and slash-and-burn “milpa” farms made by burning trees and planting seeds in the ash. Maya rulers oversaw city-states that warred with one another, created elaborate calendars and lasted centuries. The abandonment of those monument-strewn centers stands as one of archaeology’s most-debated mysteries. The “collapse” was underway in modern-day Guatemala by 800, but didn’t take place at Kiuic until almost a century later.

Preserved almost like Pompeii

Farther north, at centers such as Mayapan, pyramids and temples stayed in business until the arrival of Spain’s conquistadors in the 1500s. The Maya people themselves remained, of course, with millions living today in Central America, from modern-day El Salvador to Mexico.

Scholars are entranced with the ruins at Kiuic that still bear the last traces of their owners’ flight, a Maya version of Pompeii, the entombed town of Roman archaeological fame. Overlooked and overgrown for more than a millennium, a variety of clues now beg for interpretation:

• Walls, perfectly laid out with corner and vault stones, lying flat on the ground and waiting to be erected atop the second floor of a palace.

• A half-finished plaza, one side stuccoed and completed, the other composed of bowling-ball-sized stones.

• Pots and grinding stones left neatly in homes, awaiting their owners’ return.

At Kiuic, “the evidence for rapid abandonment now appears more compelling,” says archaeologist Takeshi Inomata of the University of Arizona-Tucson, who heads efforts to investigate the Maya settlement of Aguateca in Guatemala, a site suddenly abandoned in 830 during warfare. “It is a very important discovery.”

Pumas roam the forest lining the overgrown trail leading out of Kiuic. Stones crumble underfoot on the tree-bedecked hillside, threatening to tumble visitors to the forest floor. Once a stair built of the stones, the Escalero al Cielo (Stairway to Heaven) leads to ruins of a temple courtyard and many homes that await 200 feet above.

“The climb kept away looters, and also sometimes older archaeologists,” says Tomás Gallareta Negrón of Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History, a co-director of the site with Bey and William Ringle of Davidson (N.C.) College. Gallareta Negrón has pioneered efforts to turn the site into a nature reserve and education center.

Kiuic has been visited by archaeologists since at least 1841, when John Lloyd Stephens, the so-called American Traveler, recorded the site for his Incidents of Travel in Yucatan, a best seller of the pre-Civil War era. Some of the ruins he noted at that time still stood there this summer, such as the three-story-tall Yaxché pyramid and Kuche palaces.

But the Stairway to Heaven homes high above the site now attract as much, or more, attention from the archaeologists. During excavations last year, archaeologists found pottery and stone tools left in place inside homes, including a wealthy farmer’s kitchen room perched on the edge of the hill. Corn grinding stones called metates still rest on their sides next to doorways, at the ready for preparing another meal.

In June, excavations revealed more pottery left neatly under another collapsed roof in the farmer’s home. And under the floor of the main room, researchers found the site of a double burial. “We think these are ancestors of some kind,” a burial arrangement in line with the practices of the ancient Maya, says archaeologist Stephanie Simms of Boston University. “They certainly merited special treatment,” she says, buried with jade beads and elaborate stone tools.

The owners never returned, Simms says. “People left the hill in haste, they didn’t take everything with them, a lot of artifacts were found.”

Says anthropologist Rani Alexander of New Mexico State University-Las Cruces: “Rapid abandonments are rare finds for archaeologists. The new information at Kiuic offers another take on the Maya collapse.”

Drought, disease, warfare, corn-borers, worn-out soils — almost as many theories as ruins abound to explain the collapse. “The Maya were not a single people. There were numerous regional languages and numerous regional cultures,” Ringle says. Whatever led to the rapid abandonment at Kiuic will offer only clues to collapses elsewhere, not some sort of final word on the large-scale emptying of centers that took place across the Maya world.

The Puuc region has its own particular architecture, marked by small columns along tops of walls, the “colonette” style. But the palaces and temples conform to classic Maya styles, long row-houses facing each other across a central plaza. They built rooms whose narrow stone vaults simply leaned into each other, unlike true arches.

Maya elite took the high ground

Towering trees bite into the limestone blocks fronting the ruins at Kiuic, and they hide dozens of ruins there from visitors’ eyes. Once the trees only hugged the ridge tops, and the land below was cleared for plazas and corn. Today the site is thick with trees, vegetation and ticks, and years of swallow droppings have left a signature stench.

Kiuic’s population boomed, reaching perhaps 4,000 inhabitants, just as the centers more than 200 miles farther south, at Tikal, Copan and Aguateca, suffered abandonment. “Undoubtedly there were some people who arrived here from that time, but Kiuic had already been thriving then for centuries,” Bey says. The growth saw the elites move up the Stairway to Heaven (Gallareta acknowledges he is the Led Zeppelin fan behind the name) from which they could survey their fields.

Around that time, 850, populations swelled throughout the Puuc foothills, perhaps most notably at the city of Uxmal. Now a World Heritage Site about 20 miles north of Kiuic (as the crow flies, not by driving), Uxmal became a capital of the Yucatan Maya for centuries afterward. The newcomers likely added to already-growing populations.

But that growth just stopped in the hills at Kiuic and nearby sites, which had been occupied from 900 B.C. onwards by the Maya. “When they left, they didn’t come back,” Bey says.

“We know where they went — there are millions of Maya living today closer to the coast. Why would they leave here and not return for the things they left?”

Warfare, suggests Inomata, whose Aguateca site in Guatemala is surrounded by walls. However, Kiuic and the other towns close by show no signs of fortifications. The only warlike signs discovered are spear points dug up in the central plaza.

Another possibility is a long-term drought that dried up the choltuns, large holes dug in the limestone floors of the forest to contain water. Still that wouldn’t explain why people never returned after 1,900 years of occupation. Choltuns seem to have only come into widespread use in the Puuc a few centuries before the abandonment, so people had made do without them before.

The careful packing of homes at the Stairway to Heaven points to a methodical retreat, not a plague or war, as well as another riddle. The whole ancient Maya way of life centered on ritual destruction of old homes and goods (smashed bits of pottery underlying the floors of structures serve as one of the handiest dating devices available to archaeologists) as a starting point for building anything new.

The whole idea of a widespread catastrophic collapse of the classic Maya is overstated, Alexander says, suggesting centers likely went through many cycles of building, abandonment and reuse.

So for now, the archaeologists will continue exploring these questions next summer. Residues in the pottery at the Stairway to Heaven should precisely time its abandonment, through carbon dating. Burnt wood left amid the burials should similarly time the site’s construction. The team will keep asking questions with each new bit of evidence, aiming to uncover clues to Kiuic’s collapse and the wider fall of a civilization.

“Kiuic is just one of many sites,” Bey says. “What’s important is the research there. What we are learning at Kiuic is crucial for a rethinking about the rise and fall of the Maya civilization in this part of the world.”