Syrians Discover Ancient Jar in Ruins

By ALBERT AJI

DAMASCUS, Syria - Syrian archeologists have discovered an ancient glass jar containing an infant's ashes at one of the Mideast's most famous archaeological sites.

The discovery of the 2nd century A.D. jar amid the ruins of Palmyra was the first of its kind, shedding light on previously unknown funeral practices common at the time, Khalil Hariri, a senior Syrian archaeological official, told The Associated Press late Friday.

Archeologists unearthed the jar from a newly discovered cemetery within Palmyra, said Hariri. The ashes inside the container, which measured 9.5 inches in height and 7 inches in diameter, revealed that the infant had been cremated, he added.

Hariri said the mission discovered pottery, furniture and lamps in the cemetery, as well as glass vials in which mourners put their tears. He could not provide further details, pending studies on the new discoveries.

Palmyra, located some 150 miles northeast of Syria's capital Damascus, was the center of an Arab client state to the Roman empire and thrived on the caravan trades across the desert to Mesopotamia and Persia, especially after the decline of ancient Petra in Jordan.

Under Queen Zenobia, the city rebelled against Roman rule and briefly carved out an independent desert Arab kingdom before being re-conquered and razed by the Romans.

Human Bones Found Could Date Back To 800 B.C.

MODERATOR NOTE: Special thanks to LarryKS for submitting this article ...


Scientists protest efforts to give Indian tribes control over ancient man's remains

WASHINGTON: Scientists hoping to study the ancient skeleton known as Kennewick Man are protesting efforts on two fronts that they say could block them from examining one of the oldest and most complete set of bones ever found in North America.

For a third time in four years, the scientists are opposing a bill in the U.S. Senate that would allow federally recognized American Indian tribes to claim ancient remains even if they cannot prove a link to a current tribe.

They also are contesting draft regulations issued by the Bush administration on the disposal of culturally unaffiliated remains.

Both measures could end up with the same result, scientists say: preventing an improved understanding of North American history and the role of the continent's first inhabitants.

If adopted, the proposed changes could "result in a world heritage disaster of unprecedented proportions" and "rob our descendants of the unique insights concerning the shared heritage of all people that physical anthropological studies of culturally unidentifiable human remains can provide," the American Association of Physical Anthropologists said in a statement.

Supporters of the legislation call such worries overblown. They say the changes are intended to clarify the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act to ensure that federally recognized tribes can safeguard the graves of their ancestors.

Neither the Senate bill nor the draft regulations would affect the 9,300-year-old bones known as Kennewick Man, they said. The skeleton was discovered in 1996 along the Columbia River near Kennewick, Washington, in the Northwestern United States and has been the focus of a bitter fight ever since.

A federal appeals court ruled in 2004 that scientists can study the ancient bones, and teams of anthropologists and other analysts have begun poring over more than 300 bones and bone fragments at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture in Seattle, Washington, where the remains are housed.

A spokesman for Democratic Sen. Byron Dorgan, chairman of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, said the Senate bill would clarify what process should be followed for future discoveries of ancient remains.

"The court ruling said it's not clear" what should happen, "so Congress wants to clarify what its intent was, and its intent is that tribes that believe they have a connection (to ancient remains) either through descent or cultural affiliation, have an opportunity to make that case," said Barry Piatt, a Dorgan spokesman.

The Bush administration opposes the Senate bill, which mirrors legislation proposed in 2004 and 2005. In testimony before the Indian Affairs Committee in 2005, Paul Hoffman, a deputy assistant secretary of the Interior, called the proposed change too broad and said it would loosen the Indian graves law to include remains that might not be connected to a tribe.

Hoffman said the grave protection act "should protect the sensibilities of currently existing tribes, cultures, and people while balancing the need to learn about past cultures and customs." In cases where remains are not significantly related to an existing tribe, people or culture, they should be available for appropriate scientific analysis, he said.

The administration did not testify on the current Senate bill, which was approved by the Senate Indian Affairs Committee on a voice vote, but its views have not changed since 2005, said Sherry Hutt, manager of the Interior Department's enforcement of the grave protection act.

"The position that the secretary took at that time ... was that science is a good thing, and NAGPRA (the act) is not administered to be a death knell to science. That remains our view," she said.

But scientists said the Sept. 27 committee vote, coupled with the Oct. 16 publication of draft rules on disposition of culturally unidentifiable remains, shows there is a deliberate effort quietly to change the grave protection law. The Senate bill was approved without a public hearing two days after it was formally proposed.

The draft regulations and the Senate bill assume that any remains found belong to federally recognized tribes, said Cleone Hawkinson, a founding member of the Portland, Ore.-based Friends of America's Past. That includes remains from small bands of people who died out and left no descendants, and remains of indigenous ancestors to modern-day Latinos, including those who died just a few hundred years ago.

"By changing the definition to include everything found as Native American, (the grave protection act) automatically applies to everything, before any scientific study. Then tribes can decide if they want to allow study," Hawkinson said.

Hutt disputed that, saying the proposed regulations were not related to the Senate bill and in any case would not affect Kennewick Man. The regulations have been under development since 2001, Hutt said, calling any relationship between the draft rules and the Senate bill coincidental.

Rob Smith, a Seattle lawyer who represented a group of Northwest tribes in the Kennewick Man case, said the Senate bill would not "allow Indian tribes to make wild claims to any newly discovered remains," as opponents contend. Tribes still would have to prove a cultural connection with the remains, he said.

MODERATOR NOTE: Special thanks to Herb for submitting this article ...

Map that named America is a puzzle for researchers

WASHINGTON - The only surviving copy of the 500-year-old map that first used the name America goes on permanent display this month at the Library of Congress, but even as it prepares for its debut, the 1507 Waldseemuller map remains a puzzle for researchers.

Why did the mapmaker name the territory America and then change his mind later? How was he able to draw South America so accurately? Why did he put a huge ocean west of America years before European explorers discovered the Pacific?

"That's the kind of conundrum, the question, that is still out there," said John Hebert, chief of the geography and map division of the Library of Congress.

The 12 sheets that make up the map, purchased from German Prince Johannes Waldburg-Wolfegg for $10 million in 2003, were mounted on Monday in a huge 6-foot by 9.5-foot (1.85 meter by 2.95 meter) display case machined from a single block of aluminum.

The case will be flooded with inert argon gas to prevent deterioration when it goes on public display December 13.

Researchers are hopeful that putting the rarely shown map on permanent display for the first time since it was discovered in the Waldburg-Wolfegg castle archives in 1901 may stimulate interest in finding out more about the documents used to produce it.

The map was created by the German monk Martin Waldseemuller. Thirteen years after Christopher Columbus first landed in the Western Hemisphere, the Duke of Lorraine brought Waldseemuller and a group of scholars together at a monastery in Saint-Die in France to create a new map of the world.

The result, published two years later, is stunningly accurate and surprisingly modern.

"The actual shape of South America is correct," said Hebert. "The width of South America at certain key points is correct within 70 miles of accuracy."

Given what Europeans are believed to have known about the world at the time, it should not have been possible for the mapmakers to produce it, he said.

The map gives a reasonably correct depiction of the west coast of South America. But according to history, Vasco Nunez de Balboa did not reach the Pacific by land until 1513, and Ferdinand Magellan did not round the southern tip of the continent until 1520.

"So this is a rather compelling map to say, 'How did they come to that conclusion,'" Hebert said.

The mapmakers say they based it on the 1,300-year-old works of the Egyptian geographer Ptolemy as well as letters Florentine navigator Amerigo Vespucci wrote describing his voyages to the new world. But Hebert said there must have been something more.

"From the writings of Vespucci you couldn't have prepared the map," Hebert said. "There had to be something cartographic with it."

MISGIVINGS ABOUT AMERICA

Waldseemuller made it clear he was naming the new land after Vespucci, describing how he came up with the name America based on the navigator's first name.

But he soon had misgivings about what he had done. An atlas Waldseemuller produced six years later shows only part of the east coast of the Americas, and refers to it as Terra Incognita -- unknown land.

"America has gone out of his lexicon," Hebert said. "(No) place in the atlas -- in the text or in the maps -- does the name America appear."

His 1516 mariner's map, on the same scale as the 1507 map, steps back even further, showing only parts of the new continents and reconnecting the north to Asia. South America is labeled Terra Nova -- New World -- and North America is labeled Terra de Cuba -- Land of Cuba.

"Essentially he's reconnecting North America to the Asian mainland, suggesting a continual world of land mass rather than separated by those bodies of water that separate us from Europe and Asia," Hebert said.

Why the rollback? No one knows.

In writings accompanying the 1516 map, Waldseemuller comes across as if he "has seen the better of his error and is now correcting it," Hebert said.

He speculated that power politics played a role. Spain and Portugal divided the globe between them in 1494, two years after Columbus, with territory to the east going to Portugal and land to the west to Spain.

That demarcation line is oddly absent from the 1507 Waldseemuller map, and flags marking territorial claims in South America suggest Portugal controls the region's southernmost land, even though it is in Spain's area of influence. On the later map, the southernmost flag is Spanish, Hebert said.

"It is possible one could say the 1507 map is influenced strongly by Portuguese sources and conceivably the 1516 map may be influenced more by Spanish sources," he said.

Although the map conceals many mysteries, one thing is clear: it represents a revolutionary shift in the way Europe viewed the world.

"This is ... essentially the beginning or first map of the modern age, and it's one that everything builds on from that point forward," Hebert said. "It becomes a keystone map."

MODERATOR NOTE: Special thanks to LarryKS for submitting this article ...

Muons Meet the Maya

Physicists explore subatomic particle strategy for revealing archaeological secrets

By Betsy Mason

At its most glamorous, the life of an experimental high-energy physicist consists of smashing obscure subatomic particles with futuristic-sounding names into each other to uncover truths about the universe-using science's biggest, most expensive toys in exciting locations such as Switzerland or Illinois. But it takes a decade or two to plan and build multibillion-dollar atom smashers. While waiting, what's a thrill-seeking physicist to do?

How about using some of the perfectly good, and completely free, subatomic particles that rain down on Earth from space every day to peek inside something really big and mysterious, like, say, a Mayan pyramid? That's exactly what physicist Roy Schwitters of the University of Texas at Austin is preparing to do.

High-energy particles known as muons, which are born of cosmic radiation, have ideal features for creating images of very large or dense objects. Muons easily handle situations that hinder other imaging techniques. Ground-penetrating radar, for instance, can reach only 30 meters below the surface under ideal conditions. And seismic reflection, another method, doesn't fare well in a complex medium. With muons, all you need is a way to capture them and analyze their trajectories.

Besides probing pyramids in Belize and Mexico, physicists are applying the muon method to studying active volcanoes and detecting nuclear materials. The concept sounds out of this world, but it's really quite simple. When cosmic rays hit the Earth's atmosphere, collisions with the nuclei of air atoms spawn subatomic particles called pions that quickly decay into muons that continue along the same path. Many of the muons survive long enough to penetrate the Earth's surface. Because of their high energy, the particles can easily pass through great volumes of rock or metal or whatever else they encounter. However, they are deflected from their path by atoms in the material, and the denser the material, the greater the deflection.

Schwitters wants to exploit this deflection to see if there are any rooms or chambers inside a Mayan pyramid in Belize, he told science journalists in Spokane, Wash., at a recent meeting sponsored by the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing. His team is building several muon detectors that would be buried in shallow holes around the base of the pyramid to create an image of what's inside by measuring the trajectories of the muons that pass through it.

"What you see is very much like an X ray," he says. "If you see a spot with more muons, it means there's a space there. If you see fewer muons, it means there's something extra-dense there."

Schwitters won't be the first to marry physics and archaeology in this way. In 1967, Nobel prize-winning physicist Luis Alvarez of the University of California, Berkeley placed a muon detector in a chamber beneath the pyramid of Khafra in Egypt to see if it was hiding any burial chambers like those discovered in the larger pyramid of Khufu. He found none, but the experiment showed that the method worked.

From physics to archaeology

As the director of the Superconducting Supercollider laboratory in Texas until 1993, when Congress gave the project the axe, Schwitters is no stranger to waiting for the next big thing. And he has always been intrigued by the possibility of applying the tools of the high-energy physics trade elsewhere, so a chance conversation with one of Alvarez' former colleagues, combined with a little spare time, got Schwitters wondering what other enigmatic ancient structures were waiting to be probed.

Archaeologist Fred Valdez, director of the Mesoamerican Archaeological Research Laboratory at UT Austin, had the answer: an enormous pyramid in the third-largest Mayan city in Belize. The city is in an area in northwestern Belize known as La Milpa, which was home to one of the densest populations of Maya from as early as 1000 B.C. until around A.D. 850. The area was packed with four large cities, each with 20,000 or more residents, that were only around 8 to 12 kilometers apart with 60 or more towns, villages, and hamlets in between. Valdez believes there is much to be learned from the society that existed there.

"The amazing part is how close how many of these large cities are to each other," he said. "The Maya were clearly expert at adapting to their environment and exploiting their environment, clearly making better use of things than we are today, just to support the populations that were there."

Because there isn't a chamber below the La Milpa pyramid, Schwitters plans to harness muons with four or five smaller detectors spaced around the structure to get a three-dimensional view inside. Each detector will be a cylinder wrapped with strips of polystyrene, which emits light when hit by a muon. The bursts of light as each particle passes through both sides of the detector will be recorded by photo detectors at the end of the cylinder and used to reconstruct the muon trajectories.

Dense matter will deflect muons away from their paths, so fewer muons will hit the detectors from that area while more particles will pass through empty spaces to reach the detectors. A computer program will translate the information into an image that can be read like a CT scan or an X ray with bright spots indicating voids and dark areas correlating to more dense matter. Because muons hit the Earth at the rate of about 1 per square centimeter per minute, it will take several months to get a good image of the guts of the pyramid. Schwitters hopes he'll be able to resolve chambers as small as a cubic meter.

20/20 hindsight

Knowing exactly where to dig to find potential tombs or other chambers could save precious time when dealing with very large structures like the pyramid in Belize. It could also save artifacts that need special treatment, sometimes within hours, to keep them from deteriorating from exposure. Dust in a tomb that is normally trampled during excavation could contain valuable information about diseases that affected the Maya, or about the plants and herbs they used.

"Ideally, the results would give us a look into the building without having to do the destructive process of excavation," Valdez said.

He envisions being able to drill a small auger hole into a chamber and send a fiber-optic camera down to take a look. That way he can study the chambers exactly as they were left, and the appropriate experts and equipment can be on hand to deal with the contents as they are exposed by coating them with resin, immersing them in water, or sealing them in an airtight case.

"That's tremendous information," he said. "It's almost like 20/20 hindsight."

With funding from Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque, N.M., and support from UT and National Instruments, Schwitters' team has already built and successfully tested one detector at UT that weighs in around a ton, at 4.5 m long with a 1.5 m diameter. The detectors that will go to Belize will be much smaller, around the size of water heaters and weighing about 200 pounds. Depending on funding, the detectors could be ready for showtime in 2009.

Another team of scientists may be just months away from using muons to image the Pyramid of the Sun in Teotihuacán, Mexico, in a quest to learn why the pyramid was built. And if burial chambers such as those found in the nearby Pyramid of the Moon are discovered, they could reveal whether the society was ruled by a single person or a government of several leaders.

Led by physicist Arturo Menchaca-Rocha of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, the team is currently working out some kinks in its detector having to do with wires cracking from temperature changes. Once that hurdle is cleared, which will likely be sometime after January, their single detector will be placed in a tunnel discovered under the pyramid in 1971, much like Alvarez' experiment in Egypt.

"We are quite delayed," Menchaca-Rocha said in an e-mail from a meeting in Veracruz. "But the pyramid has been sitting there for 2,000 years, so it can wait for us to be perfectly happy about the detector."

Nuclear security

In the meantime, physicists at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico are looking to muons to help detect special nuclear materials such as plutonium and uranium at the country's borders. Current nuclear-detection capability relies on identifying the gamma-ray radiation emitted by the materials, but that doesn't always work.

"If someone wants to bring in nuclear material to build a bomb, they need to shield it with something dense like lead to stop the gamma rays," says Los Alamos physicist Chris Morris.

So Morris is working on a detector that would use muons to root out both nuclear materials and shielding. Lead is dense enough to perturb a muon's path, and it is even easier to spot the muon fingerprint of things like plutonium and uranium because their high density and big atomic charge scatter the particles more than anything else.

Los Alamos lab has partnered with Decision Sciences Corporation of San Diego to build a prototype four-sided muon detector that resembles a carport before the end of the year. Vehicles would drive into the device like entering a car wash and wait while detectors on all four sides of the tunnel record muon trajectories. A single muon would be recorded by multiple detectors, revealing any changes in its path.

"It measures the track of every muon going through the vehicle," Morris says. "In 20 seconds you can detect whether or not they have a chunk of metal that's 4 inches by 4 inches by 4 inches. If you went a little longer, you can see something smaller."

Volcanic insight

But the real strength of muon imaging is tackling very large structures, such as volcanoes, that defy other methods. Scientists led by Hiroyuki Tanaka of the University of Tokyo installed a single muon detector 1 kilometer from the summit of Mount Asama on the main island of Japan. By measuring muons traveling nearly horizontally through the volcano, the detector successfully imaged a lava mound that was created a few hundred meters below the crater floor during a 2004 eruption and a conduit below it.

"The cosmic-ray muon imaging technique has much higher resolving power than conventional geophysical techniques, with resolutions up to several meters allowing it to see smaller objects and greater detail in volcanoes," Tanaka wrote in a report on the results of the Mount Asama study in the Nov. 15 Earth and Planetary Science Letters.

Tanaka's team has also used muon detection to image a lava dome that has been smoking since 1945 on the flank of Usu volcano in Hokkaido, Japan. Both of Tanaka's current studies involved single detectors. But adding more detectors would give a three-dimensional view and help untangle the effect of higher-density materials on the muons from that of a longer distance traveled through somewhat less-dense material.

"This technique might provide a way to forecast a volcanic eruption by monitoring changes in the density of the magma channel inside the summit region of a volcano," Tanaka writes in a study on the lava dome in the Nov. 16 Geophysical Research Letters.

Even more promising is a real-time digital muon camera that Tanaka is working on that could capture real-time images of an active volcano. He hopes to have one installed with a view of Mt. Asama from 1.5 km away by May 2008, and a second one sometime thereafter that could provide a 3-D picture of Asama's next eruption.

"With this device, I think that the technique would be more practical for use in forecasting eruptions," he wrote in an e-mail from Japan.

Schwitters envisions other geologic studies that could benefit from muon detection, such as gauging the size and location of underground aquifers or assessing the stability of the geology around nuclear-waste depositories. But for now he is content to focus on the pyramids buried under dirt, trees, and vines in the forest in Belize.

"There is good reason to believe they contain rooms and chambers that have not been disturbed since the Maya left, and that's what makes them so exciting," he says.

MODERATOR NOTE: Special thanks to LarryKS for submitting this article ...

He digs less to learn more about Vikings

By Billy Baker

The joke is that, in John Steinberg's home, they know an awful lot about Vikings.

On one side you have his wife, Andrea Kremer, whose job requires her to be an expert on the Minnesota Vikings (and the other 31 National Football League teams) as a reporter for NBC Sports' football coverage.

And then there's Steinberg, a senior researcher at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, who is one of the world's foremost specialists on the real Vikings, the tough-guy (and girl) Scandinavian peoples who really knew how to blitz.

Steinberg, 41, has been exploring archeological sites in Iceland since 1999, and for the last two years has led the Skagafjord Archaeological Settlement Survey, which seeks to study the evolution of settlements in a northern fjord for clues as to how Iceland evolved from the era of Viking chiefdoms into a more organized central government.

The problem with surveying these 1,000-year-old settlements is that you can't see them. They were constructed with turf and driftwood - not exactly the most sustainable materials - and they've been buried under several feet of sediment.

But it is this challenge, and its solution, that excites Steinberg, and he gets very animated when he talks about this sort of thing.

"We were the first ones to apply technology to sites that were invisible," he said recently from his laboratory at UMass-Boston, which has a framed photo of Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones on the wall. "My claim to fame is that we invented a method of finding turf houses when there was no sign on the surface. And we can for the first time find all the sites and figure out how they changed over time."

Steinberg, who has boyish good looks in the John Edwards mold, initially planned to be an astronomer. But as a teenager, he got a job at a planetarium in Oakland, Calif., where one of the employees pointed out a button and told him not to push it. He did, of course, and it kicked off a procession of the equinox that moved the position of the stars back several thousand years.

"I found this fascinating," he said, "and I became obsessed with going back in time."

At the University of Chicago, he played strong safety for the football team and studied in an anthropology department that included Robert Braidwood, who is rumored to be the inspiration for Indiana Jones.

Tim Earle, an anthropology professor at Northwestern University, said there is a bit of Indiana Jones in Steinberg.

"He's a rough and ready kind of guy," Earle said. "He can make things happen in difficult situations," such as Iceland, which Earle described as a terrible place to attempt archeology.

"The standard techniques we use to find sites is impossible in Iceland because the sites are buried below a meter of soil," Earle said.

"But his real badge as a scientist is technological creativity, and he developed a whole new set of methods for identifying sites that had been buried or destroyed," he said.

Steinberg describes his Iceland approach as "dig less, know more," which involves directing a large team of PhD's and specialists - "It's a bit like cat wrangling," he says - who spend 50 days there each summer combing the landscape, taking soil samples, and using ground penetrating radar and other technology to look for signs of the Vikings' famous "long houses."

Steinberg said team members can learn as much about a settlement in a year as they used to learn in the seven years it takes to do a full site excavation.

By studying the Viking community, Steinberg is looking to uncover deeper riddles about the formation of human society.

"Most of human history is the story of colonization," he said. "Understanding how colonization works, especially in its most primitive form, is really important."

At the same time, he enjoys exploring the noninvasive approach to digging up the past.

"Archeology is a destructive science," he said. "Once you dig something up, you can never dig it up again. The ability to find things subsurface without digging is revolutionizing archeology, and we're at the forefront of that."

MODERATOR NOTE: Special thanks to LarryKS for submitting this article ...

Proposed federal rule threatens 2 decades of established law

US Department of Interior proposes upending 17-year-old policy

Washington, D.C. December 3, 2007 - The Society for American Archaeology (SAA) has condemned a proposed rule by the U.S. Department of Interior that would put in jeopardy the highly productive compromise that was reached when the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) was passed in 1990.

On October 16, 2007, the Department of the Interior published draft regulations that would destroy the use of cultural affiliation as the principle for repatriation decisions, which is at the core of NAGPRA and supported by seventeen years of hard work and effort by tribes, archaeologists, and museum personnel, and replace it with an undefined notion of "cultural relationship."

"The Department's proposed regulations have no basis in law or science and reflect an attempt to impermissibly legislate in a manner not prescribed by Congress. The adoption of the regulations as they stand would force the NAGPRA process back to square one," said Dean Snow, president of SAA. "This ill-advised rule would irreparably diminish the archaeological record of the entire U.S. "The damage to some of our most cherished institutions and the cost to science and the public is incalculable."

The Department's proposed rules alter the 1990 compromise between archeologists, museums, scientists, federal agencies and representatives of federally-recognized Native American tribes that resulted in passage of NAGPRA.

"The act represents a careful balance of multiple perspectives regarding human remains and objects," said Snow. "Over the last 17 years, tribes, museums, and federal agencies have developed relationships of trust and mutual understanding of the law. The proposed rule effectively dismisses those hard-earned accomplishments."

NAGPRA requires federally-funded museums, universities, governmental agencies and similar institutions to transfer control of human remains, sacred or funerary objects, and other culturally important artifacts to federally-recognized Native American tribes that demonstrate cultural affiliation.

NAGPRA represents a carefully-crafted compromise that has served to repatriate, protect, and preserve human remains for almost two decades, and forms a basis by which all entities involved in American archaeology abide. Since NAGPRA was passed in 1990, thousands of human remains have already been repatriated to culturally affiliated tribes and more are in the process of repatriation.

The Department of Interior's proposed rule extends to the disposition of human remains that are culturally unidentified. Snow pointed out that the proposed rules would put museums in the uncomfortable and inappropriate position of determining "Indianness" of claimants who are not federally-recognized and of weighing competing claims among federally-related, non-federally related, and non-Native American claimants.

The Department's proposed rule would apply to most of the nation's museums, universities, federal agencies, and could extend to medical specimens or forensic evidence collections whether they have Native American human remains or not.

Newswise - Resting in less than 10 feet of Caribbean seawater, the wreckage of Quedagh Merchant, the ship abandoned by the scandalous 17th century pirate Captain William Kidd as he raced to New York in an ill-fated attempt to clear his name, has escaped discovery -- until now.

An underwater archaeology team from Indiana University announced today (Dec. 13) the discovery of the remnants. IU marine protection authority Charles Beeker said his team has been licensed to study the wreckage and to convert the site into an underwater preserve, where it will be accessible to the public.

Beeker, director of Academic Diving and Underwater Science Programs in IU Bloomington's School of Health, Physical Education and Recreation, said it is remarkable that the wreck has remained undiscovered all these years given its location, just 70 feet off the coast of Catalina Island in the Dominican Republic, and because it has been sought actively by treasure hunters.

"I've been on literally thousands of shipwrecks in my career," Beeker said. "This is one of the first sites I've been on where I haven't seen any looting. We've got a shipwreck in crystal clear, pristine water that's amazingly untouched. We want to keep it that way, so we made the announcement now to ensure the site's protection from looters."

The find is valuable because of the potential to reveal important information about piracy in the Caribbean and about the legendary Capt. Kidd, said John Foster, California's state underwater archaeologist, who is participating in the research.

"I look forward to a meticulous study of the ship, its age, its armament, its construction, its use, its contents and the reconstructed wrecking process that resulted in the site we see today," Foster said. "Because there is extensive, written documentation, this is an opportunity we rarely have to test historic information against the archaeological record."

Historians differ on whether Kidd was actually a pirate or a privateer -- someone who captured pirates. After his conviction of piracy and murder charges in a sensational London trial, he was left to hang over the River Thames for two years.

Historians write that Kidd captured the Quedagh Merchant, loaded with valuable satins and silks, gold, silver and other East Indian merchandise, but left the ship in the Caribbean as he sailed to New York on a less conspicuous sloop to clear his name of the criminal charges.

Anthropologist Geoffrey Conrad, director of IU Bloomington's Mathers Museum of World Cultures, said the men Kidd entrusted with his ship reportedly looted it, and then set it ablaze and adrift down the Rio Dulce. Conrad said the location of the wreckage and the formation and size of the canons, which had been used as ballast, are consistent with historical records of the ship. They also found pieces of several anchors under the cannons.

"All the evidence that we find underwater is consistent with what we know from historical documentation, which is extensive," Conrad said. "Through rigorous archeological investigations, we will conclusively prove that this is the Capt. Kidd shipwreck."

The IU team examined the shipwreck at the request of the Dominican Republic's Oficina Nacional De Patrimonio Cultural Subacuático.

"The site was initially discovered by a local prominent resident of Casa De Campo, who recognized the significance of the numerous cannons and requested the site be properly investigated," said ONPCS Technical Director Francis Soto. "So, I contacted IU."

Beeker and Conrad have worked closely with ONPCS for 11 years since they began conducting underwater and land-based archaeological research related to the era when the Old World and New World first met.

"It continues our work down there from the age of discovery to the golden age of piracy, the transformation of both the native and introduced cultures of the Caribbean," Conrad said.

Much of their work is focused in the area of La Isabela Bay, the site of the first permanent Spanish settlement established by Christopher Columbus. The Taino were the first indigenous people to interact with Europeans. Beeker said much of the history of this period is based on speculation, something he and Conrad are trying to change.

The IU research in the Dominican Republic typically involves professors and graduate students from various IU Bloomington schools and departments, including the School of HPER, the School of Public and Environmental Affairs, and the departments of anthropology, biology, geology and mathematics in the College of Arts and Sciences.

Anthropology doctorate student Fritz Hanselmann, who teaches underwater archaeology techniques in HPER, said there have only been a few pirate ships ever discovered in the Americas, and that IU's multi-disciplinary research will make a significant contribution to the field.

HPER Dean Robert M. Goodman accompanied the most recent expedition to learn more about this successful interdisciplinary and international research collaboration. He also went to explore potential public health linkages between the School of HPER and the Universidad Autonoma de Santo Domingo, founded in 1538. It is the largest university in the country and the oldest in the Americas.

"Indiana University is working to increase its international presence," Goodman said. "Earlier this month, the IU Board of Trustees was presented a strategic plan that calls for increased student and faculty participation in study abroad and international service learning programs, as well as the development of strategic international partnerships that support overseas study, global research and the recruitment of international students.

"The archeological work being done by IU in the Dominican Republic affords us tremendous entrée for wider areas of collaboration," he said.

"Because of the network that Mr. Beeker and Dr. Conrad have established, the Universidad Autonóma de Santo Domingo is eager to establish a formal agreement with IU. We met with the secretary of state for environment and national resources, the dean of faculties of health sciences at the university, representatives from USAID, and the president of the hotel association, all of whom are eager to foster relationships between IU and agencies of the Dominican Republic. This was an incredibly productive trip for IU."

Beeker and his students have conducted underwater research projects on submerged ships, cargo and other cultural and biological resources throughout the United States and the Caribbean for more than 20 years. Many of his research projects have resulted in the establishment of state or federal underwater parks and preserves, and have led to a number of site nominations to the National Register of Historic Places.