Dozens of tombs filled with up to 40 mummies each have been discovered around a 1,200-year-old ceremonial site in Peru's Cotahuasi Valley.

So far, the archaeologists have excavated seven tombs containing at least 171 mummies from the site, now called Tenahaha.

The tombs are located on small hills surrounding the site. "The dead, likely numbering in the low thousands, towered over the living," wrote archaeologist Justin Jennings, a curator at Toronto's Royal Ontario Museum, in a chapter of the newly published book "Tenahaha and the Wari State: A View of the Middle Horizon from the Cotahuasi Valley" (University of Alabama Press, 2015).

Before rigor mortis set in, the mummies had their knees put up to the level of their shoulders and their arms folded along their chest, the researchers found. The corpses were then bound with rope and wrapped in layers of textiles. The mummies range in age from neonate fetuses to older adults, with some of the youngest mummies (such as infants) being buried in jars. While alive the people appear to have lived in villages close to Tenahaha.

Bits and pieces of mummies

The mummified remains were in poor shape due to damage from water and rodents. Additionally, the researchers found some of the mummies were intentionally broken apart, their bones scattered and moved between the tombs. In one tomb the scientists found almost 400 isolated human remains, including teeth, hands and feet.

"Though many individuals were broken apart, others were left intact," Jennings wrote in the book. "People were moved around the tombs, but they sometimes remained bunched together, and even earth or rocks were used to separate some groups and individuals." Some grave goods were smashed apart, while others were left intact, he said.

Understanding the selective destruction of the mummies and artifacts is a challenge. "In the Andes, death is a process, it's not as if you bury someone and you're done," Jennings told Live Science in an interview.

The authors of this thought-provoking book make the extraordinary claim that a small group of rich and powerful men sought, as early as 1890, to "bring the whole uncivilised world under British Rule, for the recovery of the United States, for the making of the Anglo-Saxon race but one empire". Led by Cecil Rhodes and backed by the fortunes of the House of Rothschild, the secret society that he formed sought to perfect a system of emigration in which British settlers would take over all of Africa and South America, and integrate the United States into the British Empire. The objective of all this was "the foundation of so great a Power as to render wars impossible, and promote the best interests of humanity".

The authors claim that what is defined as the "Secret Elite" provoked the Boer War so that the Boer colonies could be defeated and incorporated into the British Empire, stating that Jan Smuts, who was once Rhodes' close friend, "allegedly" defected to the Boers and encouraged them to initiate a war they were certain to lose.

During the war in South Africa, Germany had shown moral support for the Boers. This worried the Secret Elite. Germany was rapidly becoming the most powerful nation in Europe and a direct threat to the Secret Elite's plans for world domination. So Germany would have to be dealt with next.

To this end, talks were held in secret with Belgium. From 1905 onwards Britain planned, with Belgium, operations in the event of a German invasion. It was the invasion of neutral Belgium which prompted Britain to declare war on Germany but, according to the authors, this was all premeditated. To explain this, it must be understood that a neutral nation cannot form treaties of alliances with other countries as this means they are no longer neutral - they have taken sides. But Belgium did have a secret agreement with Britain, one devised by the Secret Elite.

I've just watched an excellent 1943 documentary by Oscar Award-winning director Frank Capra, and produced by the US government. It's a rare thing to behold: an accurate - in fact, a rather glowing - portrayal of Russia and its historical role as shock absorber to invading hordes. The film was recently uploaded to the YouTube channel of the US National Archives but, as far as I can make out, has been publicly available since 2011.

While the bulk of the film uses contemporary footage collected by US Army Intelligence during the war to capture the horror, scale and intensity of the Nazi invasion of Russia, and how the Russians ultimately defeated the Nazis through brilliant strategy and sheer force of will, the first part also goes into some historical context about previous invasions of Russia, as well as important geographical detail about the nature of 'Russia'.

New underground structures have come to light in Ani, one of Turkey's most breathtaking ancient sites. History researcher Sezai Yazıcı says the ancient city's structures should be promoted.
The underground secrets of the historic Ani Ruins, an ancient, 5,000-year-old Armenian city located on the Turkish-Armenian border in the eastern province of Kars, have been revealed.

While speaking at the recent "International Ani-Kars Symposium," history researcher Sezai Yazıcı said secret water channels, undiscovered monk cells, meditation rooms, huge corridors, intricate tunnels, unbelievable traps and corners that make one lose their sense of direction were just some of the unknown underground structures located at the ancient site.

Yazıcı said a number of experts, academics and researchers attended the Kars Symposium, which was held at Kars' Kafkas University from Aug. 14 to 16. At the symposium, Yazıcı's presentation titled, "Underground Secrets of Ani," drew a lot of attention since no previous publications on the underground structures had been mentioned before.

The Crusades are best known as a series of military campaigns launched by Western European states, and sanctioned by the Roman Catholic Church, aimed at reclaiming the Holy Land from the Muslims. Less well-known, perhaps, are the other wars sanctioned by the papacy, such as the Spanish Reconquista, the Albigensian Crusade and the Northern Crusades. It was during the Northern Crusades that a rather horrific episode in Lithuanian history occurred - the mass suicide at Pilenai, which is the largest known mass suicide in history.

The Northern Crusades (also known as the Baltic Crusades) were carried out between the 11th to the 15th centuries. On one side of the conflict were the Christian powers, including Denmark, Poland, Sweden, the Livonian Brothers of the Sword and the Teutonic Order. On the other side were the pagans of Northern Europe, including the Livonians, Estonians, Wends, Lithuanians and Samogitians.

Unless We Learn Our History, We're Doomed to Repeat It

Preface: I am a patriotic American who loves my country. I was born here, and lived here my entire life.

So why do I frequently point out America's warts? Because - as the Founding Fathers and Supreme Court judges have explained - we can only make America better if we honestly examine her shortcomings. After all:

"Dissent is the highest form of patriotism."

Only when Americans can honestly look at our weaknesses can we become stronger. If we fail to do so, history will repeat ...

While Americans rightly condemn the Nazis as monstrous people, we don't know that America played both sides ... both fighting and supporting the Nazis.

Americans also aren't aware that the Nazis were - in part - inspired by anti-Semites in America.

The unique find, made in the course of the oil workers' land reclamation work, was made about fifty kilometers from the town of Nyagan, in the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Region in western Siberia.

Oil company workers in the area noticed a strange object sticking out of an excavator bucket in the course of their work removing the top soil near a forest in the area, which turned out to be the mammoth's tusk.

The workers stopped their excavation work and began digging with hand shovels, managing to find other remains, including the second tusk, the tibia, ribs, and fragments of the animal's teeth and jaw. The mammoth was said to have been buried approximately three meters underground.

In 2013, workers in Turkey looking to demolish low-income housing near a Byzantine-era hilltop castle stumbled upon something extraordinary: an expansive underground city that may have housed 20,000 people or more.

We think they actually found a huge Diglett sanctuary.

Located in the middle of the country near the provincial capital of in Nevşehir, the underground network has yet to be extensively explored by researchers. Archaeologists and geophysicists do have resources for their explorations in the form of a 300-year-old paper trail stretching all the way back to the Ottoman Empire.

"We found documents stating that there were close to 30 major water tunnels in this region," Nevşehir mayor Hasan Ünver told National Geographic.

In 2014, those documents led researchers to a multi-level underground village of living areas, wineries, chapels, and bezirhane-linseed presses for generating lamp oil. The research team was able to find numerous small artifacts, including stone crosses and ceramics. The artifacts reveal that the settlement was used from the Byzantine era all the way up to the Ottoman conquest, researchers said.

1. The Unfinished Obelisk

For how long and complex human history is, it's no big surprise to me that it would miss a few major places and events, right? Well we'll help you fill in the gaps a bit.

Archaeologists working in Guatemala have unearthed new information about the Maya civilization's transition from a mobile, hunter-gatherer lifestyle to a sedentary way of life.

Led by University of Arizona archaeologists Takeshi Inomata and Daniela Triadan, the team's excavations of the ancient Maya lowlands site of Ceibal suggest that as the society transitioned from a heavy reliance on foraging to farming, mobile communities and settled groups co-existed and may have come together to collaborate on construction projects and participate in public ceremonies.

The findings, to be published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, challenge two common assumptions: that mobile and sedentary groups maintained separate communities, and that public buildings were constructed only after a society had fully put down roots.

"There has been the theory that sedentary and mobile groups co-existed in various parts of the world, but most people thought the sedentary and mobile communities were separate, even though they were in relatively close areas," said Inomata, a UA professor of anthropology and lead author of the PNAS study. "Our study presents the first relatively concrete evidence that mobile and sedentary people came together to build a ceremonial center."