Chris sends pictures from Teotihuacán.

It's quite the climb, and you have to get back down again. Or hang out in the blazing sun:

Chris sends this snippet from a book:

Here's the book: "1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus" (commission earned). I'm going to read that. I can't see me climbing those steep stairs in full sunlight, but I do want to read that book.

"Standing in an outdoor car park on which he wants to build flats, Carvelli watched as archaeologists got busy unearthing ancient Roman skeletons..."

"... mosaics and tombs. 'We had problems like this before in Rome when we had to work around a tomb but this is on a different level,' Carvelli said. When builders broke ground at the car park last year, archaeologists checked for ancient ruins and stumbled on a large Roman burial ground, complete with 20 tombs and 50 skeletons piled in pits for the poor, a mere six feet below where Romans have been parking their cars for years.... Peering into one hole in the ground full of skeletons, Walter Pantano, an anthropologist, surveyed the tangle of arms, rib cages and grinning skulls with their teeth intact...."

From "Ancient remains of necropolis stand in way of Rome’s builders/The abundance of artefacts and even skeletons underfoot is proving a frustrating barrier to development in the Eternal City" (London Times).

"A Romanian worker died late on Monday after being trapped for 12 hours when the 13th-century Torre dei Conti, overlooking the ancient Forum, caved in..."

"... sending a cloud of dust and debris over tourists. Maria Zakharova, a Kremlin spokeswoman, claimed that Italian infrastructure was crumbling because funds were being diverted to backing Ukraine’s war effort. 'As long as the Italian government keeps uselessly wasting taxpayers’ money, all of Italy will collapse, from the economy to its towers,' she said on Monday on her Telegram channel...."

From "Russia blames fatal Rome tower collapse on support for Ukraine/Italy is outraged as the Kremlin links its military aid to the death of a maintenance worker in the Torre dei Conti" (London Times).

Wow, that's some cheap trolling from the Kremlin spokeslady.

"Feras’s home, which he shares with his wife and nine children, comprises four connected 2,400-year-old caves and an adjoining tent."

"Just a 10-minute walk away are the remains of Petra’s grand temple and its colonnaded main street.... The caves occupied by the Bdoul were originally an integral part of a wealthy trading city – the thriving capital of the Nabateans for 500 years before it was annexed by the Romans in around AD100 and eventually abandoned three centuries later.... Officials charged with the management and development of Petra say the Bdoul who still live on the site are there illegally. They contend... that their use of the caves as homes, animal shelters, shops and storerooms risks causing irreparable harm. 'If we want to preserve the integrity of the site for future generations then we have to stop the use of the caves for damaging activities,' said Dr Fares Braizat, the chief commissioner of the Petra Development and Tourism Region Authority. '... it is illegal for anyone to live in or use the archaeological monuments within the [site of Petra] for whatever purposes.'..."

From "'I can’t survive in a house': Petra’s Bedouin resist moves to evict them from ancient cave homes/Plans to improve the world heritage site for tourists put its living culture at risk, say locals and campaigners" (The Guardian).

There's a great "Fall of Civilizations" episode about Petra, here:

"He stuck his finger in the mouth to see if he might wiggle the piece loose. 'And my finger came back wet,' he said."

"'I thought about it for a half-second longer and said, "Oh my God, my finger is wet,"' he recalled. 'I got my flashlight out and shined it in there, and the thing is completely full of liquid,' he said. He summoned colleagues. They were stunned. Here was 'an out-of-the-box, next level, spectacular find,' said Jason Boroughs, Mount Vernon’s principal archaeologist.... 'There are whole, recognizable cherries,' said Boroughs. 'It actually smelled like cherry blossoms when we got to the bottom.'"

From "Centuries-old bottles of cherries unearthed at George Washington’s home/The two, rare intact bottles, about 250 years old, were discovered by archaeologists working in the Mount Vernon basement" (WaPo).

I would have thought they'd have cleaned out the basement by now. This is a feel-good story on so many levels.

"May this tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard."

That's the oldest message that we have today that is written in alphabet letters. It's inscribed on an ivory comb.

Quoted in "An Ancient People’s Oldest Message: Get Rid of Beard Lice. Archaeologists in Israel unearthed a tiny ivory comb inscribed with the oldest known sentence written in an alphabet that evolved into one we use today" (NYT).

The NYT tells us the comb is from "around 1,700 B.C., " and I'm interested to see the survival not just of the comb but of "B.C." — rather than "B.C.E." — in the NYT.

I do a little research and dig up — not quite archeologically — something from 1997 A.D. (or should it be C.E.?), and I'm telling you about it because it's written by long — but not that long — gone William Safire, "B.C./A.D. or B.C.E./C.E.?":

"Fruit baskets that have survived intact from the fourth century BC are being studied by archaeologists who unearthed them from a sunken city off the coast of Egypt."

"The wicker containers were found filled with grapeseeds and doum nuts, the fruit of an African palm tree sacred to ancient Egyptians, in the submerged ruins of Thonis-Heracleion.They had remained untouched since the city disappeared beneath the waves in the second century BC, when it was struck by a series of disasters including a powerful earthquake. The discovery has been hailed as 'incredible' by Franck Goddio, a French marine archaeologist who found the ancient site two decades ago.... 'Nothing was disturbed. It was very striking to see baskets of fruits.'"

The London Times reports.