Fri Sep 6,12:09 PM ET
BRASILIA, Brazil (Reuters) - A fire engulfed a historic Brazilian church early on Thursday, ripping through its gold-leafed interior and reducing a treasured national heritage site to a charred shell, witnesses said. Residents of Pirenopolis, one of the few Colonial sites in Brazil's vast central interior, watched in dismay as the walled remains of the three-century-old church smoked and its tower crumbled.
The cause of the fire was unknown.
"The town is in shock," said Nayron Santana, the owner of a guest house near the cathedral-sized Our Lady of the Rosary church. "Pirenopolis is very Catholic, people would go there to pray even when there was no mass," she said.
Brazil is the world's largest Catholic country.
Television images showed flames ripping through the church's baroque interior, consuming gold and artwork imported from Portugal in colonial times. Built by slaves in 1728, the church was decorated with imported treasures as Pirenopolis developed into a rich regional center for silver mining. Pirenopolis, 150 miles from the capital Brasilia and surrounded by waterfalls, is a favorite weekend getaway spot for Brazilian cabinet ministers and politicians. The town is also famous for an ancient Portuguese festival where locals reenact a horseback battle between Moors and Christians.
Dinosaur footprint stolen from rock on Texas ranch
Associated Press
WACO - A dinosaur footprint measuring 14 inches across has been stolen from a Central Texas ranch, leaving the rancher and his wife bemoaning the loss of a family treasure. Fred and Gwen Owen say someone carved out one of three footprints from limestone rock on the Owen ranch, which sits on Lake Whitney in Bosque County. The couple says the theft happened between July 1 and last Sunday. "It was a clear track and more prominent than the others," Fred Owen said of the footprint. "It was pretty impressive really. I think it was the best track, I sure do." Gwen Owen said her grandson last saw the print on July 1 when he showed his girlfriend.
"He was very proud of it," she said.
Experts say the footprint most likely came from a theropod, a family of meat-eating dinosaurs on the prowl during the Cretaceous Period, at least 65 million years ago. The Bosque County Sheriff's Department continues to investigate, but officials don't have many leads. A four- foot chunk of rock about 5 inches deep was removed from the limestone, with nothing more left behind than chisel marks, a lone cigarette filter and faint tire tracks that have since been washed away by rain showers. "We have a few leads," Sheriff Charlie Jones said in Sunday's editions of the Waco Tribune-Herald. "It's kind of a strange case. It started out as vandalism and has grown to a theft. It's hard to assign a dollar value to an 80-million-year-old print." Fred Owen, 84, has lived on the 1,400-acre ranch most of his life, and the land has been in the Owen family since 1880, he said.
"It was just part of the ranch," Owen said of the footprint. "Now I've just got a feeling that this is a national treasure and should be treated that way." The sheriff said the thief is "obviously someone who has to be pretty familiar with archaeology because they took the whole thing." "Unfortunately, it may have ended up in somebody's fireplace in their den," Jones said. The Owens have taken photographs of the remaining prints and sent them to the director of Dinosaur Valley State Park in Glen Rose, just an hour or so up the road. Officials there have also asked for a rock sample so they can readily identify any rocks or dinosaur footprints brought to them by suspicious collectors. If the missing dinosaur footprint is recovered, Fred Owen says he would like to donate it to a museum, possibly at Baylor University. It wouldn't do any good to put it back in the ground, he said.
Looted Indian Treasures Are Sought
Mon Sep 9,10:04 AM ET By ELLIOTT MINOR, Associated Press Writer
BLAKELY, Ga. (AP) - About 1,500 years ago, one of North America's largest native-American civilizations thrived amid the longleaf pines of southwestern Georgia.
The people made human sacrifices, created exquisite pottery, crafted delicate animal figurines and built an imposing temple mound, where chiefs and priests presided. The treasures were unearthed by archaeologists in the 1950s and the state built a museum into the side of a burial mound to display them. Over the years, thousands of schoolchildren, tourists and scholars trekked to the site to learn about the Swift Creek and Weeden Island Indians, who lived near Blakely from 250 to 950 A.D. But in the dark of night in March 1974, thieves broke into the museum of the Kolomoki Mounds State Historic Park and took 129 artifacts.
A handful of items have been recovered from collectors and flea markets in Florida and Pennsylvania, but the whereabouts of the bulk of them remain a mystery. Now park officials are turning to the Internet for help in recovering the remaining booty from Georgia's most infamous archaeological theft. They've launched a Web site with pictures of the purloined pottery, asking art collectors, museums and others to help them gather the stolen merchandise. Eric Bentley, the park's manager, said the theft was particularly loathsome because it amounted to grave robbing. Many of the clay pots and fanciful figurines were made to honor chiefs and priests who had died. "From a ceramic technology standpoint, they're absolutely stunning," said David Crass, Georgia's state archaeologist. "They would compare favorably with anything from the Southwest. Many incorporate animal shapes. These pots give you a glimpse into how they saw the world."
Crass said the primary purpose of the Web site is recovery, not prosecution. "If someone has those pots in all innocence, and that happens a lot, then we would hope they would return them," he said. Kolomoki's early inhabitants built a ceremonial plaza and seven mounds, including two burial mounds and a temple mound that was a religious center. Today, the temple mound rises 56 feet above the surrounding pine forest from a base the size of a football field. Archaeologists believe it had a temple platform at the top, where chiefs and priests lived, worshipped and governed. "The folks who lived at Kolomoki were in some ways very different from us," Crass said. "But you would have heard kids laughing, dogs barking, moms yelling at their kids — the same things we hear in any neighborhood. Those were real flesh-and-blood people with all the same kinds of desires and feelings that we have today."
Tom Pluckhahn, an Athens archaeologist who has made recent excavations at Kolomoki, described it as one of the largest and most densely populated towns north of Mexico between 350 and 550 A.D. He believes there were about 500 full-time residents, with up to 1,000 more pouring in for ceremonies. "Some of the mound alignments may be tied to the solstices and equinoxes," he said. "There was a lot of emphasis on nature and trying to make sense of people's relationship to nature and death. It looks like Kolomoki was drawing people from a couple of hundred miles for ceremonies."
The 1,239-acre site has been a state park since 1938.
Bentley said many of the ceremonial pots had been "killed" so that they could not be used for any practical purpose. The potters intentionally gave them holes when they made them, or poked holes in the bottoms later. "They had a spiritual purpose," Bentley said. "They carried the spirituality of the one who had died." Georgia's Department of Natural Resources had to close the museum temporarily after the theft, but today it is open five days a week. "After the theft there were only empty cases," Bentley said. "Everything you see ... was either recovered or on loan. If we had the pottery back, we could redesign the museum to include the stolen artifacts. I would put all of them on display."