Word: lands
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...thing, the older an artifact is, the harder it becomes to show the neat nexus of affiliations that the law requires. "The evidence collapses as you go back in time," says Pat Barker, an archaeologist for the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in Nevada, who is working on a similar case. "The first 500 years is pretty solid, by 1,000 it's getting dicey, and by 10,000 most of that stuff you just...
What makes these disputes more difficult is that modern archaeological methods often guarantee that an artifact will--in the eyes of the Indians at least--be defiled. Not only is the find seized from sacred land, but radiocarbon dating (which was used to estimate the age of Kennewick Man) requires that a portion of the find be destroyed. "We're always presented as antiscience Luddites," says Huber. "But we don't like seeing remains pulverized and irradiated...
...know I don't matter." But what he has witnessed does. In mid-January, the man joined a remarkable protest against the local government's decision to seize communal farmland and lease it to a foreign investor. For several days, more than 1,000 villagers gathered near the disputed land, brandishing pitchforks and blocking a highway. But the brief exercise in free expression ended in tragedy. As dusk fell on Jan. 14, men armed with electric batons poured out of police vans and attacked the farmers. Villagers say a 13-year-old girl who tried to hide behind a woodpile...
...case of Panlong, villagers say they twice sent representatives to Beijing hoping someone would listen to their land-dispute issue, but no one did. In January, after months of fruitless petitioning of various levels of government, Panlong residents decided to stage a protest near their seized land. A similar effort in nearby Dongzhou village a month before had ended with paramilitary police killing at least six locals. But people in Panlong felt they had no other choice. The protest stayed peaceful for several days, until armed men with electric truncheons descended on the crowd and started beating everyone from young...
...Panlong saga isn't an isolated case. In the village of Liujiaying, in eastern Shandong province, local officials told residents in 2003 that they would lose their fruit and vegetable fields. After finding out how little compensation the village committee was offering, Liujiaying villagers refused to clear their land. Within a few months, the fields were bulldozed in the middle of the night, destroying decades-old grapevines and fruit trees. Later, rows of greenhouses were torn down. Peasants who complained say they were awakened at night by bricks crashing through their windows, and that several villagers were beaten...