Word: tombes
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...archaeologist, unearthing relics is as incidental as filing tax returns. But last week an excavation among the ancient ruins of Copan, in western Honduras, turned up a find so extraordinary that archaeologists are digging for the proper superlatives to describe it. The discoverers believe that they have uncovered the tomb of a 6th century Mayan king who died before he was 30 years old. Archaeologists stumbled across the temple during a routine dig, and are now calling it the find of their careers. Five hundred tombs have been excavated at Copan during the past 18 years, but only two others...
...ancient Egyptian tomb of Nefertari is gloriously restored...
Corzo's scientific experts identified the two primary causes of damage to the tomb: humidity and humanity. They theorized that the deterioration before the tomb's discovery was the result of a flood that occurred between 100 B.C. and A.D. 100. The scientists' studies also showed that the presence of 17 people inside the tomb for a mere half an hour could raise the relative humidity from 30% to 50%, more than high enough to allow bacteria to grow...
...conservators in a year-long emergency campaign. They applied 10,000 strips of Japanese mulberry-bark paper to the walls and ceilings like Band-Aids, to keep plaster from crumbling and paint from flaking. Then began the painstaking work of restoration. The conservators swabbed every square inch of the tomb with distilled water, gently removing the accumulation of 3,000 years of dust and soot. In some areas, they chiseled the layers of plaster and paint from the wall, using the mulberry-bark strips as hinges, to clean the limestone walls of the cave and repair salt fractures...
Corzo notes that the artisans who labored in the tomb three millenniums ago left unexpected evidence of their fallibility. The rows of stars in the funerary ceiling were kept straight by strings stretched from wall to wall. In the sarcophagus chamber, conservators discovered a row of fingerprints left along a string line by a careless craftsman. In one corner, a contractor had scratched in hieroglyphics his accounting of work completed. And on one pillar, Nefertari's flesh-toned cheek is splotched with blue ceiling paint. Could it be that she died before the tomb was completed and the artisans...