Excavation throws up earliest evidence of rice cultivation

September 27th, 2009 ANKARA - A team of archaeologists has found a 5,000-year-old Venus figure as part of an excavation being carried out in Canakkale's Ezine district in Turkey. According to a report in Today's Zaman, the excavation began in the field three weeks ago in cooperation with Germany's University of Tubingen.

September 18th, 2009 WASHINGTON - New findings in the form of carbonized rice have indicated that farming in the Yangtze Basin in China existed as early as 4,000 years ago. According to a report in Epoch Times, excavation in the Xiezi Area of Hubei Province yielded a total of 402 cultural relics, including carbonized rice.

September 14th, 2009 EDINBURGH - A 500 year old ancient drain in Scotland, which lay undisturbed until its discovery in 1990, is turning out to be a goldmine for archaeologists from the Glasgow University. According to a report in Herald Scotland, the team of archaeologists, backed by volunteers from Renfrewshire Local History Forum, is carrying out a 12-day excavation of the drain.

August 13th, 2009 WASHINGTON - A team of archaeologists has unearthed London's oldest timber structure, which through radiocarbon dating has been proven to be nearly 6,000 years old, predating Stonehenge by more than 500 years. The structure was discovered by archaeologists from Archaeology South-East (part of the Institute of Archaeology at UCL).

August 12th, 2009 WASHINGTON - A team of archaeologists has come across evidence which proves that the "Peking Man" was able to use fire roughly 200-000 to 500,000 years ago. "Peking Man" is referred to a group of fossil specimens, hundreds of thousands of years old, discovered in 1923-27 during excavations at Zhoukoudian near Beijing (at that time known as Peking), in China.

July 16th, 2009 LONDON - Archaeologists from Berkshire, UK, have discovered evidence of an Iron Age town underneath the remains of a Roman settlement in north Hampshire, which they say could be Britain's earliest Iron Age towns with a planned layout. According to a report by BBC News, the discovery was made by the University of Reading's Archaeology Department, which has been excavating at the Silchester Roman site, Calleva Atrebatum, since 1997.

July 12th, 2009 BEIRUT - The Directorate-General of Antiquities, Lebanon, has said that it plans to resume excavation at the Freres' archaeological site in the old city of Sidon in collaboration with a delegation of the British museum, in order to uncover more ancient ruins.arlier excavation procedures at the site led to the discovery of several of the city's underground layers, which dated back to 1,000-4,000 B.C. Claude Doumit Serhal, the head of the British museum delegation, told The Daily Star that archaeological teams would also conduct excavation works at the neighboring site of Sandaqli in order to conduct comparative research among the two sites' layers.

July 9th, 2009 WASHINGTON - In a new study, a skeleton found at a roughly 1,000-year-old site in Peru's Andes mountains has yielded chemical evidence of substantial maize consumption, which suggests that the farming of the crop led to the rise of the ancient Andean civilization. Prehistoric communities in one part of Peru's Andes Mountains may have gone from maize to amazingly complex.

July 3rd, 2009 WASHINGTON - An archaeological excavation in southern Vietnam of a site more than 3000 years old has shed new light on how the death of young children was viewed by community members and uncovered the oldest clear evidence of rice agriculture in the region. The excavation, led by Professor Peter Bellwood and Dr Marc Oxenham from the ANU (Australian National University) School of Archaeology and Anthropology, studied a site 3-4000 years old named An Son.

June 12th, 2009 NEW DELHI - Archaeologists are all set to begin a third phase of excavation at the famous terracotta army site in China, hoping to find more clay figures and unravel some of the mysteries left behind by the "First Emperor". The army of terracotta warriors and horses was one of the greatest archeological finds of modern times.

June 9th, 2009 XI'AN - Chinese archaeologists are preparing for another excavation at the famous terracotta army site, hoping to find more clay figures and unravel some of the mysteries left behind by the "First Emperor". Archaeologists hoped they might find a clay figure that appeared to be "in command" of the huge underground army, said Liu Zhancheng, head of the archaeological team of the terracotta museum in Xi'an, the capital of Shaanxi province.

June 9th, 2009 DHAKA - The surplus production of rice this year in Bangladesh, which is prone to foodgrain shortage and calamities, has raised the confidence of farmers and the government but also caused pricing and storage problems, media reports here said Tuesday. Estimated at 32.4 million tonnes, the current fiscal this month-end will mark the highest production of rice, the staple diet of the country's 153 million population.

June 2nd, 2009 LONDON - Archaeologists have found the earliest evidence for pottery making, in the form of fragments from a Chinese cave, which push back the dawn of the craft by more than 1,000 years. According to a report in Nature News, the shards of pottery, dating back 18,000 years, have been unearthed in a cave in Hunan province, southern China.

May 14th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Beta-carotene in so-called 'Golden Rice' converts to vitamin A in humans, according to researchers. Golden Rice was developed in the early 1990s with the goal of creating rice that had beta-carotene, a vitamin A precursor, in the rice grain.

May 1st, 2009 ISLAMABAD - Pakistan Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani has said that poppy cultivation and drug trafficking in Afghanistan are the main cause of terrorism menace in Pakistan. Gilani urged the NATO and ISAF to effectively deal with poppy cultivation, which still remains the main source of funding for extremists and terrorist elements.