In a 5-4 Supreme Court decision that portends massive changes in campaign finance, corporations will no longer be banned from spending money on presidential or Congressional elections.

The conservative wing of the court, with Anthony Kennedy joining, overruled two long-held precedents in reaching the decision, which said that corporations have the same right to use their own money to fund campaign ads as individuals do.

Kennedy, in his opinion for the majority, wrote that "the Government may regulate corporate political speech through disclaimer and disclosure requirements, but it may not suppress that speech altogether."...

The case, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, concerned the right of Citizen’s United, a conservative non-profit corporation, to broadcast “Hillary: The Movie”, a documentary which focused on various scandals that unfolded during President Bill Clinton’s tenure in office, as well as challenging Hillary Clinton's record in the Senate. Citizens United released the movie during the 2008 presidential primary, but was not allowed to air it on cable or on a video on-demand service.

The Republican upset in the race for the U.S. Senate seat held for nearly half a century by liberal Edward M. Kennedy reflects a huge victory for opponents of U.S. President Barack Obama - and also for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Scott Brown defeated once-favored Martha Coakley for the Massachusetts seat even after U.S. President Barack Obama rushed to Boston on Sunday to try to save her candidacy.

Over the past nine months, Netanyahu has managed to curb pressure from Obama, who enjoys a Democratic majority in both houses of Congress. Now, however, Obama will be more dependent on the support of his Republican rivals, the supporters and friends of Netanyahu....

If Obama's popularity continues to dive and the Republicans recapture at least one of the houses of Congress in November, Netanyahu and his partners will be able to breathe deep and continue expanding settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Britain was keen to avoid the 2003 war in Iraq, its foreign secretary at the time said Thursday, insisting ministers made the "best judgements" possible in the run-up to the invasion.

Jack Straw, the first serving Cabinet minister to give evidence to the public inquiry into the conflict, added that backing the war was "the most difficult decision I have ever faced in my life".

Straw, currently justice secretary in Prime Minister Gordon Brown's government, took the stand a week before his former boss Tony Blair's hotly anticipated appearance....

However, Straw also accepted that, from early 2002, "there was no secret whatever" that US military action against Iraq backed by Britain "was a possibility".

A recent book written by two Israeli writers and published in translation (pdf) by the DNI Open Source Center (OSC) traces what the authors see as the decline of Israel’s political left.

“The Left died the day the Six-Day War ended,” wrote Shmuel Hasfari and Eldad Yaniv.

“Until 1967, the Left actually managed some impressive deeds — it took control of the land, ploughed, sowed, harvested, founded the state, built the army, built its industry from scratch, fought Arabs, settled the land, built the nuclear reactor, brought millions of Jews here and absorbed them, and set up kibbutzim, moshavim, and agriculture…. What happened? How come that all that remains of the Zionist Left today is an anarchistic group that harasses the Border Police every Friday near the separation fence or at checkpoints and Women in Black?”

“This is not an academic work,” wrote Hasfari and Yaniv. “There are no footnotes and there is no bibliography. It is not a complete work, either. We have written here about some of the things that bother us a lot, matters that give us no peace of mind. We ask you not to read this in one go since that is likely to be confusing. Taste it as you would a plate of appetizers, tapas. Take a little bit. Digest it and stop to think, argue, get angry, and if you want to, curse — feel free.”

“You can also put it in the bathroom. We will not be offended. On the contrary: There are no cell phones or text messages there, and you can think. Quietly. And read.”

The OSC translation has not been approved for public release, but a copy was obtained by Secrecy News. Republication was permitted by the authors within the text. See “The National Left (First Draft)” by Shmuel Hasfari and Eldad Yaniv, Open Source Center, December 31, 2009.

From time to time there are cases of folks digging in remote areas of national parks, either for fossils, archaeological artifacts, or whatever. It's seldom that you hear of instances in which treasures were buried at a park site, but that's exactly what seems to have occurred nearly 18 years ago after a theft at San Juan National Historic Site.

Earlier this month some maintenance workers at the historic site were at work developing a new trail extension of the Paseo del Morro trail when their shovels uncovered three historical medals that had been stolen back in February 1992 from the park's Military Museum. Also taken was an 1898 Spanish carbine. A month after the museum break in, the carbine was recovered but the medals, in spite of all the investigative efforts, could not be located, according to a park release.

The medals in question had been awarded by the Spanish government to Colonel José Antonio de Iriarte y Travieso, commanding official of Castillo San Felipe del Morro, in recognition of merit and valor in combat during the 1898 Spanish-American War. Colonel Iriarte was also the last military governor of El Morro. The medals were donated by the descendants of Colonel Iriarte to the National Park Service in January 1963 to be exhibited in the Military Museum as a legacy to the future generations of Puerto Rico, according to the park.

The three medals represent the following distinctions for Colonel Iriarte: the Cross of María Cristina, for actions in combat given in lieu of a promotion for operations in Cuba in 1896; the Cross of María Cristina, for meritorious service during the bombardment of Puerto Rico in 1898; and the Cross of Military Merit, awarded for distinguished action in the war against Cuba.

Late in the evening of Dec. 23, 1888, Vincent van Gogh mutilated his ear. That insane act is the most celebrated case of artistic temperament. But why he did he have his crisis then?

Journalist and Van Gogh scholar Martin Bailey has published an intriguing new clue.

The traditional explanation is that Van Gogh's fraught relationship with Gauguin, who had been sharing his small house in Arles, France, for the previous two months, was the trigger; in particular, Gauguin announced he was leaving.

But Bailey, writing in the Art Newspaper, has found evidence pointing in a different direction. It's contained in the Van Gogh painting "Still Life With a Plate of Onions."

Shortly before Christmas, Vincent's brother, Theo, asked a Dutch woman, Jo Bonger, to marry him. In surviving letters, Theo first mentions talking about his engagement with his brother after the ear incident, when Vincent was recovering in the hospital. It now seems that Vincent might have been informed by mail a few days earlier and that Theo's happy news helped, at least, to push him over the edge....

The University of Bristol announced today, January 20th, the recent discovery of the remains of the Saxon Princess Eadgyth, possibly the oldest member of the English royal family whose remains have survived. They were excavated from beneath an elaborate 16th-century monument bearing her name in Magdeburg Cathedral as part of a wider research project into the cathedral.

Eadgyth of Wessex was born in 910. She was the daughter of Edward the Elder, King of Wessex from 900 to 924, and his second wife Aelfflaed and was the granddaughter of Alfred the Great. She was given in marriage to Otto I by her step-brother Athelstan, who was king of Wessex from 929 to 939. Following his victory at the Battle of Brunanburgh in 937, Athelstan later became one of the first kings of a unified England comprising various Saxon and Celtic kingdoms. Otto I, also known as Otto the Great, succeeded his father Henry I as King of Germany in 936. He founded the Ottonian dynasty in Germany and, in 962, was crowned Holy Roman Emperor....

Eadgyth is believed to be the oldest member of the English royal family whose remains have survived. The tomb of her brother Athelstan still exists in Malmesbury Abbey, Wiltshire, but is believed to be empty. Her sister Adiva was married to an unknown European ruler; the location of her tomb remains a mystery. However, with the recent discovery of Eadgyth's remains, 500 years after they were transferred to Magdeburg Cathedral, who knows what lies beneath Athelstan's tomb in Malmesbury Abbey?

Two weeks ago today, we reported on the upcoming auction of Neville Chamberlain’s British Airways plane ticket to Munich. He flew out on September 29th, 1938, at 8.30am. The following day, Hitler, Mussolini, Chamberlain and Daladier signed the Munich Agreement. The ticket was auctioned by Mullock’s on Tuesday January 19th. It was expected to fetch between £5,000 and £7,000.

The final selling price was considerably higher than expected. The ticket sold for £9,280.

The first farmers to arrive in Britain outbred the native hunter-gatherer men and have left their mark in modern males' Y chromosome.

Ancient farmers left their genetic mark on modern males by breeding more successfully than indigenous hunter-gatherer men as they made their way west, a study has found.

As a result, more than 60% of British men, and nearly all of those in Ireland, can trace their Y chromosome back to the agricultural revolution, or more precisely the sexual success of the men behind it.

The farmers' Y chromosome becomes more common in the west of England and reaches a national peak of 78% in Cornwall, scientists found.

A 51-year-old man from West Sussex has been arrested by police investigating the alleged plundering of valuable archaeological artefacts.

Police said some of the artefacts were suspected of being stolen by "nighthawking" from an undisclosed site in the Chichester area and elsewhere recently.

The items found so far include medieval and Roman coins, ivory and silver, and one gold Iron Age coin, brooches, buttons and horse equipment of similar ages.

The dreaded wood-eating shipworm is invading northern Europe's Baltic Sea. The animal threatens to munch through thousands of Viking vessels and other historic shipwrecks, scientists warn.

Shipworms, which can obliterate a wreck in ten years, have already attacked about a hundred sunken vessels dating back to the 13th century in Baltic waters off Germany, Denmark, and Sweden, reported study co-author Christin Appelqvist.

Why shipworms are suddenly able to spread there remains a mystery, but studies suggest rising sea temperatures have something to do with it. In warmer water the animals, Appelqvist said, appear to be somehow "less stressed" by low salinity.

Was the J. Paul Getty Museum acting in good faith when it purchased one of the finest ancient bronze statues in existence?

That will be the central question before an Italian judge after Friday's closing arguments in a long-running legal battle in Pesaro, Italy.

At stake is a much-coveted work believed by some to have been created by Alexander the Great's personal sculptor and plundered by Roman soldiers around the time of Christ before being lost at sea. A regional public prosecutor alleges that the Italian fishermen who discovered the Greek statue in 1964 failed to declare it to Italian customs officials and sold it to middlemen, who smuggled it out of the country....

The case is probably the final chapter in the Getty's long dispute with Italy over looted antiquities, which largely ended in 2007 when the museum agreed to return 40 of its most prized antiquities after concluding they had been looted and illegally exported.

The criminal allegations in the case were filed amid those heated negotiations, and are largely moot: The fishermen are all dead, and the alleged smugglers have never been identified.

The judge is nevertheless weighing whether to order the seizure of the statue, which was bought by the Getty in 1977 and today is an icon of the museum's collection, displayed in its own climate-controlled room at the Getty Villa in Pacific Palisades....

The so-called "relics of Joan of Arc," overseen by the Archbishop of Tours in Chinon, France, do not contain the charred remains of the Catholic saint.

Rather, the artifacts consist of a mummified cat leg bone and human rib, both dating to the 6th-3rd century B.C., according to a new study.

The "relics," which have fooled onlookers for decades, did resemble burnt bones, in keeping with historical accounts of the death of Joan of Arc (ca. 1412-1431), who was convicted of heresy and executed by burning.

Medical examiners, pathologists, geneticists, biochemists, a radiologist, zoologist and archaeologist all participated in the extensive study, which was accepted for publication in the journal Forensic Science International.

The bottle containing the bones first surfaced at a pharmacy in 1867. Its label read: "Remains found under the pyre of Joan of Arc, maiden of Orleans."

Different techniques, including DNA analysis, several forms of microscopy, chemical analysis and carbon dating, were used to examine the bottle's contents.

A few years ago, Philippe Charlier, a forensic scientist at Raymond Poincare Hospital in Garches, France, and his team first determined that the bottle contained an approximately 4-inch-long human rib covered with a black coating. It also housed part of a cat femur covered with the same coating, three fragments of "charcoal" and "a brownish textile scrap" about the same length as the rib.

Charlier said some historians then speculated that a cat, perhaps symbolizing the devil, was thrown onto Joan of Arc's funeral pyre.

Carbon dating, however, found that the objects predate the French heroine's lifetime by many centuries.

The "textile scrap" is likely a mummy wrapping, since "the chemical composition of the coatings was comparable with that of embalming products, such as those used by the old Egyptians," the researchers concluded.

The dark coating contained a mix of bitumen, wood resins, gypsum and other chemicals. Pine pollen was also identified, probably from pine resin, commonly used during Egyptian embalming.

The researchers believe the remains were first stored as "mummia," which were parts of Egyptian mummies used in medieval pharmaceuticals. Medieval medicine, for example, may call for a compress made of a mummy bit and the juice of an herb (Bursa pastoris) to stop nosebleeds.

"The question remains of why there was an interest in manufacturing a historical forgery during the 19th century, especially one concerning Joan of Arc," the researchers wrote, wondering if the forgery surfaced for political reasons in order to tap into her legacy.

"Or is it only an act of hoax," the researchers asked, "a joke of a medical student who would have been taken much too seriously?"

Archaeologist Anastasia Tsaliki of the University of Durham called it a "fascinating project," demonstrating how "palaeopathology" can be used to inform history.

The objects are now at Chinon's Museum of Art and History, located in central France.

Remains of one of the earliest members of the English royal family may have been unearthed in a German cathedral, a Bristol University research team says.

They believe a near-complete female skeleton, aged 30 to 40, found wrapped in silk in a lead coffin in Magdeburg Cathedral is that of Queen Eadgyth.

The granddaughter of Alfred the Great, she married Otto I, Holy Roman Emperor, in 929. She died 17 years later, at 36.

The team aims to prove her identity by tracing isotopes in her bones.

Professor Mark Horton, of Bristol's department of archaeology and anthropology, said: "We know that Saxon royalty moved around quite a lot, and we hope to match the isotope results with known locations around Wessex and Mercia, where she could have spent her childhood.

Bones moved

"If we can prove this truly is Eadgyth, this will be one of the most exciting historical discoveries in recent years."

Their preliminary findings are to be announced later at a conference at the university.

“ In the Middle Ages bones were often moved around, and this makes definitive identification difficult ”
Professor Harald Meller
The discovery of the tomb was made during a wider research project into the cathedral in 2008 by a German team.

It was thought the tomb was a cenotaph, but when the lid was removed, the coffin was discovered, bearing Queen Eadgyth's name and accurately recording the date - 1510 - when her remains were transferred.

The queen was known to have been buried initially in the Monastery of Mauritius in Magdeburg, and if bones were to be found, they would have been moved later to the tomb.

Professor Harald Meller, who led the 2008 project, said: "We still are not completely certain that this is Eadgyth although all the scientific evidence points to this interpretation.

"In the Middle Ages bones were often moved around, and this makes definitive identification difficult."

Queen Eadgyth's brother, King Athelstan, is considered to have been the first king of England after he unified various Saxon and Celtic kingdoms after the battle of Brunanburh in 937, Bristol University said.

After marriage, Queen Eadgyth lived in Saxony and had two children with Otto.

Their direct descendents ruled Germany until 1254 and formed many of the royal families of Europe that followed.

A nail-pierced skull believed to belong to the legendary medieval pirate Klaus Störtebeker has been stolen from a museum in the northern German port city of Hamburg, authorities said Tuesday.

The skull was stolen from the Museum for Hamburg History on January 9, but the museum didn't immediately announce the theft so as not to hamper the investigation. It wasn't clear how the exhibit was stolen, or why.

"We are all very upset about the theft," museum director Lisa Kosok said in the press release. "We very much hope that it will either be returned or found."

The museum said it was offering a reward of several thousand euros for information leading to the recovery of the skull, but didn't give an exact amount

The skull, impaled on a large rusty nail, was discovered in 1878 during construction for a warehouse district in an area where pirates had earlier been beheaded and their heads displayed on spikes as a warning against other pirates.

The museum displayed the skull since 1922, which is missing its jawbone. The museum also did a reconstruction of the face based on information from the skull.

Later forensic analysis determined that the skull may well belong to a man beheaded around 1400, although not necessarily Stoertebeker.

The museum tried to use DNA analysis of the skull to compare it with possible descendants, but they failed to find a definite match.

Klaus Störtebeker (c. 1360 – 20 October 1401), was a leader and the best known representative of a companionship of privateers known as the Victual Brothers. The Victual Brothers were originally hired during a war between Denmark and Sweden to fight the Danish and supply the besieged Swedish capital Stockholm with provisions. After the end of the war, the Victual Brothers continued to capture merchant vessels.

A large number of myths and legends surround the few facts known about Klaus Störtebeker's life. Störtebeker is only a nickname, meaning "empty the mug with one gulp" in Old German. The moniker refers to the pirate's supposed ability to empty a four-litre mug of beer in one gulp.

His ship was captured in 1401 and Störtebeker and his crew were taken to Hamburg, where they were executed outside the walls of the Hanseatic League city. When authorities took apart his ship they discovered that the masts contained cores of gold, silver and copper.

The Hernando Historical Museum Association is supposed to teach people the truth about our past.

So how can it justify its signature event and primary fundraiser, the annual Brooksville Raid Re-enactment?...

Without context, the museum association's event, with its flags, gunfire and uniforms, is romanticism pure and simple — glossing over history, stirring people up about it, not teaching it. And this starts with the portrayal of the raid itself.

The re-enactors wear uniforms and advance in orderly lines like the troops at Gettysburg. There were about 1,500 of them this year, and, after a few hundred Confederate re-enactors agreed to switch sides, they were evenly divided between North and South....

...In fairness only one person I interviewed went so far as to say the United States would have been better off if the South had won the war. This was Chuck Allen, who like [Doug] Davis is a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, the group that recently erected that infamous slap in the face of racial harmony, the massive Confederate battle flag at the junction of Interstates 4 and 75....

First off, just discussing the possible upside of the South's victory ignores its rather dramatic downside: the continuation of slavery. Secondly, none of the historians I talked to had heard the life expectancy statistic Allen cited. And even if some owners did treat slaves well — the slaves were their property, after all — praising this ignores the system of terror that kept slavery in place.

"There's the threat of violence, the reality of violence and the huge threat of families being broken up,'' said Matt Gallman, a history professor at the University of Florida....

There's the timing — celebrating the Confederacy at about the same time each year as Martin Luther King Jr. Day, which is when we honor a man who died fighting the worst of the Confederacy's lingering injustices.

Three years after St. Augustine was founded, Alvara de Mendana, nephew of the governor of Peru, set out with two ships and 150 soldiers and sailed west to find gold and a new trade route to China.

Mendana's 1568 voyage found nothing, so he returned to Peru.

But a relentless lust for gold pushed the Spanish to dispatch more colonizing fleets. And one founded a colony somewhere in the Solomon Islands, northeast of Australia.

No one knows its exact location or why the colony disappeared, but Martin Gibbs of the University of Sydney's Department of Archaeology has done extensive research and thinks he has a few clues. He came to St. Augustine last week to look for some clues in possible similar objects....

Gibbs said, "The (Melanesians) were initially welcoming, but constant and increasingly aggressive Spanish demands for food, women and (religious) converts wore this out, while the Spanish tired of thefts in the camp."...

Even more brutally, Mendana began to execute dissenters, fearing revolt.

Then 47 colonists died of malaria and typhus in two months, Mendana included, with many others falling ill.

The weakened colonists finally left, but the remaining accounts by survivors don't tell its exact location.

Initial archeological work in the Solomons was started in the 1970s by professors Roger Green and Jim Allen, who suggested possible colony sites, but none were excavated.

Gibbs came to St. Augustine last week to compare pottery fragments found at one possible site with pottery made in St. Augustine during the 1500s.

Evidence for the world’s earliest seafaring has emerged from an archaeological survey in Crete. Tools of Lower Palaeolithic type, at least 130,000 years old, have been found on the Greek island, which has been isolated by the Mediterranean Sea for at least the past five million years, so that any human ancestors must have arrived by boat. At this date, they would have been of a pre-modern species: the earliest Neanderthalers or even Homo heidelbergensis, the species to which Boxgrove Man belonged, are among possible contenders, but no such remains have so far been found on Crete.

“The early inhabitants of Crete reached the island using sea craft capable of open-sea navigation and multiple journeys — a finding that pushes the history of seafaring in the Mediterranean back by more than 100,000 years and has implications for the dispersal of early humans,” Professor Curtis Runnels said. The oldest uncontested marine crossing until recently was from Indonesia to Australia, dating to perhaps 60,000 years ago and made by anatomically modern humans of our own species, Homo sapiens, although we now know that earlier settlement on the island of Flores in Indonesia also necessitated a sea-crossing.

Excavations at the Sanctuary of Zeus atop Greece’s Mount Lykaion have revealed that ritual activities occurred there for roughly 1,500 years, from the height of classic Greek civilization around 3,400 years ago until just before Roman conquest in 146.

“We may have the first documented mountaintop shrine from the ancient Greek world,” says project director David Romano of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

Israel's cabinet has convened for the first time in Berlin, in a joint meeting with the German cabinet to symbolise the nations' strong bond 60 years after the Holocaust.

The focus, though, was not on threats gone by but on one that may loom in the future — the possibility of a nuclear-armed Iran.

After the joint session, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and German Chancellor Angela Merkel warned that Iran will face new sanctions if it doesn't change course on its nuclear program.

Netanyahu used the occasion to highlight the gravity of the Iranian threat.

"We know from recent history that a regime that tyrannizes its own people will tyrannize the world," he said.

State Sen. Scott Brown won a remarkable upset victory over state Attorney General Martha Coakley (D) tonight in a Massachusetts Senate special election, a victory likely to spawn broad-ranging political and policy consequences heading into the midterm elections.

With 71 percent of precincts reporting, Brown held a 53 percent to 46 percent lead over Coakley. Coakley called Brown to concede the race moments ago, according to a Democratic aide.

Brown's victory is the first for Republicans at the Senate level for Republican in Massachusetts since 1972 and he becomes the lone GOPer in the 12-person federal delegation from the Bay State.

While it is a historic win within Massachusetts, the implications of Brown's victory for the national political scene are even more critical....

Though the tea party movement has attracted criticism for its supposed lack of diversity, minority activists who are involved say the movement has little to do with race, and that it is attracting a more diverse crowd every day.

Despite the enthusiastic involvement of black conservatives in the tea party rallies and trips, Obama still enjoys seemingly unshakable support from the majority of black Americans. A recent poll from Gallup put Obama's approval rating among blacks at 91 percent. Among whites, that number was 42 percent.

Tea party groups also might not be doing themselves any favors when some of their supporters are photographed holding somewhat shocking signs at rallies -- such as one last year that said, "The White House has a lyin' African."

The conservative bloc on the Texas State Board of Education won a string of victories Friday, obtaining approval for an amendment requiring high school U.S. history students to know about Phyllis Schlafly and the Contract with America as well as inserting a clause that aims to justify McCarthyism.

Outspoken conservative board member Don McLeroy, who reportedly spent over three hours personally proposing changes to the textbook standards, even wanted to cut "hip-hop" in favor of "country" in a section about the impact of cultural movements. That amendment failed....

McLeroy proposed a clause in the civil rights section that read (emphasis ours): "Evaluate changes and events in the United States that have resulted from the civil rights movement, including increased participation of minorities in the political process and unrealistic expectations for equal outcomes." McLeroy plans to ask for a vote on this measure at a later meeting....

Republican board member Cynthia Dunbar unsuccessfully tried to strike the names of Scopes monkey trial attorney Clarence Darrow and Pan-Africanist Marcus Garvey from the standards. Asked by another member about her opposition to Garvey, Dunbar explained, according to the Texas Tribune: "My concern is that he was born in Jamaica and was deported."

The trial of John Demjanjuk in Munich may not be Germany's last major war crimes prosecution. Authorities are investigating Samuel K., 88, a retired German civil servant accused of being a death camp guard in World War II and of helping to kill at least 430,000 Jews. Public prosecutors may file charges soon.

Germany may stage a further spectacular Holocaust trial in addition to the one currently taking place in Munich against alleged SS helper John Demjanjuk.

The Central Office for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes based in Ludwigsburg has completed its preliminary investigation into Samuel K. and produced an 80-page report. It will transfer the case to the public prosecutor's office in the city of Dortmund which may soon file charges against the 88-year-old ethnic German, who is accused of having been involved in the murder of at least 430,000 Jews in the Belzec death camp in occupied Poland between end-November 1941 and spring 1943. He is alleged to have been a guard at the camp.
K., a retired civil servant who now lives near the former West German capital Bonn, is accused of having shot dead Jewish prisoners himself on two occasions, according to the testimony of a former fellow guard who has since died. A survivor of Belzec described him as "one of the biggest murderers," according to the Ludwigsburg report.

K., a former member of staff in the West German Ministry for Regional and City Planning, was born in 1921 in the Soviet Union, and entered German service in the summer of 1941 when he was a Soviet prisoner of war. He received German citizenship three years later.

K. has appeared as a witness in several other cases but has until now never become the focus of an investigation himself. His name resurfaced during preparations for the Demjanjuk trial and he was questioned last year by officers from the Bavarian police.

An investigator from the Ludwigsburg office then collected incriminating information on him, including documents collated by the US Department of Justice in Eastern European archives.

Cold winds may be blowing and the ground is definitely frozen, but the weather isn't slowing archaeologists in their decades-long effort to document Annapolis' past.

The scientists have merely moved indoors to their lab at the University of Maryland, where they continue to make sense of the pieces of bone, shards of china, bits of spice bottles and slivers of metal that have been unearthed in Annapolis.

Right now, the scholars in the Anthropology Department are looking at artifacts found on Cornhill and Fleet streets downtown. With few exceptions, working-class whites lived on Cornhill Street 100 years ago, while African Americans lived on adjoining Fleet Street.

One member of the Archaeology in Annapolis program, doctoral student Jocelyn Knauf, pointed to a little bottle that spoke volumes about life in a bygone era. The bottle, excavated in June 2008 at 40 Fleet St., was for Prof. Low's Worm Syrup, a concoction used to rid the intestines of parasites.

In the 1800s and early 1900s, Southerners, both whites and blacks, were so anemic because of hookworms, Northerners called the parasite "the germ of laziness."

Knauf said the commonplace items the archaeological team found in an old privy are proving to be priceless.

"It tells what a typical African-American family that was living at 40 Fleet St. was eating and using," Knauf said of the findings.

Among the items she was working with this week were a J.B. Coolahan mineral water bottle and a jar that once contained Chesebrough Vaseline. There also was an intact McCormick bottle that likely held vanilla extract or some other flavoring, and fragments of canning jars.

One small, square bottle that remains a mystery dates to the early 1900s, and contained some kind of highly aromatic turpentine extract. The corked brown bottle, found with the liquid still in it, emits a strong odor, but whatever label the bottle ever bore disappeared long ago.

The Annapolis artifacts in these particular trays go back to the early 1800s, and sometimes the tiniest little item can tell a big story.

In June, for example, students uncovered a lot of bone fragments at 30 Cornhill St., a collection that told of the foods working-class white people were eating from about 1820 onward.

"The thing that shows up suddenly is lots of types of birds," said doctoral student Amanda Tang, whose speciality is using bones to document history.

It turns out, Tang said, that John Brady, a baker, moved into 30 Cornhill St. in 1850, and local residents appear to have taken fowl to him to be baked or roasted, a service for which they paid some small fee.

In the early and mid-1800s, the whites at 30 Cornhill St. ate beef, mutton, venison and "lots of seafood," Tang said, but by the late 1800s they were eating more pork and rabbit, and deer was disappearing from their diet.

Eastport history

Anthropologist Matthew Palus, a Columbia University doctoral candidate who works with Archaeology in Annapolis, did his dissertation on Eastport. More specifically, Palus studied the installation of sewer lines.

Decades before Eastport became part of Annapolis in 1951, Annapolis was running sewer lines into the blue-collar neighborhood where whites and African Americans lived side by side.

"A lot of people talk about sewers as public health, but what I wanted to see was the growth of government," Palus said.

"I started looking at how the infrastructure of the city started (growing) after the Civil War," Palus said. "The vehicle for government (growth) was these utilities."

As his investigation continued, Palus found that African Americans in Eastport were not hooking up to sewers as quickly as whites were. He said he doesn't know if the difference was a matter of household finances, or whether it was because of discrimination against African Americans, or if African Americans might have had "a different set of priorities."

Regardless of the reason, Palus said, the African-American community appears to have been less attached to the city's government and its utilities than whites were, and an independent African-American subculture appears to have developed.

Surprises

The Archaeology in Annapolis program has made some startling discoveries in recent years, even though it would seem that anything of value would have been unearthed long ago.

In 2008, the project uncovered near Fleet Street what is believed to be the oldest African artifact ever found in the United States. It is a religious bundle about the size of a football, and contains lead shot, nails and pins, and a stone ax that points skyward from the top of the bundle.

That same year, the team unearthed a log road near the convergence of Cornhill and Fleet streets. The road dates back to the 1680s, before there was a formal city, and historians say it shows that a group of residents, or possibly the Colonial government, was willing to invest in infrastructure.

Archaeology in Annapolis started in 1981, when Historic Annapolis Foundation founder St. Claire Wright brought in University of Maryland anthropology professor Mark Leone to do some excavations around the circa 1715 Shiplap House on Pinkney Street.

Leone's students have been busy finding and studying artifacts ever since.

The archaeologists typically are invited to conduct digs in people's yards, or are brought in by the city to excavate when a major demolition or construction project is under way. They typically have some hint of a site's historic nature by checking property records and other documents.

"St. Claire Wright and I decided to focus (on) Annapolis," Leone said. "She wanted the city saved, and I wanted (to start) an archaeological project that was always opened to the public and that was (the basis for) scholarly work."

Today, the program attracts top students and scholars from as far away as Europe, and Leone said this week that it has trained about 50 graduate students, 17 of them at the Ph.D. level.

"We now have about 750,000 artifacts from our work," Leone said.

Uncertain future

Leone said the archaeology program is not weakening in any way, and he is excited about this year's excavation. The dig will be at 99 East St., a piece of property that belonged to free African Americans before emancipation and remains in the family's hands.

The city's mayors have supported the program over the years, and property owners have invited the scholars to dig in their yards. The house at 30 Cornhill St., for example, belongs to Karen Engelke, who was an assistant to former mayor Ellen O. Moyer.

Leone said the program costs about $150,000 a year to operate, nearly all of which comes from various grants. The city puts up a relatively small amount, about $25,000 a year.

Phill McGowan, a spokesman for Mayor Josh Cohen, said funding may be difficult to find this year.

"It is an outstanding program; Mark Leone and his team have done some outstanding work," he said. "But it is going to be a challenge to maintain grant spending at the same level - it is not just this particular grant, it is all grants."