Now, however, Cetin, a prominent member of the estimated 50,000-member Armenian-Turkish community here and one of the country’s leading human rights lawyers, believes a seminal moment has arrived in which Turkey and Armenia can finally confront the ghosts of history and possibly even overcome one of the world’s most enduring and bitter rivalries.

She already has confronted her divided self, which led her from Istanbul to a 10th Street grocery store in New York, where her Armenian relatives had rebuilt their broken lives after fleeing Turkey. (Many of the Armenians who survive in Turkey today do so because their ancestors lived in western provinces during the killings, which took place mostly in the east.)

The latest tentative step toward healing generations of acrimony between the countries took place in October on a soccer field in the northwestern Turkish city of Bursa, when President Serzh Sargsyan became the first Armenian head of state to travel to Turkey to attend a soccer game between the national teams. In this latest round of soccer diplomacy, Sargsyan was joined at the match by President Abdullah Gul of Turkey, who had traveled to a soccer match in Armenia the year before.

“We do not write history here,” Gul told his Armenian counterpart in Bursa. “We are making history.”

The Bursa encounter came just days after Turkey and Armenia signed a historic series of protocols to establish diplomatic relations and to reopen the Turkish-Armenian border, which has been closed since 1993. The agreement, strongly backed by the United States, the European Union and Russia, has come under vociferous opposition from nationalists in both Turkey and Armenia.

Armenia’s sizable diaspora — estimated at more than 7 million — in the United States, France and elsewhere is alarmed that the new warmth may be misused as an excuse to forgive and forget in Turkey, where even uttering the words Armenian genocide can be grounds for prosecution.

Also threatening the deal is Armenia’s lingering fight with Azerbaijan, its neighbor and a close ally of Turkey, over a breakaway Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan.

The agreement, which has yet to be ratified in the Turkish or Armenian parliaments, could have broad consequences, helping to end landlocked Armenia’s economic isolation, while lifting Turkey’s chances for admission into the European Union, where the genocide issue remains a crucial obstacle.

But Cetin argued that the most enduring consequence could be helping to overcome mutual recriminations. She said Armenians had been battling a powerful and collective denial in Turkish society about the killings.

“Most people in Turkish society have no idea what happened in 1915, and the Armenians they meet are introduced as monsters or villains or enemies in their history books,” she said. “Turkey has to confront the past, but before this confrontation can happen, people must know who they are confronting. So we need the borders to come down in order to have dialogue.”

Cetin, who was raised by her maternal grandmother, said the borders in her own Muslim Turkish heart came down irrevocably when her grandmother revealed her Armenian past.

Heranus, she said, was only a child in 1915 when Turkish soldiers arrived in her ethnically Armenian Turkish village of Maden, rounding up the men and sequestering women and girls in a church courtyard with high walls. When they climbed on each others’ shoulders, Heranus told her, they saw men’s throats being cut and bodies being thrown in the Tigris River, which ran red for days.

During the forced march toward exile that followed, Heranus said, she saw her own grandmother drown two of her grandchildren before she herself jumped into the water and disappeared.

Heranus’ mother, Isguhi, survived the march, which ended in Aleppo, Syria, and went to join her husband, Hovannes, who had left the village for New York in 1913, opening a grocery store. They started a new family.

“My grandmother was trembling as she told me her story,” Cetin said. “She would always say, ‘May those days vanish, never to return.’ ”

Cetin, a rebellious left-wing student activist at the time of her grandmother’s revelation, recalled how confronting Armenian identity, then as now, had been taboo. “The same people who spoke the loudest about injustices and screamed that the world could be a better place would only whisper when it came to the Armenian issue,” she said. “It really hurt me.”

Cetin, who was imprisoned for three years in the 1980s for opposing the military regime in Turkey at the time, said her newfound Armenian identity inspired her to become a human rights lawyer. When Hrant Dink, editor of the Turkish-Armenian newspaper Agos, was prosecuted in 2006 for insulting Turkishness by referring to the genocide, she became his lawyer. On Jan. 19, 2007, Dink was killed outside his office by a young ultranationalist.

Cetin published a memoir about her grandmother in 2004. She said she purposely omitted the word “genocide” from her book because using the word erected a roadblock to reconciliation.

“I wanted to concentrate on the human dimension,” she said. “I wanted to question the silence of people like my grandmother who kept their stories hidden for years, while going through the pain.”

When her grandmother died in 2000 at age 95, Cetin honored her last wish, publishing a death notice in Agos, in the hope of tracking down her long-lost Armenian family, including her grandmother’s sister Margaret, whom she had never seen.

At her emotional reunion with her Armenian family in New York, several months later, Margaret, or “Auntie Marge,” told Cetin that when her father had died in 1965, she had found a piece of paper carefully folded in his wallet that he had been keeping for years. It was a letter Heranus had written to him shortly after he had left for the United States.

“We all keep hoping and praying that you are well,” the note said.

If ownership cannot be determined, the wreckage could become a salvageable piece of history. But even as the Assessor's Office tries to sort that out, the worst fears of museum officials and maritime buffs are being realized as scavengers reap the sea's rewards on their terms, stripping the remains for usable or sellable scrap.

The Kashihara Archeological Institute in Nara Prefecture believes the discovery may help directly link the Yamataikoku kingdom with the Yamato dynasty, in the present-day Kinki region, that was later to be known as the Imperial Court.

According to the institute, the largest piece discovered in the tomb is 11.1 centimeters long and 6.3 centimeters wide. With the new discovery, the institute's research now covers 384 items, including those in private collections and others recovered from the tomb during an excavation 60 years ago.

Because the institute could not completely reconstruct any of the mirrors, they believe most of the mirrors originally buried in the tomb were either stolen or destroyed when the tomb was robbed in medieval times and later.

Through three-dimensional analysis, the institute confirmed the pieces are part of 26 mirrors known as Sankakubuchi Shinjukyo, and 19 mirrors known as Naiko Kamonkyo that were made in Japan and China.

The institute has not yet identified the mirror types for the remaining 180 broken pieces.

Forty mirrors from Hirabaru No. 1 tomb in Itoshima, Fukuoka Prefecture, dating back to the late second century, were the most excavated from a tomb until the recent discovery.

One of the recently unearthed pieces bore kanji with the Japanese reading of "ze" or "kore," as had another mirror excavated from Kanizawa Tomb in Takasaki, Gunma Prefecture, leading the researchers to believe the piece came from a mirror made in the Gunma mirror mold that also bears the Seishi Gannen inscription. Three mirrors bearing the year Seishi Gannen have been found in the nation, but this is the first time a mirror assumed to have been engraved with a date from the period was found in Nara Prefecture.

Among the mirror fragments was a piece from a 40-centimeter Naiko Kamonkyo mirror, the largest known class of domestically made mirrors from that time.

"We could assume the tomb had more than 100 mirrors. It suggests the power held by the King of Wa [an ancient name for Japan]," said Taichiro Shiraishi, director of the Chikatsu Asuka Museum in Osaka Prefecture, specializing in archeology.

"Since burial items of kings and other high-ranking people have yet to be identified, this discovery is expected to greatly impact Kofun period research," he said.

In the Americas, for example, several places are named including Chih-Li (Chile), Wa-ti-ma-la (Guatemala) and Ka-na-ta (Canada), and Florida is described as "the Land of the Flowers".

Ford W Bell, a trustee for the James Ford Bell Trust, told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review newspaper, that the map was "one of the two best in terms of quality, as far as we know".

"Ricci was a very smart missionary. He put China right at the centre of this new universe, this new globe, to underscore its importance," he said.

"Ricci, of course, was the first Westerner to enter Beijing. He was revered by the Chinese, and he was buried there."

The first secretary for cultural affairs at the Chinese embassy in the US, Ti Ban Zhang, said in a statement that the map represents "the momentous first meeting of East and West".

Questions remain about whether African hominids used Crete as a stepping stone to reach Europe or, in a Stone Age Gilligan’s Island scenario, accidentally ended up on Crete from time to time when close-to-shore rafts were blown out to sea, remarks archaeologist Robert Tykot of the University of South Florida in Tampa. Only in the past decade have researchers established that people reached Crete before 6,000 years ago, Tykot says.

However, the show was unsuccessful and was shut down in 1941. Also, it could not gather all the blacks in the country under one tent possibly because it only accepted dark-skinned blacks who appealed to the stereotype of what was considered African.

The fate of the "Rhineland Bastards"

German cover of Hans J. Massaquoi's biography.Bildunterschrift: Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift: Afro-German Hans J. Massaquoi tried to join the Nazi youth

Most of the light-skinned blacks living in Germany during the Third Reich were of mixed blood, and a good number of them were the children of French-African occupation soldiers and German women in the Rhineland. The existence of these children is and remains common knowledge because they were mentioned in Hitler's book "Mein Kampf" ("My Struggle"). In Nazi Germany, the derogatory term, Rheinlandbastard (Rhineland Bastard), was used to describe them.

Deutsche Welle spoke to leading German historian Prof. Reiner Pommerin to find out what happened to these children. "I published a book in the 70s, which told the reader about the sterilization of mixed blood children. These were children who had been fathered by occupation forces - mostly French occupation forces," he said. His book, "Sterilisierung der Rheinlandbastarde. Das Schicksal einer farbigen deutschen Minderheit 1918 - 1937" ("Sterilization of the Rhineland Bastards: the fate of a colored German minority 1918 - 1937") publicized the sterilization of the Black minority in Nazi Germany.

Prior to the publication of the book in 1979, this information was unknown to the public. The sterilization of biracial children was carried out secretly because it went against 1938 Nazi laws and procedures. The exact numbers remain unknown, but it is estimated that 400 children of mixed blood were sterilized - most without their knowledge, Pommerin said.

Today, the fate of the "Rhineland Bastards" still remains largely unknown. The lack of public knowledge regarding their fate may have to do with the "lack of public interest in minorities," said Pommerin. Campt attributes it to the secrecy behind the sterilization program and the nature of the Afrika Schau. "It has to do with the status of the Afrika Schau as a spectacle. So that was set up as a visual spectacle that was supposed to get people to notice something as a display. In that way, it was really publicized in order to get people to think about," she said.

Recognition of the black experience in Nazi Germany

Image of German soldiers marching on Hitler's birthday. Bildunterschrift: Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift: Afro-Germans were excluded from aspects of daily life in the Nazi eraAccording to Campt, the major difference between the experience of blacks and that of other groups in the Third Reich is the lack of a systematic Nazi extermination plan. Moreover, because of the small number of blacks living in Germany, few people are ready to recognize that there was even a population whose experience can be discussed.

Furthermore, there is little or no support in Germany for researchers working in this area. Unlike in the United States where research on minorities is well-funded due to the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement, "black German scholars who have been doing this work for years don't necessarily get the recognition on the basis of qualifications, on the basis of whether or not they are working within a certain kind of academic scholarly structure for the study of minority cultures," Campt said.

All the same, it should be noted that even though the publication of Pommerin's book on the sterilization of the "Rhineland Bastards" did not generate much public interest at the time, it received some attention from a German politician. The member of the Social Democratic Party asked if he could obtain the names of the victims, so that they could be compensated.

Pommerin told Deutsche Welle that "(the politician) wanted to hand over 3,000 German marks ($2,190). I knew where they were living, but I didn't want to bother these people because I could tell that this was more a political interest. And I could see the TV cameras standing in front of the house in the village and money is handed over. And all of a sudden the sensation is great in the village - here is someone who had been sterilized."

"That changes the economy, because the farmers can't bring their fruit to market." The food spoils and the farmers lose their income. The entire village is suddenly poor, she explains — just by the loss of that one bridge.

Holmes-Eber hopes that what she's teaching won't just end up scrawled in a spiral notebook. She wants it to inform decisions that military commanders make on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Marines: A Foreign Culture

Her mission might seem intimidating, particularly because the students have considerably more experience in a war zone than the teacher. "It is a challenge to gain credibility," Holmes-Eber tells NPR's Mary Louise Kelly after the class. "The hardest part was learning how to speak and understand Marine-speak."
Anthropologist Paula Holmes-Eber .

Not understanding local culture is a huge detriment for the military, anthropologist Paula Holmes-Eber says, because troops will be working at a disadvantage.

Marines are like a foreign culture themselves, she says. "They have a foreign language; they have their own ceremonies; they have their own rituals; they have everything — just a perfect foreign culture."

"So I'm actually an anthropologist in two ways," she says. "Trying to teach the principles of culture to Marines, but I'm also an anthropologist studying the Marine Corps." The more she understands their culture, the better she can communicate in a way that makes sense to them, she says.

Holmes-Eber hopes what they learn from her goes beyond the consequences of just blowing up a bridge. Given the "bloody, horrible, protracted" history of conflict in Afghanistan, Holmes-Eber would like to see American troops in the region take a different path — and that means understanding local culture well enough to build cooperative relationships.

"The goal is mission effectiveness," she explains. "If they fail because they don't understand the culture, then they didn't do what we asked them to do. So it's not about being touchy-feely and sweet and 'don't we like the natives.' "

"I really hope that we don't kill as many people this way."

Breaking The Anthropologists' Code?

Holmes-Eber's mission puts her in a conflict of her own with some fellow anthropologists, who see collaborating with the military as a traitorous act. The issue makes her squirm. "It's awkward," she finally laughs.

Anthropologists used to work closely with the military during conflicts in the 20th century, she explains. But during the Vietnam era, some of that support had controversial results.

"Anthropology was used as intelligence, used to destroy certain villages and harm populations," Holmes-Eber says. Horrified that their knowledge had hurt a culture, anthropologists set a do-no-harm standard. For many, that means not working with the military.

But Holmes-Eber says it's not a black-and-white issue. "Not working with them is not without ethical implication," she points out. "It's not 'I don't cooperate with the military, therefore I'm innocent' — you do. I think that we're all implicated. It's just a question of where that line is."

She's found hers. "I don't know what is morally wrong about teaching Marines about Islam, about Arab culture, about understanding tribal structures," she says. "I can't think of anything that I could go to bed at night and say, 'Oh, I've really done something wrong.' "

Meanwhile, Holmes-Eber says, it's an issue that's made the Marines more sympathetic to her. "They realize that I've had to run against my own field, my own profession, and go against the current and stand up and say and do something that really isn't popular," she says. "And they respect me."