A Fayetteville re-enactor who dresses as a German soldier in World War II has found a friend who actually served in the German military during the war.

Jason Mixell met 87-year-old Gustau Rewwer in December 2010. At the time, Mixell was putting on a display of his German military artifacts.

The two got acquainted and have kept in touch. Mixell even took the veteran to a re-enactment of the Battle of the Bulge at Fort Indiantown Gap.

Rewwer (pronounced like "never"), who served in the German Air Force, said he was delighted to meet Mixell, and was more than surprised to learn of the young man's interest in the German military.

"I was dumbfounded," Rewwer said. "He knew a couple of words in German. I was wondering how he knew me."

When Rewwer saw Mixell in the German army uniform, he was shocked.

"I was right back in the military again, 70 years ago. But I was in the German Air Force. What amazes me is that he has such interest in it."

Mixell noted his admiration for Rewwer and said he was learning a lot from the veteran.

"I try to take him with me as much as I can," he said. "He's teaching me how to learn German and he helps with my uniform. He lets me know if I'm wearing something incorrectly. This is living history. What he shares with me enhances my presentations." ...

Most young Canadians know little or nothing about most of the wars and peacekeeping missions their countrymen have served in, according to a survey done one year ago for Veterans Affairs Canada.

While a bare majority of the 13-to-17-year-olds surveyed claimed to know at least a moderate amount about the Second World War, their knowledge fell off rapidly beyond that.

More than two-thirds said they knew very little or nothing at all about the First World War, and nearly as many were equally unaware of Canadian peacekeeping efforts since 1960.

Their ignorance peaked with the Korean War, about which 82 per cent said they knew nothing or very little.

Even for the best-known conflict, the Second World War, 37 per cent of the youth said they knew very little and nine per cent knew nothing at all....

Leo Steinberg, the Russian-born art historian and Renaissance scholar whose work had a heroic impact on the understanding and reception of American postwar art, particularly Pop and postmodern art, passed away at the age of 90 on Sunday in New York. His death was reported in an email circulated by Utrecht-based art historian Gary Schwartz, and confirmed by University of Pennsylvania art history department chair Professor Holly Pittman.

A writer and thinker of immense erudition, Steinberg is considered alongside with art critics Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg as one of the most influential voices in shaping the way art was discussed and looked at in 20th century America. Writing and teaching in an era when the reception of new art was still largely codified by university art history departments, Steinberg electrified the art world in 1972 with his classic book "Other Criteria," which introduced the notion of the "flatbed picture plane" -- a potent entry point for understanding the dimension-annihilating flatness of work by Jackson Pollock and Jasper Johns -- through essays on those two artists as well as Picasso, Philip Guston, Robert Rauschenberg, and Willem de Kooning.

An art historian whose career began with an explosive lecture series at the 92nd Street Y titled "An Introduction to Art and Practical Esthetics," Steinberg taught over the years at universities including Penn, Columbia, and Harvard. In addition to his work on postwar art, he is highly regarded for such seminal works of classical art history as "The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion," and his critical Picasso touchstone "The Philosophical Brothel" about "Les Demoiselles d' Avignon." Unusual among art historians of his traditional background, Steinberg favored writing in an accessibly jargon-free first-person style replete with anecdotes and a humane subjectivity.

According to Gary Schwartz, Steinberg passed away in his sleep at his home on New York's 66th Street. A memorial service is planned for March 17 at 12:15 p.m. at Riverside Memorial Chapel....

A leather football that British soldiers dribbled through no man's land while coming under machine-gun fire during a first world war battle has been saved for posterity after being discovered in an old box.

Members of the London Irish Rifles soccer team smuggled the ball out of their own trenches – against orders – during the battle of Loos in 1915 and passed it among themselves, determined to boot it into the German lines.

They didn't make it and the ball ended up pierced on barbed wire. It was retrieved from the battlefield, displayed for a while at the regimental museum and eventually stored in a container, forgotten and in danger of perishing.

The ball has now been conserved by experts and is to go back on display this weekend at the regimental museum in Camberwell, south-east London.

Nigel Wilkinson, vice-chairman of the London Irish Rifles Regimental Association, said the soldiers originally had six balls that they planned to take with them into no man's land but their commanding officer shot five of them when he heard what was being planned....

Almost 2,000 years ago, 19 Roman soldiers rushed into a cramped underground tunnel, prepared to defend the Roman-held Syrian city of Dura-Europos from an army of Persians digging to undermine the city's mudbrick walls. But instead of Persian soldiers, the Romans met with a wall of noxious black smoke that turned to acid in their lungs. Their crystal-pommeled swords were no match for this weapon; the Romans choked and died in moments, many with their last pay of coins still slung in purses on their belts.

Nearby, a Persian soldier — perhaps the one who started the toxic underground fire — suffered his own death throes, grasping desperately at his chain mail shirt as he choked. [Image of skeleton of Persian soldier]

These 20 men, who died in A.D. 256, may be the first victims of chemical warfare to leave any archeological evidence of their passing, according to a new investigation. The case is a cold one, with little physical evidence left behind beyond drawings and archaeological excavation notes from the 1930s. But a new analysis of those materials published in January in the American Journal of Archaeology finds that the soldiers likely did not die by the sword as the original excavator believed. Instead, they were gassed....

Archaeologists are criticizing the ethics of a planned Smithsonian Institution exhibit, Shipwrecked: Tang Treasures and Monsoon Winds, slated to open in the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in 2012. The exhibit is based on artifacts hauled up from an Arab dhow that sank to the bottom of the Java Sea in the 9th century C.E. The wreck was salvaged by a private German company, Seabed Explorations GbR, in the late 1990s, and critics say that its divers did not observe professional archaeological standards while recovering the artifacts, which include glazed ceramics, lead ingots, and intricately worked vessels of silver and gold from the Tang dynasty. Then in 2005, most of the finds were sold to a second company in Singapore for a reported $32 million. Such commercialization of ancient objects doesn't break the laws of Indonesia, in whose territorial waters the dhow was found, but many archaeologists say that it contravenes their field's standard ethical guidelines.

In recent weeks, three major American archaeological associations and three of the Smithsonian's own internal research organizations have written to Smithsonian Institution Secretary Wayne Clough strongly opposing the exhibition. "We agree that there was unprofessional and unethical conduct associated with the recovery of this wreck, regardless of the 'letter of the law,' and that at the least, the perception of impropriety and the potential for the Smithsonian's engagement with this project could set a negative precedent and reflect ill on this institution," wrote Melissa Songer, chair of the Smithsonian Congress of Scholars, in her letter.

Underwater archaeologists have been fighting for decades to protect shipwreck sites from treasure-hunting operations that mine sunken ships for artifacts to sell. In 2009, the archaeological community scored a major victory when the UNESCO Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage came into effect. It stated that "underwater cultural heritage shall not be traded, sold, bought or bartered as commercial goods."

But Indonesia has not ratified the UNESCO convention. Instead, it licenses private companies, such as Seabed Explorations, to salvage its shipwrecks in return for a 50% share of the profits from selling artifacts. To increase profits, such companies are often tempted to cut corners on important but time-consuming tasks, such as the recording of the archaeological context. In the case of the dhow, notes Ted Schultz, chair of the National Museum of Natural History Senate of Scientists, "We believe that substantial scientific information was lost due to the methods employed."....

Archaeologists have found Britain's oldest properly engineered road, and the discovery could change the way we look at a key aspect of British history. Now, many of the country's key A roads – long thought to be Roman in origin – could now turn out to be substantially more British than scholars had thought.

The discoveries, in Shropshire, suggest that ancient Britons were building finely engineered, well-cambered and skilfully metalled roads before the Emperor Claudius's conquering legions ever set foot in Britain in the middle of the 1st century BC.

So far, they have found two sections, totalling 400m, but their alignment suggests that the road connected two key political centres of the Iron Age tribal kingdom of the Cornovii, the Cornovian "capital", the Wrekin hill-fort near modern Telford, and Old Oswestry hill-fort, near modern Oswestry.

The discovery of the road, revealed in the BBC History Magazine, is for the first time demonstrating the sophistication of British Iron Age cross-country road construction.

First a brushwood foundation (made of elder) was laid down. Then a layer of silt was placed on top of the brushwood, and finally a layer of cobbles was set into the silt to provide a good surface. A kerb system, kept in place by timber uprights, was even constructed to prevent the Iron Age highway slumping. The road was regularly maintained, and resurfaced at least twice during its life.

The excavations, funded by the UK's largest building materials company, Tarmac, have also provided remarkable information about the wheeled traffic using the Iron Age highway....

She is one of the best-known crime writers of all time but few know the extent of Agatha Christie's archaeological pedigree.

Married in 1930 to eminent archaeologist Max Mallowan, Christie spent two decades living on excavation sites in the Middle East, writing her crime novels and helping out with her husband's work.

Travel by boat and on the Orient Express to far-flung places such as Cairo, Damascus and Baghdad inspired some of Christie's best-known works of detective fiction, including "Murder on the Orient Express," "Death on the Nile," and "Murder in Mesopotamia."

Now, 3,000-year-old ivory artifacts recovered by Mallowan between 1949 and 1963 from the ancient city of Nimrud, in what is now Iraq, and likely cleaned by his famous wife using cotton wool buds and face cream, go on display Monday at the British Museum in London.

Nimrud was a city in the Assyrian kingdom, which flourished between 900-612 B.C.. The ivories found by Mallowan and his team were originally made in what is now Syria and Lebanon and brought to Assyria as looted treasures....

...Two days after a massive earthquake and the resulting tsunami turned a strip of Japan into wreckage, the hardest-hit areas still don't have enough of what they need, according to those in shelters. There's not enough food, not enough water and no heat. And there are not enough resources to quickly reach - or even contact - the tens of thousands who remain missing.

Prime Minister Naoto Kan called the disaster the country's biggest crisis since World War II. Kan said that along coastal areas workers are having a "hard time" distributing food. The government was exploring the possibility of delivering food by sea or air, given the problems with roads en route to the north....

Inside his trinket shop in the city's El Pueblo historic district, Mike Mariscal is surrounded by painted masks, woven blankets and Day of the Dead figurines he's long sold to tourists.

Mariscal fears his own day of reckoning is near as a series of disputes surround the adobe buildings, shops and Mexican-era churches in an increasingly trafficked corner of the city's revitalizing downtown.

One dustup is over Indian graves unearthed during construction of a Mexican-American cultural center. Another involves a monument to Hispanic war heroes where the original Chinatown once stood.

And Mariscal and dozens of merchants along El Pueblo's shopping street who have sold tacos and Mexican knick-knacks - along with more conventional tourist-zone schlock like knockoff designer bags and movie posters - for decades claim city rent hikes could sever their historical attachment to the site.

"I believe that the long-range plan is probably to run us all out of here," said Mariscal, 55, who wore a threadbare pleated guayabera shirt. "It'll kill me."...

Smoking was as bad for the Victorians as it is for anyone today, but back in those days it seems it did far more damage to their teeth. In the mid-19th century, prior to the invention of the cigarette, when tobacco was copiously consumed through clay pipes, smoking often resulted in nasty dental disfigurement.

A Museum of London study of skeletal remains excavated from a Victorian cemetery in Whitechapel, east London, found most people had "notches" in at least two, and often four, front teeth made through the habitual holding of pipe stems.

Osteological analysis of 268 adults buried between 1843 and 1854 found that some disfigurement had occurred in 92 percent of adults exhumed, while wear associated with habitual use of pipes was evident in 23 percent.

The study, published to coincide with national No Smoking Day in Britain, also found a number of young adult skeletons had tell-tale notches, suggesting pipe-smoking may have begun in childhood.

Clay pipes, which for the gentrified classes could be up to 18 inches long, were the cigarette butts of their day and can be dated right back to the Elizabethan period when tobacco was first imported to Europe from the New World....

Almost every Virginia county has a monument to Confederate war dead, and most of them are located in the county seat, at or near the courthouse.

Accomack County has a Confederate monument, but it is not at the county seat. It stands, instead, six miles from the courthouse in a town that did not exist during the Civil War -- a town that was, in fact, founded by Yankees.

This curious circumstance is the result of two movements, one national, the other local....

B.B. Mitchell, first president of the Brandy Station Foundation and the driving force behind extensive Civil War land preservation efforts in eastern Culpeper County, died Friday of congestive heart failure. He was 75.

Mitchell, who went simply by the first name “B,” was a running back on the 1952 undefeated football team at Culpeper County High School who attended Virginia Tech on a track scholarship but injured his knee the spring of his freshman year.

He served two years in Army intelligence, then worked 30 years in the Fauquier County school system, retiring in 1990. Mitchell taught high school English and coached football and track before being appointed the county’s director of transportation....

REPUBLIC, Mo. (AP) — Vandals did at least $4,000 damage to four cannons at the Wilson's Creek National Battlefield in southwest Missouri.

Park Superintendent Ted Hillmer says the vandalism to four of 10 cannons was discovered Monday. The cannons were reproductions of weapons used during the Civil War battle near Republic....

LITTLE BIGHORN BATTLEFIELD NATIONAL MONUMENT — In two cramped rooms in the basement of the visitor center at the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument, treasures are everywhere.

In drawers and filing cabinets, on shelves and in display cases, there are nearly 120,000 priceless artifacts, documents and books.

There is a large parchment commission, dated 1861 and signed by President Abraham Lincoln, appointing George A. Custer a second lieutenant in the Army's second regiment of cavalry. There is a 7th Cavalry silk guidon, carried off by the victors at the Battle of the Little Bighorn on June 25, 1876, and recovered a few months later at the Battle of Slim Buttes.

There are guns and knives, boots and canteens, buttons, belt buckles, spurs and ribbons, original photographs, shell casings, military records, hundreds of rare books and Native American accoutrements and sacred items. There is even Custer's "U.S. Army suspensory bandage," more commonly known today as an athletic supporter.LITTLE BIGHORN BATTLEFIELD NATIONAL MONUMENT — In two cramped rooms in the basement of the visitor center at the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument, treasures are everywhere.

In drawers and filing cabinets, on shelves and in display cases, there are nearly 120,000 priceless artifacts, documents and books.

There is a large parchment commission, dated 1861 and signed by President Abraham Lincoln, appointing George A. Custer a second lieutenant in the Army's second regiment of cavalry. There is a 7th Cavalry silk guidon, carried off by the victors at the Battle of the Little Bighorn on June 25, 1876, and recovered a few months later at the Battle of Slim Buttes.

There are guns and knives, boots and canteens, buttons, belt buckles, spurs and ribbons, original photographs, shell casings, military records, hundreds of rare books and Native American accoutrements and sacred items. There is even Custer's "U.S. Army suspensory bandage," more commonly known today as an athletic supporter....

SKOPJE, Macedonia — Macedonia has inaugurated a $23 million memorial centre for the country's Jews who were killed in Nazi death camps during World War II.

Thursday's ceremony in central Skopje was attended by the presidents of Macedonia, Albania and Montenegro, as well as Israel's Cabinet minister for strategic affairs, Moshe Yaalon....