Ancient Tomb In Spain Destroyed And Replaced With A Picnic Table 
 
 Updated at 1:45 p.m. ET 
 
 The accidental destruction of an ancient tomb in northwest Spain was best summed up by an archaeologist in one perfect, if unintended, pun: "monumental error." 
 
 Workers in the town of Cristovo de Cea in the Galicia region mistook what is believed to be a 6,000-year-old Neolithic tomb for a broken stone picnic table and "repaired it." 
 
 Lauren Frayer reported from Spain for NPR's newscast: 
 
 "An ancient tomb in northwest Spain had heritage status — and thus was supposed to be protected and clearly marked as an artifact. But somehow the local town council wasn't aware. So when parks and rec workers saw the granite slabs — they thought they were part of a park bench that needed repair. They poured concrete into the ancient burial chamber, and topped it with a brand new picnic table. An environmental group realized the error and complained. The tomb is believed to be more than 6,000 years old, from the area's ancient Celtic settlers." 
 
 An investigation into how the tomb came to be destroyed is underway, according to The Local, but it appears to be an open and shut case: Officials simply weren't aware the site existed — not even the town's mayor, José Luis Valladores. 
 
 "No one told me, neither Heritage nor the environmental group," he told the Spanish Huffington Post. "The site wasn't even marked, and the logical thing would have been for them to get in contact with the local council so that we could have taken measures to protect the site," he added. 
 
 Juan Barceló, the archaeologist who called the mistake a monumental error, said he "was horrified when he heard [the] news," and speculated that the breakdown in communication between builders and the local authorities was probably due to the summer holidays. 
 
 He also told The Local that mistakes like this are not the norm. 
 
 "This is not representative of Spain, where monuments over 100 years old are all preserved by law," Barceló said. "All authorities, national, state and local work effectively preserving our heritage. But sometimes accidents happen. I am sure that such disasters happen in many other countries, but have not been published." 
 
 It turns out Barceló is partly right. Other countries have destroyed ancient remains, but usually it's done knowingly. 
 
 In 2007, as The New York Times reports, "a work crew in the ancient capital city of Nanjing unearthed and destroyed the burial sites of 10 noblemen from six dynasties." 
 
 Just last year, according to archaeologists, an ancient Native American burial ground and village in California was discovered and then razed in order to make way for multimillion-dollar homes. 
 
 However, the mistaken destruction of ancient relics isn't completely unheard of. 
 
 In 2013, NPR's Scott Neuman wrote about workers destroying a 2,300-year-old Mayan pyramid in Belize to use the rubble for road repair. They were apparently unaware that the pyramid was a Mayan ruin. 
 
 And then there are times when even the best intentions to preserve ancient relics go horribly awry, like this story from NPR's Eyder Peralta about a painter's attempt to restore a fresco. ||||| an oval-shaped structure unearthed in the Tuscan town of Volterra. Archaeologists believe it represents the most important Roman amphitheater finding over the last century. The foundations of the colosseum, which is oval-shaped like the much larger arena in the heart of Rome, might date back to the 1st century A.D. Amphitheaters like these were used during Roman times to feature events including gladiator combats and wild animal fights. The archaeologists estimate the structure, which mostly lies at a depth of 20 to 32 feet, measured some 262 by 196 feet. Only a small part of it has been unearthed during a small dig survey. New finds are expected this year as a full-scale dig is launched. Gladiator Colosseum Found in Tuscany 
 
 View Caption + #5: One of the most promising discoveries last year was 
 
 the Colombian government announced they had found the holy grail of treasure shipwrecks -- an 18th-century Spanish galleon that went down off the country's coast with a treasure of gold, coins and precious stones now valued between $4 billion and $17 billion. The multibillion-dollar ship, called the San Jose, was found off the island of Baru, near Cartagena. The vessel was part of Spain's only royal convoy to bring colonial coins and bullion home to King Philip V during the War of Spanish Succession from 1701 to 1714. The San Jose was trying to outrun a fleet of British warships off the island of Baru on June 8, 1708, when an explosion sent it to the bottom of the Caribbean Sea. She was reportedly carrying 600 people, chests of emeralds and tons of silver, gold and platinum. The shipwreck has been at a center of a decades-long search that also involved a legal battle with the Seattle-based Sea Search Armada, or SSA, a commercial salvage company that claims it first discovered the wreck's location in 1981. Moreover, Peru has argued that any treasure recovered from the San Jose should be considered a Peruvian national patrimony. As more legal fights will likely occur, new expeditions to the wreck in 2016 are expected to recover the much disputed treasure of gold and emeralds. Multibillion Dollar Shipwreck Found Off Colombia 
 
 extraordinary and controversial claim : Stonehenge was basically a second-hand monument from Wales. It would have stood there hundreds of years before it was dismantled and transported to Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire. The research indicates that two quarries in the Preseli Hills of Pembrokeshire, in southwest Wales, are the source of Stonehenge's bluestones. Carbon dating revealed such stones were dug out at least 500 years before Stonehenge was built -- suggesting they were first used in a local monument that was later dismantled and dragged off to England. "Stonehenge was a Welsh monument from its very beginning. If we can find the original monument in Wales from which it was built, we will finally be able to solve the mystery," Mike Parker Pearson, director of the project and professor of British later prehistory at University College London said. Researchers have been using geophysical surveys, trial excavations and aerial photographic analysis to identify the ruins of a lost, dismantled monument. The results of such research promise to make the headlines this year. "We think we have the most likely spot. We may find something big in 2016," Kate Welham, of Bournemouth University, said. Stonehenge First Built in Wales, Study Claims 
 
 The noninvasive technologies applied to King Tut's tomb will be widely used this year in another ambitious project. Called Scan Pyramid, the investigation is carried out by a team from Cairo University's Faculty of Engineering and the Paris-based organization Heritage, Innovation and Preservation under the authority of the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities. The project aims to scan the largest pyramids of Egypt in order to detect the presence of any unknown internal structures and cavities. The technique could lead to a better understanding of the pyramids' structure and how they were built. The project uses a mix of technologies such as infrared thermography, muon radiography, and 3D reconstruction to look at the inside of four pyramids, which are more than 4,500 years old. They include Khufu, or Cheops, Khafre or Chephren at Giza, the Bent pyramid and the Red pyramid at Dahshur. One particularly remarkable anomaly has been already detected on the eastern side of the Great Pyramid, also known as Khufu or Cheops, at the ground level. Much more is to come -- the first results are expected in the first months of the year. Striking Anomaly Found in Great Pyramid 
 
 Egypt will likely offer promising finds in 2016. King Tutankhamun's tomb will be under the spotlight as recent investigation suggests the western and northern walls of the 3,300-year-old burial may hide two secret chambers. According to Egypt's Minister of Antiquity Mamdouh al-Damaty there is a 90 percent chance the tomb of King Tut contains such chambers. Damaty made the announcement last November at the end of a radar-based investigation. The non-invasive search followed a claim by Nicholas Reeves, a British Egyptologist at the University of Arizona, who first speculated the existence of the chambers, arguing that one contains the remains, and possibly the intact grave goods, from queen Nefertiti. She was the wife of the "heretic" monotheistic pharaoh Akhenaten, Tutankhamun's father. Will archaeologists try to access the hidden chambers? Their attempt may lead to what Damaty called "one of the most important finds of the century." Radar Finds Secret Chamber in King Tut's Tomb 
 
 Inscriptions are visible on ceramic pottery shards, known as “ostraca,” which researchers believe date to the earliest phase of the Bible’s compilation. 
 
 Many of the earliest texts of the Bible were written by at least 600 B.C. in the ancient Kingdom of Judah, located in what is now the Southern Levant, new high tech research on correspondence from the period suggests. 
 
 The findings, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, help resolve a longstanding debate over whether the first major phase of biblical text compilation took place before or after the destruction of Judah’s capital city, Jerusalem, in 586 B.C. 
 
 The new research concludes that early sacred texts of the Torah, known in part to Christians as the Old Testament, were written shortly before that fateful event, when Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar destroyed Jerusalem and forcibly exiled the people of Judah. 
 
 Fact-Checking the Bible 
 
 Play Video Can Science Be a Religion? Are there times when the two overlap, when fervent belief in science functions much like devout faith? DCI 
 
 “Several (biblical) texts refer to events which best fit the reality in the years just before the fall of the Kingdom of Judah,” senior author Israel Finkelstein, a professor of archaeology at Tel Aviv University, told Discovery News. 
 
 For the study, Finkelstein, lead author Shira Faigenbaum-Golovin and their team used novel image processing and computer analysis to investigate 16 inscriptions from the desert fortress of Arad, located west of the Dead Sea. The inscriptions, which are correspondence concerning military matters, date to 600 B.C. and were made by putting ink script on ceramic shards. 
 
 “This was a common practice at the time,” Finkelstein explained. “We know this from other Judahite forts, both in the Negev (the south) and the Shephelah (the west). Most of the inscriptions deal with mundane issues, such as orders to send commodities to or with army units.” 
 
 What Did Jesus Look Like? 
 
 In this case, the inscribed shards -- known as ostraca -- contain military commands regarding the movement of troops and provision of wine, oil and flour among the men. One mentions “the king of Judah” and another “the house of YHWH,” in reference to the Temple in Jerusalem. 
 
 Faigenbaum-Golovin and colleagues Arie Shaus and Barak Sober focused their analysis on who wrote the correspondence. They determined that six individuals of varying military ranks created the ostraca. ||||| Indian artifact treasure trove paved over for Marin County homes Archaeologists crushed that tribe declined to protect burial site 
 
 A treasure trove of Coast Miwok life dating back 4,500 years - older than King Tut's tomb - was discovered in Marin County and then destroyed to make way for multimillion-dollar homes, archaeologists told The Chronicle this week. 
 
 The American Indian burial ground and village site, so rich in history that it was dubbed the "grandfather midden," was examined and categorized under a shroud of secrecy before construction began this month on the $55 million Rose Lane development in Larkspur. 
 
 The 300-foot-long site contained 600 human burials, tools, musical instruments, harpoon tips, spears and throwing sticks from a time long before the introduction of the bow and arrow. The bones of grizzly and black bears were also found, along with a ceremonial California condor burial. 
 
 "This was a site of considerable archaeological value," said Dwight Simons, a consulting archaeologist who analyzed 7,200 bones, including the largest collection of bear bones ever found in a prehistoric site in the Bay Area. "My estimate of bones and fragments in the entire site was easily over a million, and probably more than that. It was staggering." 
 
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 No artifacts were saved 
 
 All of it, including stone tools and idols apparently created for trade with other tribes, was removed, reburied in an undisclosed location on site and apparently graded over, destroying the geologic record and ending any chance of future study, archaeologists said. Not a single artifact was saved. 
 
 Lost forever was a carbon-dated record in the soil layers of indigenous life going back approximately to the time the Great Pyramid of Giza was built in Egypt. It was, said several prominent archaeologists, the largest, best-preserved, most ethnologically rich American Indian site found in the Bay Area in at least a century. 
 
 "It should have been protected," said Jelmer Eerkens, a professor of archaeology at UC Davis who visited the site as a guest scholar. "The developers have the right to develop their land, but at least the information contained in the site should have been protected and samples should have been saved so that they could be studied in the future." 
 
 The shell mound was first documented in Larkspur in 1907, but no one knew its significance until a developer decided to build homes, prompting an examination of the grounds. 
 
 Archaeologists brought in 
 
 The development was approved by the city in 2010, but the developer, Larkspur Land 8 Owner LLC, was required under the California Environmental Quality Act to bring in archaeologists to study the shell mound under the direction of American Indian monitors before it could build. 
 
 The developers hired San Francisco's Holman & Associates Archaeological Consultants to conduct an excavation, and that firm spent the past year and a half on the site, calling in 25 archaeologists and 10 other specialists to study aspects of the mound. As required by the environmental act, their work was monitored by the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, who were designated the most likely descendants of Larkspur's indigenous people. 
 
 The American Indian leaders ultimately decided how the findings would be handled, and they defended their decision to remove and rebury the human remains and burial artifacts. 
 
 "The philosophy of the tribe in general is that we would like to protect our cultural resources and leave them as is," said Nick Tipon, a longtime member of the Sacred Sites Protection Committee of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria. "The notion that these cultural artifacts belong to the public is a colonial view." 
 
 But Eerkens and several other top archaeologists said a lot more could have been done to protect the shell mound. The problem was that the work was done under a confidentiality agreement, so little was known about it until March when some of the archaeologists discussed their work during a Society for California Archaeology symposium in Visalia. 
 
 An extraordinary site 
 
 It was too late by then to preserve the site and, by all accounts, the archaeologists at the symposium were stunned. 
 
 "In my 40 years as a professional archaeologist, I've never heard of an archaeological site quite like this one," said E. Breck Parkman, the senior archaeologist for the California State Parks. "A ceremonial condor burial, for example, is unheard of in California. This was obviously a very important place during prehistory." 
 
 The developer, Larkspur planning officials and officials at Holman & Associates all pointed to tribal leaders. 
 
 "We coordinated the entire time with the tribe and the archaeological team to make sure it was a collaborative effort and that things were handled in accordance with the tribe's wishes," said Brian Olin, the senior vice president for New Home Company, which is part of a joint venture with Larkspur Land 8. 
 
 Miley Holman, the owner of the archaeological firm, referred all inquiries to the American Indians, as did Neal Toft, the Larkspur planning director. 
 
 "The city did not participate or oversee any of the archaeological digs or discovery," Toft said. "The Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria managed the oversight along with a qualified archaeologist. We were not apprised or assessed of any significant finds, and in fact we kept out of it." 
 
 Greg Sarris, the chairman for the 1,300-member tribe, was far from apologetic about what happened to the archaeological site. It is nobody else's business, he said, how the tribe chooses to handle the remains and belongings of its ancestors. 
 
 "Our policy is that those things belong to us, end of story," said Sarris, whose tribe recently opened the Graton Resort & Casino in Rohnert Park. "Let us worry about our own preservation. If we determine that they are sacred objects, we will rebury them because in our tradition many of those artifacts, be they beads, charm stones or whatever, go with the person who died. ... How would Jewish or Christian people feel if we wanted to dig up skeletal remains in a cemetery and study them? Nobody has that right." 
 
 The protection of cultural sites has been a prickly topic for decades in the Bay Area, where American Indian shell mounds were once abundant around San Francisco Bay. There is often tension, and there are sometimes courtroom battles, between American Indians, who generally want ceremonial items left alone, and archaeologists who want to collect and preserve ancient artifacts and village sites for science. 
 
 State and federal laws attempt to balance the two - protecting cultural sites and giving American Indians a say over what happens - but in most cases a private-property owner can't be forced to protect a cultural site. 
 
 The new homes, on a 22-acre former tidal estuary of Corte Madera Creek, across from Hall Middle School in central Larkspur, will include 42 senior housing units, eight senior cottage homes, six affordable-housing town houses and 29 single-family homes. They are expected to go on the market in the fall for $1.9 million to $2.5 million. 
 
 Shrouded in secrecy 
 
 Nondisclosure agreements are relatively common when dealing with Indian burials because of the historical problems American Indians have had with looters, grave robbers and vandals, but the archaeologists believe the developer was behind the secrecy. 
 
 "The developer was reluctant to have any publicity because, well - let's face it - because of 'Poltergeist,' " said Simons, referring to the 1982 movie about a family tormented by ghosts and demons because their house was built on top of a burial ground. 
 
 They also question Larkspur planning officials, who could have protected the mound by ordering a redesign or mandating construction of a cap over the site. Critics suspect planning decisions were influenced by the fact that Larkspur is getting out of the deal a 2.43-acre piece of land to build a community center. 
 
 "It's like the fox watching the henhouse," said Al Schwitalla, an archaeologist hired by Holman & Associates to analyze artifacts at the site. He said radiocarbon dating was arbitrarily limited and DNA testing was prohibited, a move that prevented confirmation of a genetic link to Graton Rancheria tribe members. 
 
 Lost treasures 
 
 A draft report is being prepared documenting what was found inside the Larkspur mound, but the actual items are lost to science and future study. That includes atlatl throwing sticks, which were used for hunting before the bow and arrow. There were also thousands of shells and the bones of bat rays, waterfowl, deer, sea otters and some 100 grizzly and black bears. Archaeologists say the remains of the condor, a species revered by the Miwok, could be an indication that the birds were kept as pets, possibly for their feathers. 
 
 There were also antler tools, flutes, beads, bone awls, hairpins, game pieces and ritualistic stone objects apparently used to trade for obsidian and beads from Napa-area tribes, according to archaeologists. 
 
 "There are a lot of things that went wrong here," Eerkens said. "It's really a shame."
– Usually municipal workers taking the initiative to replace a broken picnic table would be heralded as a minor civic victory. However, that's less the case when the "broken picnic table" was actually a 6,000-year-old tomb under government protection. NPR reports the tomb is believed to have been built by Neolithic Celtic settlers in what is now the town of San Cristovo de Cea in Spain. After removing the granite slabs they thought had been parts of a bench, workers poured concrete into the burial chamber and topped it off with a picnic table. A Spanish archaeologist tells the Local he was "horrified" by the "monumental error" after an environmental group discovered what had happened in June. Town officials say they weren't aware the tomb was even there, despite it being listed as a heritage site. "No one told me," the mayor tells El Huffington Post. "The site wasn't even marked." But a regional government department is investigating the situation and tells the Local "the town council was well aware of its existence." According to NPR, this kind of thing isn't unheard of. Two years ago, workers in Belize accidentally ruined a 2,300-year-old Mayan pyramid because they needed rubble to fix a road. But more often these ancient sites are destroyed on purpose. Last year, for example, developers dismantled a Native American burial ground in California to make room for some million-dollar homes. (This kid knows a thing or two about accidentally destroying precious things.)