Peter Phillips talks of his 'extreme frustration' at the delays. He was aged three and then called Peter Pfeffer when his parents had to leave Vienna hurriedly in 1939 after his father, a doctor, had been tipped off by a patient that he was marked down on a list for Dachau.

Evi Labi also managed to escape with her parents - in her case within hours of the Nazi occupation of Austria in March 1938. Her father had worked for the previous Austrian government, and their apartment in Vienna was occupied and ransacked almost immediately after the Nazis arrived in the city.

'My story is one of many,' she says. Then aged 15, she recounts the terrible time when their apartment was first invaded. 'They opened the front door, and said to passersby "Come and help yourself to Persian rugs",' she recalls. Within hours, she found herself a refugee, without even the money for a toothbrush.

Mr Phillips, Evi Labi and a small number of fellow Austrian refugees have now created the Austrian Restitution Group which is pressing the Austrian government for action. Both say that it is the principle of compensation, rather than the money itself, which is important.

But for some fellow refugees, clearly the money is a real need. Mr Phillips says that between 30 and 40 people who have made claims to the compensation fund have approached the Group for help in recent months. 'Some people are really hard up,' he says. 'People ask me, "Herr Phillips, when will we get the money?" The answer is, I haven't the faintest idea.'

The Austrian compensation fund, known as the General Settlement Fund, has been controversial from the start. It was created by the Austrian government after pressure from Jewish organisations and was part of a process which saw similar compensation schemes set up by German and Swiss banks and insurers. However, the total in the General Settlement Fund, $210m, has been criticised for being unrealistically low. There is no suggestion that families will receive anything like full compensation.

"There was no alternative," Moa says, claiming that the Republican democracy overthrown by Franco's rebel forces during the bloody Spanish civil war had already failed beyond repair. "He left a prosperous and politically moderate country. The last 30 years of democracy have been possible thanks to that."

Moa, a former member of a violent leftwing group, is rejected by many professional historians as a pseudo-historian who has found a publishing goldmine as a modern Franco apologist. "What he writes is nothing less than an up-to-date repetition of what Franco's people have always said," commented the historian Santos Julia in El Pais newspaper.

"What I found so moving about this man and his life was his response to practicing [law] under very trying and challenging conditions, was to ferret out the truth while arguing for his clients," said Morris.

The result is "Justice Imperiled; the Anti-Nazi Lawyer Max Hirschberg in Weimar Germany" (University of Michigan Press), a book that also completed Morris' doctorate in history from the University of Rochester.

Morris, 51, had considered becoming a historian since he was a teen growing up in Roslyn, L.I. He learned to speak German fluently and studied German history.

Unlike his allies Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, Francisco Franco survived World War II, retaining his dictatorial grip on Spain for another 30 years. Even when he died, he avoided the fate of his fellow despots. Hitler's body was likely incinerated outside his bunker; Mussolini's corpse swung from a gas-station awning in Milan; but Franco still lies in a grand tomb funded and carefully maintained by the country he subjugated. On Sunday, the 30th anniversary of his death, several thousand Franco supporters will make their annual journey to the Valley of the Fallen, some 50 km northwest of Madrid, where a colossal basilica is carved into the craggy Guadarrama Mountains. There, they will lay wreaths and offer fascist salutes, as they do every year. But this time, their pilgrimage will take place in a country that is ready to confront the dark chapter of its dictatorship — and perhaps finally put to rest the legacy of Francisco Franco.

After igniting a civil war in 1936 when he led a coup against Spain's democratically elected government, Franco and his Nationalist forces — aided by Germany and Italy — finally prevailed in 1939. For the next 36 years, Franco ruled the country; he sent political prisoners to concentration camps and homosexuals to mental asylums, and women were not allowed to work without the permission of their husbands or fathers. Speaking out — for democracy or against the regime — was hazardous to your health.

He says that the Inspector of Antiquities at Samarra has confirmed that the berm, created by bulldozing earth into a giant embankment, is complete on the north and east sides of the city, crossing the archaeological area somewhere north of the palace of Sur Isa.

Although he says that it has become increasingly difficult to get accurate reports on the situation in Samarra, Professor Northedge has calculated that, while it may not yet encircle the entire city, the section of berm constructed so far must cut through the Cloverleaf Racecourse, “a unique monument, of which there is no like in the world”, one of three horse-racing courses established in the ninth-century caliphal capital.

He estimates that, depending on its path, the berm has almost certainly cut across the sites of at least two ninth-century palaces, and possibly also a Chalcolithic cemetery.

The institute's annual Remembrance Day poll -- a national survey conducted last month of more than 1,000 Canadians -- suggests the public would go even further. Eighty per cent of those surveyed said high schools should impose compulsory courses in 20th-century Canadian history, including a study of the First and Second World Wars.

Currently only three provinces require high school students to study some Canadian history.

"Incredible as it seems, there are provinces where you can go through school and not be required to take a single course in Canadian history," says Rudyard Griffiths, executive director of the institute.

"I think it's having a pernicious effect on Canadians' knowledge of history. For one thing, we have high school graduates not being able to associate D-Day with the invasion of Normandy. That begs the question, are we living up to our solemn pledge not to forget our veterans?"

The letter was written in 1779 by Washington to his chief of intelligence, Gen. Benjamin Tallmadge, and focuses - without naming him - on the man who historians have called the Revolution's most important spy, Robert Townsend of Oyster Bay. His code name was Culper Jr., and Washington, at his own request, never learned his true identity.

The 3 1/2-page letter is from the collection of the late publishing baron, Malcolm Forbes, and is expected to sell for $120,000 to $180,000.

Condensation has seeped into the oversized metal canisters that hold some of the library's vast collection of archival newspapers, says Ara Kaye, a senior reference specialist. The deterioration of the acetate film is known as vinegar syndrome for the telltale odor it emits.
The collection boasts more than 3,500 titles from every county in the state -- from the Audrain Journal (circa 1889) to Wyaconda's Clark County News (1904-1923) -- on 41 million pages of microfilm. The oldest title is the St. Louis Missouri Gazette, founded in 1808.
Several thousand rolls of threatened film have been sent to a Kansas City company for reproduction, Miss Kaye says. The society now will keep two copies of its newspaper files: a working copy for researchers and a second set stored in a temperature-controlled underground cave.

Although Miss Kaye and other researchers detected the deterioration before it caused widespread damage, they now are faced with a shortage of money to pay for the duplication costs, which range from $200,000 to $300,000.

Private donors, including many small-town newspaper publishers, have contributed or pledged nearly $150,000, says Gary Kremer, executive director of the State Historical Society of Missouri.

The fundraising push comes as the society grapples with a 10 percent budget cut in the current fiscal year, coupled with an expected additional 3 percent cut in appropriations. The changes have forced the society to start charging research fees for other-than-routine requests.

Missouri historians and amateur genealogists call the society's newspaper collection a treasure trove of the state's culture, an unmatched window into small-town life.

To demonstrate loyalty to America, many forsook their cultural ties, and two generations grew up severed from their roots.

"Historically, there hasn't been a real close connection with the Japanese Americans and Japan," said San Francisco attorney Kaz Maniwa, who co-chaired the gathering. "People just assumed there is this close connection. Because of the war, there has been a lot of mixed feelings."

Their ordeal was compounded before and after the war by racism.

"Japanese-American nisei (second-generation immigrants) often shielded their children from things that are Japanese, Japanese language particularly, and tried to have them assimilate as much as possible into the mainstream of American society," Maniwa said.

Japanese Consul General for San Francisco, Makoto Yamanaka, who co-chaired the gathering, said the impact was felt on both sides of the Pacific.

"Japanese people do not know much about the history and experience of Japanese Americans," Yamanaka said.

The passage of time and rising interest in Japanese popular culture by younger Japanese Americans have opened the door to re-building cultural ties, said Maniwa, who also heads the California Japanese American Community Leadership Council.

The most visible result of last week's gathering came late Thursday -- a 28-part "action plan." The document, whose genesis was in similar meetings in 2003 and 2004, was the focus of daylong closed sessions among the participants Monday at the Radisson Miyako Hotel in Japantown.

He devoted most of his address to his successes, citing a familiar list: the expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit, the balancing of the budget, multiple free trade agreements, the Children's Health Care Program (the largest expansion of health care since Medicare), and dozens of other domestic and foreign initiatives.

He admitted to less than half a dozen failures, chief among them, his failure to send a few thousand soldiers to Rwanda to prevent the massacres there, which he called "unconscionable." He took responsibility for the disaster at Waco, which he simultaneously blamed on bum advice from the FBI.

He counted among his failures the decision to approve the appointment of an independent counsel to investigate Whitewater, a land deal on which, he noted, he lost money. Alluding indirectly to his sexual indiscretions, he admitted that he had made mistakes, but insisted he had not obstructed justice and had not lied to the grand jury, the two charges that led to his impeachment in the House of Representatives. He said that if you want to "hold it against me that I did something bad then how many other presidents do you have to downgrade?"

He admitted that several initiatives should receive an A for effort even though they did not end in success: his 1993 health care program and his attempts to achieve peace in the Middle East with a settlement between Israel and the Palestinians.

He said he was tired of hearing people wonder how his presidency would have turned out if he hadn't been impeached. Thanks to his staff and cabinet, he said, the business of the people was attended to throughout the ordeal. He reeled off a list of accomplishments in his final year to demonstrate that he had remained a productive figure: Congress had repealed the Social Security earnings test, China gained entrance into the WTO, child care was expanded, the number of children in after school programs doubled, and free trade agreements were signed with Jordan and Vietnam.

How should historians judge presidents, Clinton asked? First, they should decide if he met head-on the great challenges facing the country. Second, did the president offer the country a vision. Third, did he properly execute his vision. Fourth, did he respond to unforeseen crises. And five, were people better off at the end of his administration than they were at the outset.

Judged by the reaction of the crowd of thousands listening to him at Hofstra's university arena, Clinton would have received a glowing report tonight if they had been polled. He had started his address by saying he planned to discuss policy and might be boring. But he was constantly interrupted by applause. Sitting in the audience among the students were scores of Clinton-era officials including Madelaine Albright, Robert Rubin, Sidney Blumenthal, and Michael Waldman.

Joseph Smith's name isn't in the Bible, but he is considered by 12 million people to be one of Christianity's foremost prophets, founding the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and creating the Mormon faith --- and sparking controversy within the Christian community that still simmers today.

This year marks Smith's 200th birthday, and to celebrate the occasion, Mormons throughout the nation are holding open dialogues about their enigmatic leader.

Says Chris White, an assistant professor at Georgia State University:

"Foreign observers, like [Leo] Tolstoy, have called Latter-day Saints a 'quintessentially American religion.' Their story is really an American story --- living on the American frontier in the 19th century; they embraced American values of industry and commerce and capitalism and attracted white Americans.

"But they have always run against the grain of Protestants --- their doctrinal distinctiveness, their plural marriage and their own impulse to be a separate people and marry among themselves. And then they had these new angels that scandalized Americans. And so they have also been persecuted from upstate New York to Missouri to Salt Lake, where no one else wanted to go."

(Salt Lake City remains the church headquarters today.)

There are many people today who still don't understand that Mormons are Christian, say the faith's followers. That frustrates David Winters of Norcross who grew up in the church.

"We believe the Bible is the word of God. And yes, we also believe in additional scripture, the primary example of the Book of Mormon, but the subtitle of that book is 'Another Testament of Jesus Christ.' "

The film dramatizes encounters between white colonists and AmericanIndians, focusing on the relationship between Smith, portrayed by ColinFarrell, and the Indian princess Pocahontas, who intervened to save himwhen he was captured by her tribe.Q'orianka Kilcher plays Pocahontas. Christopher Plummer, Christian Baleand August Schellenberg also star.Director Terrence Malick filmed scenes at Jamestown, the firstpermanent English settlement in North America, and nearby locations.Officials hope "The New World" will boost tourism in Jamestown as "TheLord of the Rings" did in New Zealand. Both films are from New Line Cinema.

Now, Ali's hometown is ready to unveil its most lasting tribute, a museum celebrating the life of one of the 20th century's most recognizable figures.

The Muhammad Ali Center opens November 21, chronicling the life of "The Greatest" inside and outside the ring, emphasizing his peaceful values and vision of global tolerance, and setting the record straight about that infamous gold medal.

The exhibit begins with Darwin's voyage upon the H.M.S. Beagle, the ship that carried him to the Galapagos and South America. On display will be a mini-menagerie of animals seen by Darwin during his voyage, including two live Galapagos tortoises, a five-foot long green Iguana and six horned toads.

The exhibit then turns to the Down House, a small farmhouse on the outskirts of London where the naturalist spent the last 40 years of his life. The exhibit includes a faithful reconstruction of the study where Darwin churned out more than 7,500 letters and wrote "The Origins of Species," the book in which he described his theory of natural selection.

The exhibit will also contain a section devoted to Darwin's daughter, Anne, who died at age 10 after an illness. Darwin buried his religious faith when he buried Anne, and he was an agnostic when he died in 1882.

Films and interactive displays will be on hand to help illustrate the importance of Darwin's theory in modern biology and to show how scientists rely on evolution in everything from decoding the human genome to understanding diseases like HIV/AIDS and avian bird flu.

Democrats responded to Bush's Veterans Day speech by accusing the president of exploiting the holiday to try to shore up his faltering political standing.

Bush said he respected his opponents' right to disagree with him about the decision to go to war against Iraq, and that as president he accepted responsibility for what has taken place there under his watch.

But he added, "it is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began."

"Some Democrats and anti-war critics are now claiming we manipulated the intelligence and misled the American people about why we went to war. These critics are fully aware that a bipartisan Senate investigation found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community's judgment related to Iraq's weapons programs," Bush said.

"The stakes in the global war on terror are too high, and the national interest is too important, for politicians to throw out false charges," Bush added in a speech that broadly reviewed Washington's declared war on terrorism since the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.

The building, which dates to the 10th century B.C., is in an Israeli archeological site called Tel Zayit, about 35 miles southwest of Jerusalem. It would have been on the outskirts of ancient Judah.

For years, scholars have debated whether the kingdoms of David and Solomon, who the Bible says reigned about the 10th century B.C., were as advanced as the Bible describes them.

The discovery is of particular importance since the Bible attributes Gath as the home town of Goliath. "Gath of the Philistines," was one of the major cities of the Philistines, the well-known arch-enemies of the Israelites in the biblical text.

Professor Aren Maeir, Chairman of Bar-Ilan University's Martin (Szusz) Department of Land of Israel Studies and Archaeology, told The Jerusalem Post that the odds of this being the actual Goliath referred to in the Bible are "small if non-existent."

Professor Maeir explained that this find could chronologically be placed some 50 years after the story of David and Goliath was to have taken place.

Furthermore, according to Prof. Maeir, Goliath was a very popular type of name at the time.

Regardless of the low odds, the archaeological find may be seen as the first clear extra-biblical evidence that the story of the battle between David and Goliath may be more than just a legend.

The Census Bureau stopped asking for data about those veterans years ago. Using a report of 65,000 alive in 1990 as a baseline, the VA estimates that no more than 50 remain, perhaps as few as 30.

The last survivor of the Battle of Jutland said: "By coming here, you recall things you want to forget.

"But I do the best I can and I come here to pay homage to these brave men.

"We owe so much to these men who gave all they could have given on my behalf and everyone's behalf. It is so important that we acknowledge them."

The private, Toronto-based advocacy group says provincial governments could help solve the problem by making Canadian history a mandatory requirement of high school graduation.

The institute's Remembrance Day poll - a national survey conducted last month of more than 1,000 Canadians - suggests the public would go even further. Eighty per cent of those surveyed said high schools should impose compulsory courses in 20th-century Canadian history, including a study of the First and Second World Wars.

Currently, only three provinces require high school students to study some Canadian history.

"Incredible as it seems, there are provinces where you can go through school and not be required to take a single course in Canadian history," said Rudyard Griffiths, executive director of the institute.

"I think it's having a pernicious effect on Canadians' knowledge of history. For one thing, we have high school graduates not being able to associate D-Day with the invasion of Normandy."

In Manitoba, Grade 11 students must take a general history course that includes a 20th-century Canadian component. Ontario has a compulsory Grade 10 Canadian history course that includes some study of the two World Wars, and Quebec has a mandatory Grade 11 course focused on the history of Quebec.

In all other provinces, Canadian history is either optional in high school or included piecemeal in broader social studies programs.

Clinton is scheduled to give a speech at the conference today. About a dozen cabinet members and former staffers will speak at the three-day event.

Among those scheduled for the first day are Madeleine K. Albright, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and former secretary of state; Leon Panetta, former chief of staff and former director of the Office of Management and Budget; Robert E. Rubin, former U.S. Treasury Secretary; John Podesta another former chief of staff; and Richard C. Holbrooke, another former U.S. ambassador to the UN.

About 2,000 people have registered for the conference at the Hempstead campus, which concludes Saturday, university officials said. The university also announced receiving a $1.5-million pledge from Hofstra alumnus and university trustee Peter Kalikow to endow an academic chair in presidential studies.

Beyond the big names from the Clinton administration, about 300 scholars will appear on some 50 panels, which include two on Clinton's impeachment. In addition, 100 scholarly papers have been submitted. Given the wide spectrum of participants and scholarly papers, conference director Eric J. Schmertz, an emeritus professor of the Hofstra Law School, said the forum presented a "balanced" approach to assessing Clinton's presidency.

The event "is not intended to be a celebration," he said. "We are not honoring a presidency. We are studying and assessing a presidency through the academic community of scholars."

Hofstra began its presidential conferences in 1982, starting with Franklin Delano Roosevelt and continuing with every American president since Roosevelt.

Brinkley, an author and professor of history at Tulane University in New Orleans who is to deliver the conference overview today, said earlier this week, "I'm going to talk about the highs and lows, the good and the bad of the [Clinton] presidency."

"The positives of Clinton are becoming obvious," said Brinkley, citing his economic policy and welfare reform. "I think the gorilla in the room is his impeachment problem," which he called a "great curse on the Clinton legacy."

"There is an argument to be made if you didn't have the whole impeachment problem, Bill Clinton would go down as a great president. The problem is we did have the impeachment."

Dr Tony Pollard, of the Two Men In a Trench TV programme, has joined protests over a proposed 160-mile power line which some fear would destroy the site of the battle of Sheriffmuir, which signalled the bloody denouement of the 1715 Jacobite rebellion.
Sheriffmuir joins a long list of battlefields, including Bannockburn (1314), Falkirk (1746), Pinkie, near Musselburgh (1547), and Kilsyth (1645), which have been threatened by modern developments.

The A9 road was also built through the centre of the battlefield of Killiecrankie (1689) in the 1970s.
The new threat to Sheriffmuir has triggered calls for tighter legislation as experts are concerned that a £200m replacement power line would destroy the site, near Dunblane. Virginia Wills, a local resident, said: "These pylons are almost two-and-a-half times the size of normal pylons and they would run right through the centre of the battlefield.

"It would be a tragedy if the site were lost for future generations. The foundations (of the pylons) alone are the size of Olympic swimming pools."

"Was I disappointed? Of course," said Bill Kelso, the association's director of archaeology at Jamestown. "A lot of work went into this."

Kelso remains convinced, however, that researchers have correctly identified Gosnold based on historical, archaeological and forensic evidence.

"It's all come together," he said.

Gosnold, a former privateer, discovered and named Massachusetts' Cape Cod and Martha's Vineyard in 1602, and captained one of three ships that carried settlers from England to Virginia in 1607. He died three months later, at age 36.

Historians, who relied on written accounts of Jamestown's founding from Capt. John Smith and other settlers, largely overlooked Gosnold. Smith, however, described him as "the prime mover behind the settlement."

A nearly intact skeleton of a European man in his mid- to late 30s was found in 2002 near the site of the Jamestown fort. Evidence such as a coffin _ usually reserved at the time for people of higher status _ and a decorative captain's staff on its lid have led researchers to believe the remains are Gosnold's.

"We have never found any other ceremonial objects in Jamestown burials, so we know this was someone very special," Kelso said.

"We are asking for discovery of JFK assassination records related to the late George Joannides, chief of the Psychological Warfare Branch of the CIA's Miami Station in 1963," said Jefferson Morley, a researcher and Washington Post writer who is pursuing the CIA records.

"The CIA has acknowledged that it has an unspecified number of documents about Joannides' activities in the summer and fall of 1963 but says it will not release any of them for reasons of 'national security'," he explained.

A conference on the matter will be held at DC District Court next Wednesday.

The case has garnered significant outside support.

"As published authors of divergent views on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, we say the agency's position is spurious and untenable," wrote some two dozen assassination specialists in a joint letter on the Morley case.

("It's probably the first time ever that George Lardner and Oliver Stone agreed on a JFK question," Morley told Secrecy News.)

The CIA refusal "defies the will of Congress. It obscures the public record on a subject of enduring national interest. It encourages conspiracy mongering. And it undermines public confidence in the intelligence community at a time when collective security requires the opposite."

See "Blocked," New York Review of Books, August 11, 2005:

Mr Peacock has said the curriculum review being carried out could see history being taught as part of other subjects, such as French or modern studies, instead. The minister, who explains the thinking in our Education pages today, said: "It is about being less prescriptive from the centre about the detail of what teachers teach, and providing them with freedom, space and trust to exercise their professional judgment and decide what is most appropriate for their pupils."

But writing in The Scotsman today, Prof Devine says Scottish pupils should be receiving more, not less, history tuition in the classroom.

He says: "If this nonsensical suggestion is ever accepted, the Scottish Parliament may be presiding over the possible destruction of history in Scottish schools. It is now time for the Executive to decide whether they want to promote history's place in our education system or want to hasten its demise for good. At the very least, a formal ministerial statement on an issue so vital to the culture of the nation now and in the future is vitally required."

Meanwhile, widespread and systematic looting of Sumerian, Assyrian and Babylonian architectural sites across the country has resulted in the heritage of Mesopotamia, the cradle of human civilisation, continuing to disappear.

The ferocious violence in Iraq, after President George Bush officially declared a victorious conclusion to the war, has meant that US forces and their Iraqi allies do not have the time or manpower to look for either the stolen museum pieces or to protect the sites scattered around Iraq.

International law agencies are supposedly chasing the ransacked items from the museum. But the man who was tasked by the US government with tracking down the looted artefacts claims that there was never any effective liaison and investigators had to depend on temporary, ad-hoc arrangements to carry on the pursuit of highly sophisticated gangs of smugglers.

Matthew Bogdanos, a colonel in US Marines reserves, who worked as a Manhattan prosecutor, has written of his experience while he was in charge of the mission in a book, Thieves of Baghdad. He said 'There is no co-ordination. It's based on personal relationships, and when it works, it's a surprise.'

He adds: "Senior members of the Bush Administration who, with a sense of history, remember Watergate are deeply alarmed at the implications of this scandal: a distracted and weak administration, a demoralised CIA - and the war in Iraq. They worry about the comfort being given to America's enemies at a particularly dangerous time, when neither that war, nor the war on terror, is being won. By contrast, by 1973 America was no longer engaged in a hot war in Vietnam; and she had reliable allies.

"In many ways the situation looks more loaded with menace now. Meanwhile, out of all the mess, domestically the dreadful Bill Clinton somehow arises as having been almost a serious president - with all that may mean for Hillary's chances (not hitherto looking bright) at the coming election."

What took her so long?

CBS producer Mary Mapes with British soldiers and a young Afghan in Afghanistan in 2001. (Family Photo)

"I was extremely battered," she said in an interview yesterday. "I'd had months and months of having my head kicked around a soccer stadium by much of the Western world. I needed some time to regroup."

Mapes is now pushing a book, called "Truth and Duty," about the botched "60 Minutes II" story on Bush's National Guard service that led to her firing. She ladles out plenty of blame but largely defends what she still considers a fair piece of reporting, although an independent panel accused CBS of having "failed miserably" to authenticate the documents before rushing the story to air.

"I'm a human being; I do things wrong from the first breath I take in the morning," Mapes said. "I don't in any way feel I am without responsibility in this. . . . I probably shouldn't have been as pliable or as malleable as I was" when her bosses were finalizing the story. "This is a huge shortcoming. I didn't know how to say no. . . . I was trying very hard to please them."

She praises Dan Rather as "a tremendously loyal person" and says the story cost him his anchor job. "Dan was betrayed by a number of people, certainly by the company he has gotten up and worked for every morning for 40 years," Mapes said.

She is disdainful of Moonves, the CBS president who ordered the outside investigation. "He doesn't know journalism from dirt farming," Mapes said. In the book, noting that Moonves courted and then married "Early Show" anchor Julie Chen, she writes: "I used to say everything Les knows about journalism had been sexually transmitted. Now I know even that hasn't taught him much."

Zhang said she had consulted several seasoned hemp knitters in the prefecture before she came to the conclusion.

The wig dates back to years between the Warring States Period (475 - 221 BC) and the Western Han Dynasty (206 BC - 24 AD), said Liu Hong, curator of the museum in Liangshan, a community of the Yi ethnic group.

He said a joint archeological team sent by the museum and Sichuan University excavated 11 tombs in Sikai district, Zhaojue county in the Daliangshan Mountain in the past two weeks.

The tombs, built of slates and rectangular in shape, are typical to Liangshan prefecture but rarely found elsewhere in China. According to the ancient burial tradition in the region, the corpses were buried only after they were air dried in the wilderness, said Liu.

The identity of these tomb owners remains a mystery, though some historians assume they were forefathers of the Yi nationals living in the area today. "The new finding might provide some clues to scientists who are working to unravel the mystery," said Liu.

Besides the skeleton and his wig, the tombs also produced many earthen pots, a few pieces of bronzeware and three wooden rings engraved with dainty patterns, said Tang Liang, head of the archeological team.