In reaction to this and many similar stories, the Israeli public outcry was so great that Israel formed The Company for Restitution of Holocaust Victims' Assets, determined to help victims’ families receive what was rightfully theirs. The Hashava website explains that “Recently, the Company paid Shlomo [Gonen] over NIS 300,000 out of the money the bank agreed to transfer without admitting its historical liability regarding the victims' accounts.”

The campaign’s organizers are hopeful of finding the beneficiaries, and has spent years organizing and detailing the assets. They created an easy to use website, hashava.org.il/eng so people will feel comfortable looking at the list of assets and submitting an application. They also opened a 24-hour hotline: +972-3-516-4117.

But what if the owners cannot be found? The assets, according to new Israeli law, will be used to help Holocaust survivors in need, and fund Holocaust educational projects.

Kubicek supervises a crew of 15 archeologists who are under a tight deadline to recover as many artifacts from the site as possible. The crew will work until August and hopes to unearth about 50 percent of the artifacts surveyors believe exist on the property, department of transportation officials said.

The excavations isn’t being done willy-nilly, site archeologist Ryan Harke said. Crews are using soil analysis to find artifact deposits known as middens.

Harke said middens are recognizable because they create breaks in normal soil layering. He said they stick out like sore thumbs, and they’re chock full of artifacts.

“They’re like ancient garbage dumps,” Harke said.

Kubicek said some middens have concentrations of discarded items that show ancient people used certain spots at the site for specific tasks, such as tool making or pottery crafting.

With a shovel and a trowel, archeologist William Eichmann scraped away a 5-centimeter layer of black topsoil from a pit on the site’s north end.

Eichmann dropped the soil into a bucket and poured it through a large mesh sieve. The sieve caught some key artifacts: flakes of chert rock, possibly discarded by weapon makers in the Mississippian era of prehistoric Native Americans.

“Feel these remnants,” Eichmann said. “Even after being in the ground all this time, they’re still almost razor sharp.”

He said the people who likely left behind the shards ranged the glacial hills of southern Wisconsin to the Galena area in northwest Illinois from 1,200 to 500 years ago.

Eichmann said he could tell the shards were from weapon point production because their color shows they were heated, a process commonly used by ancient toolmakers.

While crews have found no human remains at the site, other items include pottery and tool fragments from the Woodland people, an ancient native group that lived in the region 2,500 to 800 years ago.

One significant artifact crews unearthed came from the south end of the site, on a tree-choked hill overlooking a bog to the east.

Kubicek said he believes it’s a Folsom point, a type of stone spear head used by hunters in the Paleo era—one of the earliest prehistoric cultures in Wisconsin.

“It’s probably isolated. It’s the only item we’ve found from that period,” he said.

Kubicek said if crews find pieces of carbon or burned plant material near an artifact, lab workers offsite could use carbon dating to come within decades of pinpointing its age.

“That system’s gotten better over the years. It’s usually pretty damn close,” Kubicek said.

Kubicek said if the weapon from the south hill actually is a Folsom point, it could be 10,000 years old.

The bulk of artifacts found at the site will be sent to UW-Milwaukee for further analysis of their composition, age and what cultures might have used them, Kubicek said.

Some of the items could end up in museums, or at state-supported historical societies, as part of an agreement between the state, Native American groups and scientists involved in the dig, officials said.

Currently, there are no plans to make the site a protected historical site.

“It’s a matter of getting a reported document of the pictures and the history of what was there. It’s about documentation now and preserving the documents that are recovered,” Department of Transportation highway project manager Mark Vesperman said in a phone interview.

After that’s done, Vesperman said, the Finch site’s days are numbered. It’s on private property, but sale is pending. Soon, the state will take over the bulk of the site.

Vesperman said he’s aware people passing on Highway 26 are curious about all the workers, tarps and buckets at the site.

“We could put a sign out warning people that it’s an archeological site, but that’s like the Wizard of Oz telling people not to look behind the curtain,” he said.

Vesperman said crews won’t necessarily turn away visitors who are curious about the dig, but people aren’t allowed to interfere with the work or do any digging of their own.

Kubicek said because the area is so undisturbed, crews are prepared for a continued flood of visitors to the site. He expects to find significant items until the very end of the dig.

As he walked along a foot-beat path past two open pits near the bottom of a hill, Kubicek stopped to pick up a small, white fragment lying in the dirt.

“Huh,” he said, tossing the piece back to the ground. “Nothing but a deer bone.”

Reporters were briefed on the statistical information at the Pentagon as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton addressed the United Nations during a conference to review of the nuclear nonproliferation treaty.

Active warheads are those ready to be used within a short period of time, while inactive warheads are maintained but have key parts removed from them, the official said.

The United States has thousands more nuclear warheads that have not been dismantled but are slated to be taken apart. Those weapons have key parts removed from them and are not maintained, the official said. The warheads are only being kept secure and it would take a good deal of effort and money to restore them to working order, the official said.

The Pentagon did not provide a figure on the number waiting to be dismantled, but did acknowledge there are thousands.

Numerous reports about how and when Sean died have circulated over the years; the most widely repeated theory is that he was captured by Vietnamese communists, turned over to Khmer Rouge, and then held with other Western journalists before being crudely executed. The commercial value of the Sean Flynn story — a dashing, brash son flying headlong into war to stake out a reputation independent of his movie idol father — has not escaped Hollywood's eye. A film company has purchased the rights to Two of the Missing, an account of Flynn and Stone's saga. Heath Ledger was reportedly considering taking the role of Flynn before his own death in 2008.

Despite the fabled search for Flynn, the two men who believe they found his remains have not exactly been thanked for their work. Australian David MacMillan, 29, and Briton Keith Rotheram, 60, turned over a skull, teeth and bones to the U.S. embassy in Phnom Penh, which sent them on to the military office in Hawaii in charge of finding missing Americans from past conflicts. This outfit's initial assessment was that the bones may be those of a Southeast Asian, but further testing is underway. They have emphasized that amateur digs are discouraged because they can damage evidence, noting that in this case, "The remains are badly fragmented due to the manner in which they were recovered." The office's spokesperson stopped short of saying MacMillan and Rotheram had broken any laws, but contrary to standard protocol for exhumations, the pair used a mechanical digger with a serrated scoop to remove a layer of topsoil covering what they believed to be Sean's gravesite. The military described the area as "disturbed" when a team was sent there for a follow-up excavation, and said they found additional bone fragments in the hole of the previous dig.

The media took it from there, reporting the shocking news that the most famous case of cannibalism in American history could well be a myth. Even a blogger at the majestic New York Times was taken in, throwing up a fanciful post headlined "No Cannibalism Among the Donner Party?"

One critical thing to understand is that the Donner Party was stranded at multiple locations. Most members of the party were trapped at Donner Lake; others were huddled at a site called Alder Creek, about seven miles back on the trail. As the months-long drama played out, some who tried to escape became trapped again and perished along the way.

Robbins analyzed bone fragments found only at the Alder Creek location. Indeed, some of the Donner sites have never been located and thus cannot be excavated.