Hi all, this is just a note to let you know that I will be away at SXSW for the rest of this week, so regular postings will be on hold until I return on Monday, March 22. Until then…the news is up to you!

Please post all the history news you find, with your commentary, on A Forum About History. When I return I’ll post the best stories, with credit to the finder (of course).

They can be the latest developing stories in any of the historic fields, or your thoughts and opinions on existing discoveries/lectures you have attended.

A Forum About History is a great place to get your history fix, allowing you to discuss anything and everything history-related with like-minded individuals. This is a great week to turn it into a thriving online community.

You can click here to register for free! Let’s start populating this thing!

The brain of a child who lived in the 13th century has been found preserved, complete with neurons and cerebral cells.

An international team of researchers has identified intact neurons and cerebral cells in a mummified medieval brain, according to a study published in the journal Neuroimage.

Found inside the skull of a 13th century A.D. 18-month-old child from northwestern France, the brain had been fixed in formalin solution since its discovery in 1998.

“Although reduced by about 80 percent of its original weight, it has retained its anatomical characteristics and most of all, to a certain degree its cell structures,” anatomist and palaeopathologist Frank Ruhli, head of the Swiss Mummy Project at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, told Discovery News.

The brain was the only tissue preserved in the infant’s skeletonized body.

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The body of a headless man has been unearthed in an ancient Mayan chamber which is adourned with paintings depicting various acts of torture.

Found under the Temple of Murals at the Maya site of Bonampak, the man was either a captive warrior who was sacrificed—perhaps one of the victims in the mural—or a relative of the city’s ruler, scientists speculate.

Whoever he was, “the place of the burial tells us that the person buried there was special,” said anthropologist Emiliano Gallaga Murrieta via e-mail.

At the time of the murals’ creation, about A.D. 790, Bonampak was a city of thousands. Today its most prominent vestige is a long-overgrown, partially excavated acropolis in the middle of a vast tropical rain forest in the southern state of Chiapas.

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The remains of what may be a French fort dating back to the 1730s has been found on the Vermont shore of Lake Champlain.

When engineers determined the old Lake Champlain Bridge was unsafe and needed to be replaced, it seemed like the regrettable end of a historic landmark. The project, though, has led to a major archaeological discovery.

Scientists have found what appears to be a nearly 300-year-old French fort. The fort’s discovery would be significant in its own right, but it would also represent the first physical evidence of a substantial French settlement known to have existed on the Vermont shore of Lake Champlain starting in the 1730s.

“It’s a hugely exciting find — one of the great and exciting finds of a lifetime really,” said Elsa Gilbertson, administrator for the Chimney Point State Historic Site, where the apparent fort was discovered.

“You would be hard pressed to find a more significant archaeological site in Vermont,” said John Crock, director of the University of Vermont’s Consulting Archaeology Program, which conducted the dig in cooperating with the Vermont Agency of Transportation and Division for Historic Preservation.

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A hydroelectric dam is threatening to flood El Porvenir, an unexplored pre-Columbian holy site.

The government plans to flood the valley in which El Porvenir lies to create a hydroelectric dam, wiping out the stones and leaving archaeologists unable to determine whether the site was built by a local indigenous tribe.

True examination of the site has been limited due to the remote location and difficult working conditions — the area is know for its particularly aggressive lancehead vipers.

Archaeologist Reina Duran, director of the Tachira Museum in the state capital San Cristobal, said she first visited El Porvenir in 1979 and worked on it each dry season for 10 years. “During those years when we came and went it was overgrown and full of mud again,” she said. “Every time we arrived at the site we had to begin the work again.”

Today, only a small patch of the 25-meter-wide by 50-meter-high structure can be seen. It is flanked on both sides by streams that flow into the nearby Dorados River, or Golden River. In 1977 a local journalist wrote that it looked “something like a pyramid,” and strong debate has prevailed ever since over its origins and uses. Some biologists claimed it was a natural geological formation but that’s not a theory shared by Duran.

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