Laser-scanning technology reveals that the Cambodian lost city of Mahendraparvata, dating back to a time before Angkor Wat, was much more extensive than previously thought. The latest word about the high-tech hunt for hidden ruins came over the weekend in an on-the-scene report from Australia's Fairfax Media.

Archaeologists have known about the Hindu-Buddhist-influenced city, situated about 25 miles (40 kilometers) north of the better-known Angkor Wat temple complex, for decades. Some of the ruins rank among the tourist attractions on the holy Khmer mountain known as Phnom Kulen ("Mountain of the Lychees"). However, experts weren't sure how extensive the site was ... until now.

"We're talking about a city that is more than 1,000 years old and is all underground. If you didn't know, you might think it's natural," Stephane De Greefe, the archaeological project's lead cartographer, told Cambodia Daily. 

The Khmer Archaeology Lidar Consortium set up an aerial survey of the Mahendraparvata site and its surroundings, using a technique known as lidar (short for "light detection and ranging"). The process involves flying an instrument-equipped helicopter over the area, bouncing pulses of laser light off the ground below, and then analyzing the scattered light readings to produce a 3-D map of the terrain beneath the jungle's vegetation.

Billions of data points and about 5,000 digital photographs were collected during a week's worth of aerial surveys, taking in an area amounting to 143 square miles (370 square kilometers).

'Eureka moment'
University of Sydney archaeologist Damian Evans told Fairfax Media that seeing the map displayed on a computer screen marked the "eureka moment" in a years-long search. The readings revealed dozens of temple sites, hundreds of mysterious mounds that may represent burial sites, and traces of canals and roads criss-crossing the area.

An on-the-ground expedition followed, during which the team came across two temple sites that may still be intact, and a cave with centuries-old carvings that may have been a refuge for hermits during the Angkor period.

Phnom Kulen served as a center of the Angkor civilization between the ninth and the 16th centuries. Tradition has it that Mahendraparvata was where the founder of the Khmer Empire, Jayavarman II, celebrated his people's freedom from Javanese control in the year 802. Angkor Wat was built nearby more than 300 years later.

How a city got lost
Why did Mahendraparvata fade away? "We see from the imagery that the landscape was completely devoid of vegetation" at some point during the site's history, Evans told Fairfax Media's Lindsay Murdoch. "One theory we are looking at is that the severe environmental impact of deforestation and the dependence on water management led to the demise of the civilization. ... Perhaps it became too successful to the point of becoming unmanageable."

Some reports have made it sound as if Mahendraparvata was only now being discovered, but Evans told Cambodia Daily that the real point behind the research has to do with how lidar resolved the debate over the lost city's extent. Lidar surveys are becoming a routine part of "lost city" quests — including the discovery of centuries-old ruins in Honduras that may be linked to the legendary city of Ciudad Blanca, and an extensive survey of Caracol, a Maya center in Belize.

Details about the Cambodian project are to be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Update for 6:30 p.m. ET June 17: The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences just sent journalists a pre-publication draft of the paper submitted by Evans and his colleagues — suggesting that Mahendraparvata as well as Angkor Wat were part of a vast urban network.

"We identify an entire, previously undocumented, formally planned urban landscape into which the major temples such as Angkor Wat were integrated," the researchers write. "Beyond these newly identified urban landscapes, the lidar data reveal anthropogenic changes to the landscape on a vast scale, and lend further weight to an emerging consensus that infrastructural complexity, unsustainable modes of subsistence and climate variation were crucial factors in the decline of the classical Khmer civilization."

The researchers say their mapping reveals a pattern of regular "city blocks," within which mounds and ponds were built to create temple precincts. Such cityscapes existed in ancient Angkor as well as the Phnom Kulen region and another area farther northeast, known as Koh Ker.

"These 'urban temples' are not isolated; rather, they are nodes in an increasingly concentrated medieval cityscape," they said.

Evans et al. / PNAS

A map of northwest Cambodia provides an overview of the areas where lidar imagery was acquired, indicated with yellow shading. The background data is from NASA's Shuttle Radar Topography Mission.

Evans et al. / PNAS

Lidar imagery shows the central area of Angkor, with the "walled city" of Angkor Thom above Angkor Wat. Red lines indicate post-medieval features, including roads and canals. The other features are from the Angkor era.

The paper echoes Evans' comments about the potential environmental roots of the Khmer Empire's decline: "The archaeological record shows that episodes of failure were commonplace within the hydraulic infrastructure within the medieval period. ... For several centuries at Angkor, episodic renovation of the water management system offered a series of provisional solutions that were adequate for mitigating the risk of low rainfall on an annual scale. Eventually, however, the civilization was confronted with decadal-scale megadroughts in the 14th and 15th centuries."

The researchers speculate that those megadroughts triggered the doom of Cambodia's megacities. In that, they see a parallel to the classic Maya civilization, which is thought to have gone into decline due to a similar pattern of deforestation and drought. And they include a chilling observation about our own era, attributed to University of Sydney archaeologist Roland Fletcher: "If the infrastructure of low-density cities is inherently liable to be or to become a constraint on the viability of a city’s daily life, then this is an issue of some serious consequence for our engagement with a future of giant, low-density cities."

More about lost cities:

• Scientists share images of Honduran ruins
• Atlantis thought to be found off Spanish coast
• Lost pyramids spotted by space scientists
• Gallery: Seven tales of cities lost and found

The study to be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is titled "Uncovering Archaeological Landscapes at Angkor Using Lidar." In addition to Evans, Fletcher and De Greef, the authors include Christophe Pottier, Jean-Baptiste Chevance, Dominique Soutif, Boun Suy Tan, Sokrithy Im, Darith Ea, Tina Tin, Samnang Kim, Christopher Cromarty, Kasper Hanus, Pierre Baty, Robert Kuszinger, Ichita Shimoda and Glenn Boornazian.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the NBC News Science Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with NBCNews.com's stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

This story was originally published on Mon Jun 17, 2013 3:45 PM EDT

Michel Py / UFRAL

This pressing platform found in Lattes, France, dates back to 425 BC. It contained traces of tartaric acid from grapes, indicating it was used to make wine and not olive oil.

The first wines stomped and fermented in France included brews flavored with pine resins and rosemary. The additives, revealed in a new analysis of wine-making storage tools and containers dating back to 425 B.C., could have been flavoring, but also may have served a healing role.

"[Wine] was sort of the medicine of the ancient world," Patrick McGovern, an expert on ancient alcohol at the University of Pennsylvania, told NBC News. A fermented beverage containing alcohol not only dissolved organic medicinal additions, it was also safer than drinking water, which could contain diseases.

Traces of tartaric acid in ancient amphoras unearthed at an archaeological site in Lattes, France, confirm that the jars contained grape wine, along with the aromatic and herbaceous additives. McGovern and his colleagues explain their findings in a paper published online Monday by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Wine making has its origins in Iran around 9,000 years ago. By the 7th century B.C., the Gallic and Celtic residents of southern France were slinging back imported wines, shipped in from Etruria (Tuscany) in the holds of cargo ships. The first French wine makers were Greeks living in the colony of Massalia — today's Marseille — who started making and jarring a grape brew around 525 B.C., archaeological evidence indicates. 

Remains of a vineyard and tools for wine making have also been found in Lattes — then called Lattara — a settlement on the banks of a lagoon, up the coast and further west of Marseille. The first biochemical confirmation of French wine-making has come from this coastal dig.

McGovern and his colleagues tested shards of amphoras (some of which originated in Tuscany and others that came from Marseille) found in Lattes and report that the insides were coated in pine resins. The analysis also revealed traces of camphor that could have come from herbs such as rosemary, thyme or basil. 

A pressing platform that was found nearby — dating back to 425 B.C., with a bowl and a spout for draining out liquids — also contained tartaric acid, confirming that it was used in the wine-making process. 

"It was a source of discussion among archaeologists at the site as to whether it was used for olives or grapes," Michael Dietler, an expert on ancient feasts and a professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago, told NBC News in an email. "It is good to have some reliable evidence about this." 

"The importance of the amphora is that it's about marketing," Nicholas Purcell, who studies the ancient Greeks and Romans at the University of Oxford, told NBC News. Looking back at this point in wine history, Purcell suggested that the vessel is of more significance than what it contained. 

He has a "hunch" that people all over the Mediterranean had been making wines for their own consumption for years before, but the fact that they could preserve it and store in big vessels like the amphoras meant it was set to travel long distances and last a while. "What I take away is some quite spectacular moments in the commercialization of the wine trade," he said.

More on ancient food and drink: 

• Cheers! Eight ancient drinks uncorked by science
• Earliest fish stews were cooked in Japan during last ice age, experts say
• Say cheese! Central European farmers did, 7,500 years ago

In addition to McGovern, the authors of "Beginning of Viniculture in France" include Benjamin Luley, Nuria Rovira, Armen Mirzoian, Michael Callahan, Karen Smith, Gretchen Hall, Theodore Davidson and Joshua Henkin.

Nidhi Subbaraman writes about science and technology. Follow her on Facebook, Twitter and Google+.

Dan Balilty / AP

A damaged fragment of the Dead Sea Scrolls lies in Israel's scriptural repository.

For years, fragments from the 2,000-year-old Dead Sea Scrolls have been sold quietly to evangelical Christian collectors and institutions in the United States — even though Israel regards those sales as illegal. Now the transactions, and the frictions associated with them, have come under an international spotlight.

One big reason is that the scraps are so valuable, in financial as well as archaeological terms. The reported price tags for the fragments range up to $35 million or more. All those texts could shed new light on the origins of Jewish scriptures, ranging from Genesis and other books of the Bible to the messianic rules that were laid down by the mysterious community behind the scrolls.

"They are really small pieces, but they are important because you may have two or three lines that may have not been found anywhere else. And suddenly it adds a lot to the history of the Dead Sea Scrolls. There is at least one rather amazing discovery in one of them,"  Jerry Pattengale, who oversees 12 fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the privately held Green Collection, recently told The Associated Press.

Pattengale declined to discuss the discovery further, saying that he had to wait until the finding was published.

Many of the fragments sold on the private market come from William Kando, a Palestinian Christian whose family has held onto a collection of pieces from the Dead Sea Scrolls for decades. Kando's father, Khalil Eskander Shahin, was a Bethlehem cobbler and antiquities dealer who bought and sold some of the Dead Sea Scrolls after the initial discovery by Bedouin shepherds in 1946.

During the 1967 Middle East War, Israel seized thousands of scroll fragments that were held in east Jerusalem. Under pressure from Israeli authorities, Shahin (who came to be known by his nickname, "Kando") sold the Israelis a 26.7-foot-long (8.15-meter-long) scroll of parchment that was hidden in a shoebox beneath a floor tile in his bedroom. That manuscript, which describes the construction and operation of an idealized Jewish Temple, is known worldwide as the Temple Scroll.

Dan Balilty / AP

An Israel Antiquities Authority employee works on fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls in Jerusalem on May 10. Written mostly on animal skin parchment about 2,000 years ago, the manuscripts are the earliest copies of the Hebrew Bible ever found, and the oldest written evidence of the roots of Judaism and Christianity in the Holy Land.

Dan Balilty / AP

Lena Libman, right, head of the Israel Antiquities Authority's Dead Sea Scrolls Conservation Lab, holds fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls in Jerusalem.

Dan Balilty / AP

Lena Libman, head of the Israel Antiquities Authority's Dead Sea Scrolls Conservation Lab, holds up fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Many of the fragments are the size of postage stamps.

Dan Balilty / AP

A worker with the Israel Antiquities Authority photographs pieces from the Dead Sea Scrolls in Jerusalem.

The Christian connection
The elder Kando had many more fragments hidden away, and those were eventually transferred to Switzerland, his son told AP. After the father's death in 1993, the sons began selling off the family collection. Through a series of sales, fragments ended up in the hands of such institutions as Azusa Pacific University, an evangelical Christian college near Los Angeles; and Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas.

Randall Price, founder and president of the Texas-based World of the Bible Ministries and a professor at Liberty University in Virginia, said he met with William Kando in 2010 and discussed the sales of the fragments. "He is very insistent that the remaining fragments go to institutions that deal with the Bible so that they can be shared with Christian believers," Price wrote afterward.

Kando told AP that he offered to sell the remaining fragments in the family's collection to institutions in Israel, including the government's antiquities authority — but that they couldn't afford to buy them.

"If anyone is interested, we are ready to sell," he said. "These are the most important things in the world."

The Genesis fragment
Israeli authorities are reportedly interested in one scrap in particular: a well-preserved, butterfly-shaped fragment of Genesis that's about the size of a cereal box. The manuscript, which was recently exhibited at the Fort Worth seminary, includes passages that tell the story of Joseph and his "coat of many colors." Price said that fragment was valued at $35 million or more, but Kando told AP that his family is not participating in any new negotiations for scroll sales. He said the Genesis fragment and the other scrolls that remain in the family's possession are currently locked away in a Swiss safe-deposit box.

The Israeli government, meanwhile, sees the scrolls and other ancient Jewish texts as cultural treasures — and in recent years, authorities have clamped down on what they regard as illegal sales. More than 10,000 fragments of the scrolls are being studied in a climate-controlled, government-operated lab in Jerusalem. The Israel Antiquities Authority wants to see Kando's fragments added to that collection — but says that his asking price is too high. It's threatening to seek the seizure of any pieces that hit the market.

"I told Kando many years ago, as far as I'm concerned, he can die with those scrolls," Amir Ganor, head of the authority's anti-looting squad, told AP. "The scrolls' only address is the State of Israel."

More about the Dead Sea Scrolls:

• Google puts Dead Sea Scrolls online
• Is mystery of scrolls' authorship solved?
• Gallery: 8 Jewish archaeological finds

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the NBC News Science Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with NBCNews.com's stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

UTL Scientific

Readings from a laser-mapping system were combined to produce a 3-D map of the Honduran rain forest, and then the vegetation was virtually lifted up from the scene to reveal the ruins of a circular structure.

A high-tech team of scientists and filmmakers shared pictures of what appears to have been a centuries-old civilization in Honduras, one year after they used laser-mapping technology to identify traces of structures in the thick jungle.

The square-shaped and rounded structures, seen in computerized elevation maps of a rugged rain forest, may have been the last vestiges of pyramids, palaces and houses in a fabled settlement known as "la Ciudad Blanca," or the White City.

Tales of Ciudad Blanca have circulated since at least 1526, when the Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortez told King Charles V about a mysterious province called Xucutaco that "must exceed Mexico in riches and equal it in the great size of the towns, the multitude of people and the government thereof." Many explorers have gone in search of the vanished city, driving deep into some of Honduras' roughest and most inaccessible rain forests. Neither riches nor ruins were found.

Nevertheless, the sagas inspired documentary filmmaker Steve Elkins to mount yet another search, this time using an aerial mapping technology known as light detection and ranging, or lidar.

How lidar works
An airplane equipped with the lidar mapping apparatus can bounce laser light off the terrain below, and then gather millions of the reflected readings. Those readings can be interpreted by high-powered software that can produce 3-D maps with an elevation resolution of less than 4 inches (10 centimeters). Such maps can even be "filtered" to peel back the dense vegetation and see the contours of the land below. Using lidar, archaeologists can conduct land surveys that might have required months or years to do on the ground.

"We use lidar to pinpoint where human structures are by looking for linear shapes and rectangles. Nature doesn't work in straight lines," Colorado State University's Stephen Leisz, a member of UTL Scientific's archaeological team, said in a statement from the American Geophysical Union.

UTL / Colorado State University

The left image shows a map derived from lidar readings of rainforest terrain. The readings associated with vegetation have been removed to create the right image, which shows the outlines of a square structure.

UTL Scientific

This lidar focuses on a formation in Honduras' Mosquitia rain forest known as "Structure B."

Archaeologists once thought the rain forests of Central and South America were too rugged to allow for large, highly organized communities like the one described by Cortez. But over the past decade or so, researchers have found evidence to argue that the forests were once much more highly managed by native populations. The idea that the ancient peoples of the Americas created complex cities and roadways in what are now wild forests no longer seems as radical as it once did. That's what inspired Elkins and his colleagues to go ahead with their search.

An 'easy' discovery
A year ago, the team mapped about 60 square miles (160 square kilometers) of Honduras' Mosquitia rain forest, and sent the data back to University of Houston engineer Bill Carter. Carter, who works with the National Science Foundation's National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping, identified the regular outlines of artificial structures after just a few minutes of analysis.

"It was kind of surprising how easy it was to find them," Carter told The New Yorker.

It took months more to map hundreds of ruins at several sites in the target area. On Wednesday, Elkins and his team shared some their images to fellow researchers during a session at a geophysical science conference in Cancun, Mexico, organized by the AGU. The laser images unveiled this week illustrate how structures could be identified beneath the vegetation, but do not show the settlements in a wider context.

"We can't show the overall place because we'd like to protect the site" from treasure hunters and looters, Elkins explained in the AGU's news release.

He said that the UTL Scientific team plans to explore the structures on the ground later this year. (UTL stands for "Under the Lidar".) Eventually, Elkins and fellow filmmaker Bill Benenson, who is underwriting the expedition, plan to produce a documentary about the latest search for Ciudad Blanca.

More about lost cities:

• How lasers helped spot lost city in Honduras
• Lost city of Atlantis may lie off Spain's coast
• Gallery: Seven tales of cities lost and found

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the NBC News Science Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with NBCNews.com's stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

BELIZE CITY — A construction company has essentially destroyed one of Belize's largest Maya pyramids with backhoes and bulldozers to extract crushed rock for a road-building project, authorities announced Monday.

The head of the Belize Institute of Archaeology, Jaime Awe, said the destruction at the Nohmul complex in northern Belize was detected late last week. The ceremonial center dates back at least 2,300 years and is the most important site in northern Belize, near the border with Mexico.

"It's a feeling of Incredible disbelief because of the ignorance and the insensitivity ... they were using this for road fill," Awe said. "It's like being punched in the stomach, it's just so horrendous."

Nohmul sat in the middle of a privately owned sugar cane field, and lacked the even stone sides frequently seen in reconstructed or better-preserved pyramids. But Awe said the builders could not possibly have mistaken the pyramid mound, which is about 100 feet (30 meters) tall, for a natural hill because the ruins were well-known and the landscape there is naturally flat.

"These guys knew that this was an ancient structure. It's just bloody laziness," Awe said.

Photos from the scene showed backhoes clawing away at the pyramid's sloping sides, leaving an isolated core of limestone cobbles at the center, with what appears to be a narrow Maya chamber dangling above one clawed-out section.

"Just to realize that the ancient Maya acquired all this building material to erect these buildings, using nothing more than stone tools and quarried the stone, and carried this material on their heads, using tump lines," said Awe. "To think that today we have modern equipment, that you can go and excavate in a quarry anywhere, but that this company would completely disregard that and completely destroyed this building. Why can't these people just go and quarry somewhere that has no cultural significance? It's mind-boggling."

AP

A backhoe claws away at the sloping sides of the Nohmul complex in northern Belize on Friday.

Belizean police said they are conducting an investigation, and criminal charges are possible. The Nohmul complex sits on private land, but Belizean law says that any pre-Hispanic ruins are under government protection.

The Belize community-action group Citizens Organized for Liberty Through Action called the destruction of the archaeological site "an obscene example of disrespect for the environment and history."

Not the first time
It is not the first time it's happened in Belize, a country of about 350,000 people that is largely covered in jungle and dotted with hundreds of Maya ruins, though few as large as Nohmul.

Norman Hammond, an emeritus professor of archaeology at Boston University who worked in Belizean research projects in the 1980s, wrote in an email that "bulldozing Maya mounds for road fill is an endemic problem in Belize (the whole of the San Estevan center has gone, both of the major pyramids at Louisville, other structures at Nohmul, many smaller sites), but this sounds like the biggest yet."

Arlen Chase, chairman of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Central Florida, said, "Archaeologists are disturbed when such things occur, but there is only a very limited infrastructure in Belize that can be applied to cultural heritage management."

"Unfortunately, they (destruction of sites) are all too common, but not usually in the center of a large Maya site," Chase wrote.

He said there had probably still been much to learn from the site. "A great deal of archaeology was undertaken at Nohmul in the '70s and '80s, but this only sampled a small part of this large center."

Heritage disappearing
Belize isn't the only place where the handiwork of the far-flung and enormously prolific Maya builders is being destroyed. The ancient Mayas spread across southeastern Mexico and through Guatemala, Honduras and Belize.

"I don't think I am exaggerating if I say that every day a Maya mound is being destroyed for construction in one of the countries where the Maya lived," wrote Francisco Estrada-Belli, a professor at Tulane University's Anthropology Department. "Unfortunately, this destruction of our heritage is irreversible but many don't take it seriously. The only way to stop it is by showing that it is a major crime and people can and will go to jail for it."

Robert Rosenswig, an archaeologist at the State University of New York at Albany, described the difficult and heartbreaking work of trying to salvage information at the nearby site of San Estevan following similar destruction around 2005.

"Bulldozing damage at San Estevan is extensive and the site is littered with Classic period potsherds," he wrote in an academic paper describing the scene. "We spent a number of days at the beginning of the 2005 season trying to figure out the extent of the damage .... after scratching our heads for many days, a bulldozer showed up and we realized that what appear to be mounds, when overgrown with chest-high vegetation, are actually recently bulldozed garbage piles."

However small the compensation, bulldozing pyramids is one very brutal way of revealing the inner cores of the structures, which were often built up in periodic stages of construction.

"The one advantage of this massive destruction, to the core site, is that the remains of early domestic activity are now visible on the surface," Rosenswig wrote. 

Associated Press writer Patrick E. Jones reported this story in Belize, and Mark Stevenson reported from Mexico City. Copyright 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Experts have provided the grisly goods to back up 17th-century accounts of cannibalism during the Jamestown colony's "starving time" — including a skull that shows signs of being chopped at and pried apart.

"Our team has discovered partial human remains before, but the location of the discovery, visible damage to the skull and marks on the bones immediately made us realize this finding was unusual," Bill Kelso, chief archaeologist of the Jamestown Rediscovery Project in Virginia, said in a news release issued Wednesday. Specimens from the Jamestown site were laid out during a Washington news conference.

Written accounts described acts of cannibalism during the winter of 1609-1610, when sickness, starvation and attacks from native tribes in the area put the two-year-old Virginia settlement to its sternest test. Scores of the colonists who crowded inside James Fort died that winter. One of the accounts described a husband who killed his pregnant wife and salted her flesh for storage and consumption. (The husband was executed for the crime.)

There was no reason to doubt the accounts, but in the course of their decades-long excavation, archaeologists were on the lookout for remains that might tell more of the story behind Jamestown's hardships. They found the evidence in the form of a partial human skull and other bones lying in a 17th-century trash deposit. Kelso enlisted the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History to sort out the clues. Colonial Williamsburg and Preservation Virginia helped provide historical context.

'Jane of Jamestown'
Based on an analysis of the bones — including the skull and its teeth, as well as the size of a tibia and bone growth in a knee joint — experts determined that the remains came from a 14-year-old female, nicknamed "Jane." The isotopic distribution of elements in the bones suggested that she consumed a European diet of wheat and meat.

Carolyn Kaster / AP

Doug Owsley, division head for physical anthropology at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, displays the skull and a facial reconstruction for "Jane of Jamestown" during a news conference at the museum in Washington on Wednesday.

Carolyn Kaster / AP

Strike marks are seen on the skull of "Jane of Jamestown" at the National Museum of Natural History.

The grisliest findings were reflected in the wounds to the head: The chief of the museum's division of physical anthropology, Douglas Owsley, identified chops to the forehead and the back of the cranium to open the head. Knife cuts on the jaw and the cheekbone could have been made during removal of the flesh. Other markings suggest that the head's left side was punctured and pried apart.

The scientists' conclusion: Jane was butchered for her meat.

"She was almost certainly dead when she was cannibalized," Jim Horn, Colonial Williamsburg's vice president of research and historical interpretation, told NBC News. "The way the cuts are configured on the skull points to the fact that she was dead. if she was not, there would have been more signs of a struggle, and the marks would have been more irregular."

Based on the bone analysis and the disposition of the remains at the site, researchers believe Jane arrived in Jamestown in August 1609, just months before the crisis. She might have been a maidservant, or the daughter of a colonist. Chances are that she died in January or February of 1610, from either sickness or starvation, Horn said.

"The 'starving time' was brought about by a trifecta of disasters: disease, a serious shortage of provisions, and a full-scale siege by the Powhatans that cut off Jamestown from outside relief," he said in Wednesday's news release. "Survival cannibalism was a last resort; a desperate means of prolonging life at a time when the settlement teetered on the brink of extinction."

When Lord De La Warr and his relief party arrived in Jamestown in the spring of 1610, he ordered the "cleansing" of the ruined settlement. "It must have looked like a charnel house when he arrived," Horn said. That's probably how Jane's remains came to be deposited amid a trash heap in an abandoned cellar, he said.

Jane's legacy
Jamestown went on to become the Virginia Colony's capital from 1619 to 1699. In the late 17th century, the settlement was devastated by a series of fires. At the dawn of the 18th century, Virginia's capital was moved to Williamsburg, and old Jamestown faded away. Decades later, the descendants of Jamestown's settlers played their part in the creation of the United States of America.

Researchers have not matched up Jane's bones with a specific member of the Jamestown colony, and although DNA samples have been saved for future analysis, they say there's little hope of identifying modern relatives for comparative genetic testing. But the excavation continues, and Jane's remains provide graphic evidence of Jamestown's desperation.

Horn acknowledges that the story of Jane has a grisly fascination to it, but he says there's a broader significance as well. "It revolves around what it took to successfully establish European colonies in the New World," he told NBC News. "In the early phase of European colonization of the Americas, most colonies actually failed. They failed for the kinds of reasons that we discovered at Jamestown. ... Most colonies lasted no more than six to 12 months. What we're looking in the case of Jamestown is a remarkable story of survival and endurance."

More about Jamestown:

• 400-year-old seeds found in Jamestown
• 'New World' shows off a new Jamestown
• Colonial armor found in Jamestown pit

An exhibition that tells the story of Jane and the survival of Jamestown, England's first permanent settlement in America, is due to open May 3 at Historic Jamestowne in Virginia. Jane's bones will be put on exhibit temporarily, and eventually they will be "respectfully reinterred," Horn said. The facility has also produced a book and DVD on the subject, titled "Jane." However, details of the discovery have not yet been published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Takeshi Inomata

Workers stand on Platform A-24 at the Ceibal archaeological site in Guatemala. Archaeologists say the dig revealed the oldest monumental construction in the Maya lowlands.

Archaeologists say that ceremonial structures unearthed in Guatemala are centuries older than they expected — and that the findings point to new theories for the rise of Maya culture.

"The origin of Maya civilization was more complex than previously thought," the University of Arizona's Takeshi Inomata, lead researcher for a study appearing in this week's issue of the journal Science, told reporters on Thursday. Even though all this happened 3,000 years ago, the findings could provide fresh insights about social change in general, he said.

The Maya had their heyday in Mexico and Central America between the year 250 and 900, but the roots of their culture go much farther back. There are several schools of thought about how their distinctive culture arose: Some archaeologists say the central features of Maya cultural life, including grand ceremonies centered on broad plazas and pyramids, were borrowed from Mexico's older Olmec civilization. Others say those features arose internally, without much outside influence.

Inomata said the excavations at Ceibal, in Guatemala's Maya lowlands, suggest a more complicated scenario. Over the course of seven years, he and his colleagues dug down more than 50 feet, analyzed the layers of sediment, and did scores of radiocarbon-dating tests to trace the evolution of Ceibal's structures. They concluded that Ceibal's Maya rulers started building ceremonial plazas and platforms around 1000 B.C., and had turned those structures into a central pyramid and plaza by 800 B.C. 

That would mean Ceibal's residents were developing the architectural and religious hallmarks of Maya society before the first appearance of those hallmarks in Olmec society, at La Venta, hundreds of miles away on Mexico's Gulf Coast. La Venta's ceremonial structures have been dated to about 800 B.C.

Science / AAAS

Ceibal lies in Guatemala's Maya lowlands. The Olmec centers of San Lorenzo and La Venta were hundreds of miles away, in Mexico. Researchers say Ceibal also was influenced by other communities in central Chiapas and along the Pacific coast.

Other Maya settlements were building such structures around that same time, although they weren't as developed as Ceibal's. A wide spectrum of Mesoamerican communities — for example, settlements in central Chiapas and those on the southern Pacific coast — may have had a lot of important interactions with Ceibal and other communities in the Maya lowland during this period, Inomata said.

He stressed that the Olmec almost certainly influenced Maya culture during the centuries that predated Ceibal's rise. For example, there's evidence that an Olmec center near San Lorenzo was dominant well before Ceibal's residents began building their ritual structurs. However, Inomata said, "San Lorenzo didn't have the kind of ceremonial complexes that we're talking about."

The period from 1000 and 800 B.C. appears to have been a key turning point for Maya culture. There may have been a "power vacuum" between the fall of San Lorenzo and the rise of La Venta that gave early Maya communities the opportunity to experiment and develop cultural innovations, Inomata said. "We are looking at major change in this period, and that happened really in the absence of a very strong Olmec center," he told reporters.

The construction of Ceibal's ceremonial complexes would have required the participation of the whole community, said the University of Arizona's Daniela Triadan, who is a co-author of the Science paper as well as Inomata's wife. "Some people might already have had a special position in the community, and they were most certainly people with specialized ritual knowledge. This indicates that the transition from a mobile hunter-gatherer and horticultural lifestyle to permanently settled agriculturalists was rapid," she said.

What drove that rapid change? The research team is still looking into potential environmental factors, but Inomata speculated that the cultivation of maize — that is, corn — may have been decisive. "There may have been a major increase in maize production, which may have been a threshold in terms of the development of cultural elements," he said.

"This is not just a study about this specific civilization," Inomata told reporters. "We also want to think about how human societies change, and how human civilization developed. What we are seeing here is that major renovation and change can happen through the interaction of various groups. It doesn't have to come from powerful, major political centers. That's one important implication that we are getting."

More about the Olmec and the Maya:

• Olmec influence stretched hundreds of miles
• Maya doom teaches climate lesson
• Cosmic Log archive on Maya culture

In addition to Inomata and Triadan, the authors of "Early Ceremonial Constructions at Ceibal, Guatemala, and the Origins of Lowland Maya Civilization" include Kazuo Aoyama, Victor Castillo and Hitoshi Yonenobu.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

A diminutive robot helped researchers make a substantial discovery during preliminary tests conducted in a tunnel running under the Temple of Quetzalcoatl at the archaeological site of Teotihuacan, the team said Monday.

The team expected to find only one chamber in the last section of the tunnel — but instead, they found three, team leader Sergio Gomez said in a report published by the Mexican newspaper El Universal. The chambers are thought to have been used by Teotihuacan's rulers roughly 2,000 years ago for royal ceremonies or burials, but they're so choked with mud and rubble that they haven't been explored in modern times.

Henry Romero / Reuters

A worker from the National Institute of Anthropology and History walks next to a robot used to explore ruins at the entrance of a tunnel in the archaeological area of the Quetzalcoatl Temple, near the Pyramid of the Sun at the Teotihuacan archaeological site.

That's where the 3-foot-long (1-meter-long) robot known as Tlaloc II-TC comes in: The robot is designed to drive through the tight spaces leading to the back of the tunnel beneath the Temple of Quetzalcoatl, also known as the Temple of the Feathered Serpent. It's equipped with a video camera as well as mechanical arms to clear obstacles.

The current project follows up on an earlier round of robotic exploration by Tlaloc II-TC's predecessor, Tlaloc I, in 2010. (Tlaloc was the Aztec god of rain.)

In 2010, Gomez said there was a "high possibility that in this place, in the central chamber, we can find the remains of those who ruled Teotihuacan." The city was once an influential center of Mesoamerican culture, but little is known about its rulers. Archaeologists have not yet found any depictions of a ruler, or any tomb of a monarch.

El Universal quoted Gomez as saying that the configuration of the space beneath the temple appears to be similar to that of the tunnel running beneath Teotihuacan's Pyramid of the Sun, where four chambers were explored in the 1970s. About 76 meters (250 feet) of the Quetzalcoatl tunnel have already been uncovered, leaving 30 meters (100 feet) or so in the last section. After a round of robotic reconnaissance, archaeologists intend to clear out that section for exploration.

Henry Romero / Reuters

Visitors look on at the archaeological area of the Temple of Quetzalcoatl, near the Pyramid of the Sun at the Teotihuacan archaeological site, about 60 kilometesr (37 miles) north of Mexico City.

Henry Romero / Reuters

Archaeologist Sergio Gomez from the National Institute of Anthropology and History speaks to the media during a news conference in the archaeological area of the Temple of Quetzalcoatl on Monday. A remote-controlled robot has relayed back video images of what appears to be three ancient chambers beneath the temple.

More about Mexican archaeology:

• Google maps ancient Mexican ruins
• Ancient Mexico's dead were given makeovers
• All about Teotihuacan on NBCNews.com

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Egypt SCA via AP

This hieroglyphic papyrus was among scores of ancient documents found at Wadi al-Jarf in Egypt.

Archaeologists have stumbled upon what is thought to be the most ancient harbor ever found in Egypt, along with the country's oldest collection of papyrus documents, Egyptian authorities say.

The harbor goes back 4,500 years, to the days of the Pharaoh Khufu (Cheops) in the Fourth Dynasty, the Egypt State Information Service reported on Friday. The Great Pyramid of Giza serves as the tomb of Khufu, who died around 2566 B.C.

The harbor was built on the Red Sea shore in the Wadi al-Jarf area, 112 miles (180 kilometers) south of Suez. The find was made by a French-Egyptian mission from the French Institute for Archaeological Studies, according to Friday's dispatch. Discovery News quoted the mission's director, Pierre Tallet of the University of Paris-Sorbonne, as saying that the site "predates by more than 1,000 years any other port structure known in the world." 

The harbor is considered one of the most important commercial ports of ancient Egypt, where trips to export copper and other minerals from the Sinai Peninsula were launched. Egyptian authorities said the archaeologists found a variety of docks, as well as a collection of carved stone anchors.

The team also unearthed a collection of 40 papyri that detailed the daily lives of ancient Egyptians during the 27th year of Khufu's reign, said Egypt's antiquities minister, Mohamed Ibrahim. "These are the oldest papyri ever found in Egypt," he said. Among the subjects reportedly covered were the arrangements for getting bread and beer to the workers heading out from the port.

One papyrus is said to detail the daily activities of an official named Merrer, who was involved in building the Great Pyramid.

"He mainly reported about his many trips to the Turah limestone quarry to fetch block for the building of the pyramid," Tallet told Discovery News. "Although we will not learn anything new about the construction of the Cheops monument, this diary provides for the first time an insight on this matter."

Egypt SCA via AP

Fragments of papyri from Wadi al-Jarf shed light on life in ancient Egypt.

More about Egyptian finds:

• Bones, jars found in 3,000-year-old tombs
• Egyptian temple holds ancient shoes
• Cosmic Log archive on Egypt

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.