In Sand Lake Coulee, evidence of a 600-year-old village has been found. Some artifacts found there date back 10,000 years.

It is one of two places in the U.S. that archeologists have found preserved, prehistoric farm fields that were buried and it is even listed on the National Register of Historic Places. But that doesn't necessarily protect it.

“That area has an amazing wealth of archeology,” Robert “Ernie” Boszhardt said. “Unfortunately a lot of this has been lost through development.”

Boszhardt, regional archaeologist at the Mississippi Valley Archeology Center, has spent nearly 25 years trying to preserve and learn about the past civilizations in the Upper Mississippi River Valley. He said a lot has already been lost.

Archaeology and anthropology are two sciences trying to shed light on the lives of ancient civilizations. The main aim of all the research is to find vestiges of lost cultures and civilizations, to decode the code of the universe, and hence, life.

Ancient Egypt, with its aura of mystery, is one of the most important civilizations among the cultures of Antiquity and continues to attract the attention of scientists. As the pharaohs refuse to give up their secrets, science takes a further step toward unveiling what has been hidden for millennia.

Lost Civilizations

A super-powerful camera orbiting Mars may help discover the fate of long-lost spacecraft that never phoned home after reaching the red planet.

NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) is now circling that puzzling world, equipped to assist in determining whether life ever arose on the red planet and characterize its climate and geology, as well as prepare for future expeditionary crews to land there.

But another sharp-shooting skill of MRO is catching sight of past probes — craft that ran into trouble and died in the line of Mars duty. That list includes NASA's gone but not forgotten Mars Polar Lander and the British-built Beagle 2

In 1971, Lehner, a bored sophomore at the University of North Dakota, wasn’t planning to search for lost civilizations, but he was “looking for something, a meaningful involvement.” He dropped out of school, began hitchhiking and ended up in Virginia Beach, where he sought out Cayce’s son, Hugh Lynn, the head of a holistic medicine and paranormal research foundation his father had started. When the foundation sponsored a group tour of the Giza plateau—the site of the Sphinx and the pyramids on the western outskirts of Cairo—Lehner tagged along. “It was hot and dusty and not very majestic,” he remembers.

Still, he returned, finishing his undergraduate education at the American University of Cairo with support from Cayce’s foundation. Even as he grew skeptical about a lost hall of records, the site’s strange history exerted its pull. “There were thousands of tombs of real people, statues of real people with real names, and none of them figured in the Cayce stories,” he says.

When Mark Lehner was a teenager in the late 1960s, his parents introduced him to the writings of the famed clairvoyant Edgar Cayce. During one of his trances, Cayce, who died in 1945, saw that refugees from the lost city of Atlantis buried their secrets in a hall of records under the Sphinx and that the hall would be discovered before the end of the 20th century.

In 1971, Lehner, a bored sophomore at the University of North Dakota, wasn’t planning to search for lost civilizations, but he was “looking for something, a meaningful involvement.” He dropped out of school, began hitchhiking and ended up in Virginia Beach, where he sought out Cayce’s son, Hugh Lynn, the head of a holistic medicine and paranormal research foundation his father had started. When the foundation sponsored a group tour of the Giza plateau—the site of the Sphinx and the pyramids on the western outskirts of Cairo—Lehner tagged along. “It was hot and dusty and not very majestic,” he remembers.

In the near future, with the launch of NASA’s Kepler Mission in 2008, we’ll have the tools to seek evidence of Earth-size planets in the habitable zone of distant stars.

The search for life beyond Earth is the search for a good place to live, a habitable planet, in orbit about a long-lived star where life may arise and evolve. The first place we looked was at stars like our own Sun, a middle-sized, middle-aged star. G-Stars like the Sun are stable for about 10 billion years, which is a good long time for planets to form, and life to evolve. We also expected to find solar systems like our own with small terrestrial planets near the star, and larger gaseous planets farther out. This particular pre-conception was discarded with the discovery of hot Jupiters on 4-day orbits about their stars.

The images are vivid, capturing the essence of exploration. Archaeologists digging up the remains of long lost civilizations. Anthropologists encountering exotic cultures with strange languages.

But do archaeologists and anthropologists have anything to teach the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), where encounters are at the distance of light-years, and a round-trip exchange could take millennia?

The longest-running search for radio signals from alien civilizations is getting a burst of new data from an upgraded Arecibo telescope, which means the SETI@home project needs more desktop computers to help crunch the data.

Since SETI@home launched eight years ago, the project based at the University of California, Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory has signed up more than 5 million interested volunteers and boasts the largest community of dedicated users of any Internet computing project: 170,000 devotees on 320,000 computers.