In rural Shànghǎi (yes there's a rural part of a city with 24 million people) a small defensive compound was recently discovered. Discovered is an odd term for it, but that's what the news is saying. I say it's odd because, well, it's freaking Shanghai, and even if it's a small village, the local people of that village obviously knew it was there and have for the past 80 years. This happened in a village called Xīnbāng 新浜镇, part of Lǔxīng town 鲁星村 in the City of Sōngjiāng 松江市, which is part of Shànghǎi 上海市.

Anyway, it was rediscovered by city and museum officials just recently, this past Sunday. It's in remarkably good condition (which is to me the most impressive part). It's a small defensive tower that was constructed as part of the preparations for the Battle of Shanghai in 1937. The Battle of Shanghai was the start of the most significant fighting in Asia's part in WWII, a.k.a. the Second Sino-Japanese War.

It got a brief mention on /r/Shanghai which is how I heard about it, but that was posting a super brief article from Global Times, which, how can we say, isn't amazing.

A better article is here (in Mandarin but Google Translate does okay). And also here's a photo if that's all you really care to see.

This period in Shanghai's history, the build up to and decade of the 1930s, is phenomenally interesting. To have something like these buildings survive that long, in such a remote place, not having been stripped of the bricks for building materials, not having been absolutely covered in graffiti ads for fake documents, it's pretty rad.

At the end of the video on that article they point out that the local museum is now taking care to research and preserve the structures, having authenticated that they are in fact defense structures build for that period, which is pretty cool.

• Bunnies helped a great civilisation in ancient Mexico thrive

• The discovery of a 3,000-year-old pyramid-shaped mausoleum in Kazakhstan has gone viral over the past 24 hours, with several media outlets proclaiming the structure to be the world's first pyramid. But archaeologists say the structure, which contains a series of five walls that gradually get higher toward the center, is not nearly as old as these news reports claim.

• Verónica Ortega, of Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History, says her excavations in recent months at Teotihuacan’s square of the Pyramid of the Moon have yielded a breakthrough, suggesting the whole city was an aquatic sanctuary consecrated to the worship of water. The 43-year-old archaeologist has found canals and cavities similar to pools beneath the square, along with sculptures of water gods. Excavations at Teotihuacan’s other two pyramids uncovered seashells, water pitchers and more aquatic elements.

• Researchers from the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Libraries and from universities in the Netherlands have used high-tech imaging to uncover the details of a rare Mexican codex dating from before the colonisation of America.

• Some Mayanists are trying to argue that Calakmul was the seat of a Maya Empire in the Lowlands region of Guatemala and Mexico

• The Wari's grisly end - €”the fall of a South American empire

Today the german historian Ernst Nolte died at the age of 93. In the late 80s he started the so called Historikerstreit, a huge debate about atrocities in Nazi Germany in comparsion to the ones in the Sowjet Union. It included arguments about the idea of absolute and comparable "evil". Here's a short article in the Süddeutsche Zeitung: http://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/eil-historiker-ernst-nolte-ist-tot-1.3126439

Not sure if this counts as "What's New" as I'm fairly new to this sub. If it doesn't fit please let me know or just delete this post.

Skeletal remains 'confirm ancient Greeks engaged in human sacrifice'

It's a bit of a clickbait headline: the found 'sacrificial' human remains date to as early as 11th century BC so we're not really talking of the classical Greeks most people think of when they speak of 'the Greeks'. They've only found one body so far but I personally wouldn't be too surprised if they found more and even much later victims.