BEIJING, Aug. 11 (Xinhua) -- The following are highlights of China's key archaeological news from the past week:

--Tomb raiders caught

Police nabbed 29 suspected tomb raiders, and retrieved a passel of valuable cultural relics in east China's Anhui Province.

Police in the city of Huainan said tomb-robbing suspects had ransacked an ancient grave dating back to the Warring States period (475 B.C.-221 B.C.) three times. Among the 75 retrieved artifacts, 26 were classified as national grade-one cultural relics.

--Stone reliefs found in 2,000-yr-old tombs

Two ancient tombs with delicate stone reliefs were discovered in Jinan, capital of east China's Shandong Province. Stone reliefs were an important building component of palaces, ancestral temples and tombs in the Han Dynasty.

The tombs were found when local residents dredged a pond at the end of 2018 and are believed to date back to the Han Dynasty (206 B.C.-A.D. 220).

--Ancient couple graves

Two ancient couple graves belonged to the nobility of the Zeng State, dating back to the middle of the Spring and Autumn Period (770 B.C.-476 B.C.), have been unearthed in central China's Hubei Province.

The two graves were located in the Zaoshulin Graveyard in the city of Suizhou. More than 1,000 bronze ware, many of which had inscriptions, have been discovered in the graveyard.

--Famed ship wreck yields abundant relics

Chinese archaeologists have found more than 180,000 relics from an ancient merchant ship from the Song Dynasty (960-1279), the State Administration of Cultural Heritage said Tuesday.

Found in 1987 and salvaged in the South China Sea in 2007, the Nanhai (South China Sea) No.1 is now preserved at the Maritime Silk Road Museum on Hailing Island of Yangjiang, south China's Guangdong Province. Enditem

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