Archaeology Weekly

While most of England was on lockdown amid the COVID-19 pandemic, archaeologist Matt Champion was working solo at Oxburgh Hall, a moated Tudor mansion in Norfolk. As part of the site’s £6 million (roughly $7.8 million USD) roof restoration project, workers had lifted the floorboards in the estate’s attic for the first time in centuries. Probing the recesses beneath the boards with gloved fingertips, Champion expected to find dirt, coins, bits of newspapers and detritus that had fallen through the cracks. Instead, he discovered a veritable treasure trove of more than 2,000 items dating as far back as the 15th century.

If you drive north from Khartoum along a narrow desert road toward the ancient city of Meroe, a breathtaking view emerges from beyond the mirage: dozens of steep pyramids piercing the horizon. No matter how many times you may visit, there is an awed sense of discovery. In Meroe itself, once the capital of the Kingdom of Kush, the road divides the city. To the east is the royal cemetery, packed with close to 50 sandstone and red brick pyramids of varying heights; many have broken tops, the legacy of 19th-century European looters. To the west is the royal city, which includes the ruins of a palace, a temple and a royal bath. Each structure has distinctive architecture that draws on local, Egyptian and Greco-Roman decorative tastes—evidence of Meroe’s global connections.

In 1758, the French ethnographer Antoine-Simon Le Page du Pratz published The History of Louisiana, in which he wrote that the Mississippi River’s name meant “the ancient father of rivers.” Though his etymology was off—the Ojibwe words that gave us Mississippi (Misi-ziibi) actually mean “long river”—the idea has proven durable. “Ol’ Man River” buoyed Show Boat, the 1927 musical by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II. During the 1937 flood, Raymond Daniell wrote in the New York Times about frantic efforts to raise barriers “faster than old man river could rise.”

Two burial chambers, six kerbstones and two suspected satellite tombs have been found during the dig.

The find was made at the 18th Century Dowth Hall, within the Brú na Bóinne complex, a Unesco World Heritage site.

The project is being carried out by the agri-technology company Devenish and University College Dublin (UCD).

Teams from UCD School of Archaeology and Devenish, the Belfast-based firm which acquired Dowth Hall and its lands in 2013, have been working on the site for more than a year.

Archaeologists have discovered the burnt remains of a bread baked 14,400 years ago, more than 4,000 years before the advent of agriculture.

The findings, excavated in northeastern Jordan's Black Desert, reveal the oldest direct evidence of bread and are discussed Monday in the journal PNAS. Twenty-four bread-like discoveries were found in two fireplaces in a Natufian hunter-gatherer site known as Shubayqa 1.

We know that the Romans liked boxing. Roman Emperor Augusts used to love watching matches, whether fought among professionals or street fighters, and he famously exiled the actor Pylades after he disrupted a match by giving the finger to a fellow spectator. Despite this popularity, it is rare to encounter boxing artifacts when digging around Roman sites, as boxing gear was mostly made of perishable materials, such as leather and wool. That’s what makes the recent discovery of a pair of boxing gloves so notable.

Two millennia ago, a small Greco-Roman temple in present-day Turkey awed and enthralled its residents. Just beyond its stone gate, in a grotto shrouded in a heavy mist, a strange force worked dark deeds: Bulls ushered inside would lie down and perish; the castrated priests in charge would emerge unscathed.

Was it the bloodthirsty will of Pluto, the god of the underworld? The supernatural power of the priests? New research published on Feb. 12 in the journal Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences suggests a far earthlier explanation to the cave’s mystery: noxious carbon dioxide.

Excavation of an ancient Egyptian site has found evidence of beer and bread-making in a newly discovered building complex.

The city of Tell Edfu, located around 400 miles south of Cairo in the Nile Valley, has been explored by archaeologists for the past 16 years.

At the end of 2017, researchers from the University of Chicago found a complex of buildings that marked the earliest point of the town’s occupation.

They dated from around 2400 BCE – the so-called “Old Kingdom” period of ancient Egypt, when the great pyramids were built.

A team of archaeologists believe they may have discovered a spot where some of the architects of Stonehenge gathered and camped.

The team have been investigating a causewayed enclosure – these are thought to be ancient meeting places or centres of trade – on army land at Larkhill close to Stonehenge.

They found an alignment of posts that matches the orientation of the circle at Stonehenge, leading to the theory that Larkhill could have been some sort of blueprint for the temple.

Scientists have confirmed that human remains interred in a prominent Viking warrior grave in Sweden were those of a woman and not a man, a discovery that raises provocative questions about gender roles and limitations in the male-dominated ancient society.

The woman's remains were entombed in a "well-furnished" grave in the Viking-age town of Birka and were excavated in the 1880s, but it was only through DNA testing that her sex was determined, according to findings published Friday in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.

Archaeologists are likening the discovery to winning the lottery. A Roman cavalry barracks has been unearthed near Hadrian’s Wall, complete with extraordinary military and personal possessions left behind by soldiers and their families almost 2,000 years ago. A treasure trove of thousands of artefacts dating from the early second century has been excavated over the past fortnight.

The find is significant not just because of its size and pristine state, but also for its contribution to the history of Hadrian’s Wall, showing the military build-up that led to its construction in AD122. The barracks pre-dates the wall: the Romans already had a huge military presence in the area, keeping the local population under control.

On the site of a former auto-repair shop here, broken stone walls mark the site of a 900-year-old village that may yield new insights into an ancient desert culture.

The ruins are what remains of two “great houses” — apartment buildings, essentially — that formed a northern outpost of a civilization based at Chaco Canyon, about 100 miles away in northwestern New Mexico.

Archaeologists from the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center, in nearby Cortez, have just begun the first systematic excavation of this site in an effort to learn how its residents lived in the early 1100s, and how they related to the wider Chaco culture.

A statue of a human-headed winged bull from the Northwest Palace in Nimrud, Iraq, that was bulldozed by the Islamic State last year to great outcry has been faithfully recreated using modern technology and put on exhibit at the Colosseum in Rome to spur discussion of the possible reconstruction of war-torn archaeological sites.

Full-scale reconstructions were also made of two damaged Syrian sites: the archive room of Ebla and a portion of a ceiling from the Temple of Bel in Palmyra, as examples of how conflict can devastate a nation’s fragile heritage.

Archaeological excavations around the historic Balıklı Lake in the southeastern province of Şanlıurfa have unearthed floor mosaics dating back to the Kingdom of Osroene, known by the name of its capital city, Edessa (today’s Şanlıurfa).

Works have been continuing in an area of 4.5 hectares for six years. Nearly 80 rock graves from the Roman era have been restored so far and five more floor mosaics were recently discovered in the same area. After the restoration works, the mosaics will be displayed at the museum.

Officials said the floor mosaics featured Syriac inscriptions and fine engravings.

An Ancient Thracian gold treasure “from the time of Alexander the Great" has been discovered by archaeologists during the rescue excavations of a Thracian burial mound near the Black Sea resort of Primorsko in Southeast Bulgaria.

The treasure consists of a total of 37 gold appliques which decorated the harness of the horse of an Ancient Thracian dynast (i.e. ruler) during parades and formal religious ceremonies, Primorsko Municipality has announced.

There are only a handful of manuscripts remaining from before Europeans came to the continent. They're made of leather strips coated with white plaster-like substance called gesso.

The one the researchers studied is called the Codex Selden, and scholars have been suspicious for decades now that the book is hiding something beneath its surface.

According to legend, Chinese civilisation began around 4,000 years ago in the Yellow River basin, when an emperor called Yu the Great successfully managed to control a huge flood.

After all these years, the story has taken on an almost mythological status, but despite frequent retelling, evidence for the 'great flood' and the Xia dynasty itself has remained patchy.

Now researchers have found the first geological evidence that the flood actually happened - and it was just as big as the legends suggest.

The ancient Greeks and Romans wrote grisly legends about Mount Lykaion. The Arcadian peak, some would write, was where one of the first Greeks tried to trick Zeus by feeding him a sacrifice tainted with human flesh. In punishment, the legend goes, Lycaon was either slain or turned into a wolf.

As a result, according to some ancient writers, the firepit altar at the top of the mountain didn't just receive gifts of livestock from the people of ancient Greece. Sometimes a human boy would be added to the offering in Zeus's honor (or eaten), perhaps even in the hope of inducing a lupine transformation. But were musings on these sacrifices taken from historical accounts, or were they simply instances of ancient myth turning into urban legend?

The five men were in Skaftarhreppur in southern Iceland when they found the sword, which they think may have washed up during a recent flood, the Visir news website reports. One of the men, Arni Bjorn Valdimarsson, shared a photo of it on his Facebook page and swiftly received a call from Iceland's Cultural Heritage Agency, which took possession of the artefact on Monday morning.

An unrivaled discovery on the southern coast of Israel may enable archaeologists to finally unravel the origins of one of the most notorious and enigmatic peoples of the Hebrew Bible: the Philistines.

The discovery of a large cemetery outside the walls of ancient Ashkelon, a major city of the Philistines between the 12th and 7th centuries B.C., is the first of its kind in the history of archaeological investigation in the region.

Recent archaeological digs have uncovered more than 20 round buildings in what is believed to be Cyprus' earliest known village, dating as far back as the 9th century B.C., the east Mediterranean island's Department of Antiquities said Tuesday.

The department said in a statement that excavations, which concluded last month in the Ayios Tychonas-Klimonas area near Cyprus' southern coast, also found domestic dogs and cats had already been introduced to Cyprus when the village was active 11,200 to 10,600 years ago. It said villagers hunted small wild boar and birds, but didn't produce pottery.

Six gold bracelets and a seventh made of silver comprise the largest collection of Viking treasure to ever be discovered in Denmark, The Local reports — and the trove wasn't even found by professionals.

The three amateur archaeologists who make up "Team Rainbow Power" found the gold with their metal detectors in a field in Jutland. "We really felt like we had found the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow when we found the first bracelet, but when others then appeared it was almost unreal," Marie Aagaard Larsen of Team Rainbow Power said in a press release from the National Museum of Denmark.

The discovery of a few muddy coins in a Devon paddock by a pair of amateur metal detector enthusiasts has led to the redrawing of the boundary of the Roman empire in south-west Britain.

Previously it had been thought that Ancient Rome’s influence did not stretch beyond Exeter but the find has resulted in a major archaeological dig that has unearthed more coins, a stretch of Roman road and the remnants of vessels from France and the Mediterranean once full of wine, olive oil and garum – fish sauce.

The far south-west of Britain has long been seen as an area that clung to its independence but the discovery at Ipplepen, near Newton Abbot, 20 miles south-west of Exeter, has led to the conclusion that Roman influence was strongly felt here.

It's one of the most fascinating and well-built structures in existence, but researchers have shown that the Great Pyramid of Giza is actually lopsided, thanks to an error builders made during construction some 4,500 years ago.

This error has led to the west side of the pyramid being slightly longer than the east side, creating a base that isn’t perfectly square – despite the fact that it looks that way from afar.

The discovery came as researchers from the US-based Glen Dash Research Foundation and the Ancient Egypt Research Associates (AERA) were studying the magnificent structure to better understand its original dimensions.

Parishioners of a tiny church in rural Herefordshire have long believed a rumour that their altar cloth once belonged to Queen Elizabeth I.

It was kept at St Faith's Church in Bacton in an old wooden frame.

Now, having spotted it by chance, experts at Historic Royal Palaces (HRP) have concluded the exquisitely-embroidered cloth of silver is so lavish it is likely to have come from a dress worn by the Tudor monarch herself.

A mug confiscated by Nazis at Auschwitz has been hiding a secret for more than 70 years.
Workers at the Auschwitz Museum this week found a gold ring and necklace that had been carefully wrapped in canvas before being concealed in a false base.

In February 1990, thanks to a 15-year-old boy named Bruno Kowalsczewski, footsteps echoed through the chambers of Bruniquel Cave for the first time in tens of thousands of years.

The cave sits in France’s scenic Aveyron Valley, but its entrance had long been sealed by an ancient rockslide. Kowalsczewski’s father had detected faint wisps of air emerging from the scree, and the boy spent three years clearing away the rubble. He eventually dug out a tight, thirty-meter-long passage that the thinnest members of the local caving club could squeeze through. They found themselves in a large, roomy corridor. There were animal bones and signs of bear activity, but nothing recent. The floor was pockmarked with pools of water. The walls were punctuated by stalactites (the ones that hang down) and stalagmites (the ones that stick up).

Some 336 meters into the cave, the caver stumbled across something extraordinary—a vast chamber where several stalagmites had been deliberately broken. Most of the 400 pieces had been arranged into two rings—a large one between 4 and 7 metres across, and a smaller one just 2 metres wide. Others had been propped up against these donuts. Yet others had been stacked into four piles. Traces of fire were everywhere, and there was a mass of burnt bones.