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Is there any wonder why metal detectors are so popular in the UK? This list of six found treasures are all from the British Isles. Shown here is the treasure called the Hoxne Hoard, uncovered in Suffolk and valued at £1,750,000! Peter Whatling and Eric Lawes found it while searching for a lost tool in 1992. Link -Thanks, Danny!
(Image credit: Mike Peel)
A 400-year old cottage was discovered by a construction crew near Pendle Hill (in northern England) that is believed to have been the home of one of the Pendle Witches. The eleven women known as the Pendle Witches were found guilty of murdering ten people with witchraft in 1612, and all but one were hanged for their supposed crimes.
Archaeologists believe this cottage has ties to witchcraft because they found the remains of a cat set inside a brick in the wall. From BBC News:
It is believed the cat was buried alive to protect the cottage’s inhabitants from evil spirits…
Simon Entwistle, an expert on the Pendle witches, said: “In terms of significance, it’s like discovering Tutankhamen’s tomb.
“We are just a few months away from the 400th anniversary of the Pendle witch trials, and here we have an incredibly rare find, right in the heart of witching country. This could well be the famous Malkin Tower – which has been a source of speculation and rumor for centuries.
“Cats feature prominently in folklore about witches. Whoever consigned this cat to such a horrible fate was clearly seeking protection from evil spirits.”
It will be interesting to see what develops in this case, perhaps the witches will be found innocent four centuries later.
Link –via BoingBoing
Construction workers digging a foundation for a supermarket in Camelon, Scotland, ran into what is now an archaeological site. Around 60 pairs of discarded footwear that once belonged to Roman soldiers was found.
The 2,000-year-old leather footwear was discovered along with Roman jewelry, coins, pottery, and animal bones at the site, which is located at the northern frontier of the Roman Empire.
The cache of Roman shoes and sandals—one of the largest ever found in Scotland—was uncovered recently in a ditch at the gateway to a second century A.D. fort built along the Antonine Wall. The wall is a massive defensive barrier that the Romans built across central Scotland during their brief occupation of the region.
In what will most likely prove to be a garbage dump, archaeologists are finding clues to life in one of the “most important Scottish excavations in the last decade.” Link
(Image credit: Martin Cook)
Photo: Zhang Xiaoli/Xinhua
Archaeologists in Luoyang, China, dug up 5 chariots and 12 horse skeletons from a 2,500-year-old tomb. The photos over at National Geographic are fantastic, but can someone explain to me why the skeletons of the horses are flat? Link
Swedish archaeologists have pulled a trove of 8,000-year-old human skulls from a peat bog that was formerly a lake near Motala, Sweden.
The rituals at Kanaljorden were conducted on a massive stone pavement constructed on the bottom of a shallow lake (currently a peat fen). Some crania were fairly intact while others were found as isolated fragments. The more intact ones represent eleven individuals, both men and women, ranging in age between infants and middle age. Two of the skulls have had wooden stakes inserted all the way from the base to the top. In another case a woman’s temple bone was found inside the skull of another woman. Besides human skulls, the finds also include a small number of post-cranial human bones and bones from animals, as well as artefacts of stone, wood, bone and antler.
The skull depositions at Kanaljorden are clearly ritual in character. The next step is to find out if the human bones are relics of dearly departed that were handled in a complex secondary burial ritual, or trophies of defeated enemies. The archaeologists hope that the ongoing laboratory analysis [stable isotopes] will give clues as to whether the bones are the remains of locals or people with a distant geographic origin, and if they represent a family group or persons unrelated to each other.
Read more at Aadvarchaeology. Link
(Image credit: Anna Arnberg)
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Archaeologists
in Austria have discovered the remains of an unusual school under the
grounds of Vienna: a school for Roman gladiators, where slaves and prisoners
were taught to fight to the death.
LinkOne of the distinctive parts of the ruins is a thick wooden post in the middle of the training area which was used by gladiators as a practice enemy.
The Roemisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum said the three-dimensional images of the school reveal it to have been a mixture of a barracks and a prison.
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Lovers of Professor of Archaeology Henry Walton Jones, Jr., Ph.D. rejoice! (Who? You probably know him as "Indiana Jones").
To mark the 30th anniversary of "Raiders of the Los Ark," known here in the NeatoHQ as "the best movie ever," Lucasfilm, National Geographic and Canada's X3 PRoductions are teaming up to bring priceless artifacts (or movie props for you nonbelievers) in a touring exhibit.
(Real) Archaeologist Fredrik Hiebert of National Geographic has this to say about the Indiana Jones movie franchise and its importance to archaeology:
Let me tell you the perspective from National Geographic’s in-house archaeologists, because that’s what I am, and it’s a very special hat to wear, to use an Indiana Jones idiom.
I normally deal with what I call the Indiana Joneses who come to National Geographic to do real research, and it’s an amazing group of scholars that we have …. A great number of them have been inspired by the films of Indiana Jones. It’s like a whole generation.
I used to teach at the university where in Intro to Archaeology — Archaeology 101 — one of the first questions that I always ask is, “How many of you were inspired by Indiana Jones?” What’s amazing is that this is the 30th anniversary of the first Indiana Jones film, and these students are like 20 years old, and 70% of them raise their hands, saying they were inspired by the films.
That is one of the world’s most awesome inspirations that could happen. It’s almost like Indiana Jones is the world’s most famous archaeologist. Even now. He’s not a real person, but he’s had an incredible, incredible impact on the field of professional archaeology, both at the university, and here, now, that I have the great honor to sit at National Geographic ….
We are all inner Indiana Joneses. Every archaeologist has a little bit of that adventure in them.
The Los Angeles Times' Hero Complex blog has more details: Link (and sadly, no US tour dates have been announced)
See also: Indiana Jones items over at the NeatoShop
Genesis Medical Imaging, Inc. has allowed scientists from Chicago’s The Field Museum use of a mobile CT scanner to scan their ancient discoveries, and the results have been surprising. In one mummy they found nothing but straw under the wraps, in another only a skull and legs, and although some of their findings have been disappointing overall the Field Museum has been happy to know exactly what they have in their collection. Read more about it at Art Daily.
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A road crew in Dorset, England found a mass grave of Viking bodies that appear to have been slaughtered by Britons, as their heads, torsos and legs were buried in separate graves and no weapons, equipment or clothing were found. The bones showed signs of utter brutality being delivered upon the poor fellows, but more intriguing is the fact that the Vikings teeth had horizontal lines deliberately filed into them. Archaeologists feel that this was done in order to appear more fearsome in battle, and that the excruciating filing of the teeth must have been done by a master craftsman.
Mexican archaeologists have discovered a Prehispanic grave site they believe to be Mayan in the state of Tabasco. Estimated to be around 1200 years old and containing 116 bodies, this is the largest group of skeletons found in the region. The area was thought to have been used as a cemetery, with the elite buried in a separate area from their companions, and skeletons found with dental inlays, cranial deformation and other body modifications. Read more about it at ArtDaily.
An engraved bone, believed to be from a mastodon, giant sloth or mammoth, may be the oldest example of primitive art ever found in the Americas. The carved bone features the depiction of an ancient mammoth, and was discovered by an amateur fossil hunter in Florida, in an area near Vero Beach where other mammoth bones have recently been found. The archaeological team working on carbon dating the bone feel that it is at least 13,000 years old, and that the etching must be at least that old as well.
Warm weather, steaks as big as an elephant’s ear and big hair. What’s not to like about Texas? Apparently, that’s what pre-historic men also must’ve thought as they settled in North America:
"At the Debra L. Friedkin site, Texas, we have found evidence of an early human occupation… 2,500 years older than Clovis," said Dr. Waters. "This makes the Friedkin site the oldest credible archaeological site in Texas and North America. The site is important to the debate about the timing of the colonization of the Americas and the origins of Clovis."
The newly discovered tools are small and made of chert, and the researchers suggest that they were designed for a mobile toolkit — something that could be easily packed up and moved to a new location. These tools are recognizably different from Clovis tools although they do share some similarities, including the use of biface and bladelet technology.
Link (Photo: Michael R. Waters)
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The Queen Anne’s Revenge was the flagship of Edward Teach, also known as Blackbeard. The ship was abandoned in 1718 when it wrecked on a sandbar off the coast of North Carolina. Archaeologists have been carefully studying the wreckage for a decade now, and have slowly released photographs of their finds. Recently they reconstructed a sword hilt from found fragments that may have belonged to Blackbeard or one of his companions.
Recovered from the Queen Anne’s Revenge wreck site in 2008, the quillon could have been made in England or France, according to Wendy Welsh, conservator of the Queen Anne’s Revenge artifacts for the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources.
Beyond the hilt, only a stump of the blade remains, but Welsh said Jan Piet Puype, a Dutch arms historian, thinks the weapon was probably relatively short and was carried by a gentleman with some status—at least before a pirate got hold of it.
Although it could have been used for self-defense, the sword was mainly a decorative accessory and was manufactured sometime between the mid-17th century and the early 18th century, according to Puype.
See more pictures and information at National Geographic News. Link
(Image credit: Wendy M. Welsh, North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources)
Archaeologists have announced the discovery of the world’s oldest winemaking facility. The winery was found in an Armenian cave near the village of Areni -the same cave where the oldest shoe ever was found last year. Carbon dating shows that the winery dates back 6,100 years!
In September 2010 archaeologists completed excavations of a large, 2-foot-deep (60-centimeter-deep) vat buried next to a shallow, 3.5-foot-long (1-meter-long) basin made of hard-packed clay with elevated edges.
The installation suggests the Copper Age vintners pressed their wine the old-fashioned way, using their feet, Areshian said.
Juice from the trampled grapes drained into the vat, where it was left to ferment, he explained.
The wine was then stored in jars—the cool, dry conditions of the cave would have made a perfect wine cellar, according to Areshian, who co-authored the new study, published Tuesday in the Journal of Archaeological Science.
Analysis of residue found malvidin, a plant pigment found in red wine. Read more about the discovery at National Geographic News. Link -Thanks, Marilyn Terrell!
(Image credit: Hans Barnard)
Ani is an abandoned city in Turkey near the Armenian border. At one time it had 200,000 residents, but no one has lived there for 300 years. Huge empty ancient buildings remain, all alone in their magnificence. The history of this city is long and bloody, and the remaining archaeological site is in danger of disappearing completely. See lots more pictures at Kuriositas. Link
Israeli archaeologists have found teeth of modern humans in a cave in central Israel that date back 400,000 years. That makes them twice as old as modern humans found in Africa, which is where they’ve been thought to have originated.
“It’s very exciting to come to this conclusion,” said archaeologist Avi Gopher, whose team examined the teeth with X-rays and CT scans and dated them according to the layers of earth where they were found.
He stressed that further research is needed to solidify the claim. If it does, he says, “this changes the whole picture of evolution.”
The accepted scientific theory is that Homo sapiens originated in Africa and migrated out of the continent. Gopher said if the remains are definitively linked to modern human’s ancestors, it could mean that modern man in fact originated in what is now Israel.
Sir Paul Mellars, a prehistory expert at Cambridge University, said the study is reputable, and the find is “important” because remains from that critical time period are scarce, but it is premature to say the remains are human.
The archaeologists from Tel Aviv University are confident that other human fossil evidence will be found at the site. Link -Thanks, özi!
(Image credit: AP/Oded Balilty)
In 1989, a shipwreck from about 130 B.C. was discovered. Divers retrieved dishes and other artifacts. One surprising discovery was a chest of vials and containers with tablets in them, some still dry! Evolutionary geneticist Robert Fleischer said they were made of compressed vegetation.
“It was assumed the pills were medicines that the physicians were using. There were things associated with this chest that led them to believe it was a physician’s chest,” said Fleischer.
Using DNA sequencing, Fleischer has identified some of the plant components in the tablets: carrot, radish, parsley, celery, wild onion, cabbage, alfalfa, oak and hibiscus.
Researchers are looking into the ingredients to determine what they were for. Speculation is that the tablets were used to treat dysentery, which was common among ancient sailors. Link
(Image credit: Harry A. Alden)
You’d think soup would completely dry up after a couple of thousand years, but a pot of still-liquid soup was found by a team of archaeologists in China. It was sealed inside a bronze cooking pot at a dig near Xian.
The soup and bones were discovered in a small, sealed bronze vessel in a tomb being excavated to make way for the extension of the airport in Xian, home to the country’s famed ancient terracotta warriors, the report said.
The liquid and bones in the vessel had turned green due to the oxidation of the bronze, it said. Scientists were expected to conduct further tests to confirm the liquid was indeed soup and to identify the ingredients.
Another liquid discovery at the same site is believed to be wine. Link -via Fortean Times
(Image credit: Xinhua)
Nowhere in the world is archaeology as tied to politics as it is in Israel. Different factions have a stake in determining where the ancient kingdoms of Judah and Israel were ruled from, and how powerful its leaders were. At the heart of the matter is King David.
He has persisted for three millennia—an omnipresence in art, folklore, churches, and census rolls. To Muslims, he is Daoud, the venerated emperor and servant of Allah. To Christians, he is the natural and spiritual ancestor of Jesus, who thereby inherits David’s messianic mantle. To the Jews, he is the father of Israel—the shepherd king anointed by God—and they in turn are his descendants and God’s Chosen People. That he might be something lesser, or a myth altogether, is to many unthinkable.
“Our claim to being one of the senior nations in the world, to being a real player in civilization’s realm of ideas, is that we wrote this book of books, the Bible,” says Daniel Polisar, president of the Shalem Center, the Israeli research institute that helped fund Eilat Mazar’s excavation work. “You take David and his kingdom out of the book, and you have a different book. The narrative is no longer a historical work, but a work of fiction. And then the rest of the Bible is just a propagandistic effort to create something that never was. And if you can’t find the evidence for it, then it probably didn’t happen. That’s why the stakes are so high.”
National Geographic looks at competing theories about the archaeological finds in Israel and the few hard facts that we have about them. Link
(Image credit: Greg Girard)
Hamish Mowatt of South Ronaldsay, one of the Orkney Islands off the coast of Scotland, unearthed a Neolithic tomb in his backyard garden. Now archaeologists are scrambling to document and preserve the 5,000 year old grave site.
Mr Mowatt said he had always wondered what lay under an 8ft stone in the garden and eventually curiosity got the better of him.
He dug a small hole close to the stone to see how thick it was. He then managed to get a thin wire pushed under the stone and confirmed there was definitely a space underneath. While doing this, a finger-hole size appeared in the earth to his right. This allowed him to push the wire in — to a depth of three feet.
By carefully removing a small area of earth and two stones, Mr Mowatt could see a rock face. Shining a torch inside, he saw a chamber with about nine inches of water lying in the bottom.
Mr Mowatt added: “I have an underwater camera, so I got it in through the hole and the monitor rigged up. On the screen, I could see the rock face clearly, but when I went further I could clearly see what I thought was a white skull, with two eye sockets, looking back at me.”
So far, three skulls are visible in the stone chamber, which is filling up with water. Experts think there might be multiple connected chambers on the site. Link -via TYWKIWDBI
(Image credit: Sigurd Towrie)
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The examples of ancient Greco-Roman statuary that survive to this day may be bare stone and earthenware, but archaeologist Vinzenz Brinkmann argues that they were originally brightly painted:
Armed with high-intensity lamps, ultraviolet light, cameras, plaster casts and jars of costly powdered minerals, he has spent the past quarter century trying to revive the peacock glory that was Greece. He has dramatized his scholarly findings by creating full-scale plaster or marble copies hand-painted in the same mineral and organic pigments used by the ancients: green from malachite, blue from azurite, yellow and ocher from arsenic compounds, red from cinnabar, black from burned bone and vine.
Call them gaudy, call them garish, his scrupulous color reconstructions made their debut in 2003 at the Glyptothek museum in Munich, which is devoted to Greek and Roman statuary. Displayed side by side with the placid antiquities of that fabled collection, the replicas shocked and dazzled those who came to see them. As Time magazine summed up the response, “The exhibition forces you to look at ancient sculpture in a totally new way.”
Link via io9 | Images: Stiftung Archaeologie
Archaeologists working in Ethiopia have discovered grooves in animal bones indicating that they had been subjected to work with stone tools. If this conclusion is accurate, the earliest tool use by hominids dates back to 3.4 million years — almost a million years before previous estimates:
Primordial butchers using sharp stones to fillet a carcass in ancient East Africa made the marks, the researchers said.
“It pushes back tool use almost a million years,” said archaeologist Shannon McPherron at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, who discovered the bones last year at Dikika, Ethiopia, about 300 miles from Addis Ababa.[...]
Until now, the oldest known stone tools dated to about 2.5 million years ago. Those implements, of which thousands were found in East Africa, are thought to be the work of an early human species. The older find announced Wednesday, however, would predate the evolution of the human family, known as the genus Homo, and raises new questions about the role of tools in spurring human evolution. They may have initiated a shift in pre-humans’ diet, which in turn may have aided the development of larger brains.
Link via Discover | Photo: Dikika Research Project/PA
Sometimes things are worth waiting for. Guédelon in France is a castle being built using only medieval techniques. As such (and perhaps unsurprisingly) it is the first castle of its type to be built in France for getting on for 800 years. An experiment in archaeology in reverse. Instead of digging down, the archaeologists are building up.
Little known outside of France the castle still boasts a huge amount of visitors, over 300,000 in 2009 (making it worthwhile visiting early in the morning before the those clad in twenty first century clothing somewhat dim the experience). Visitors can wear what they will. Workers on the site on the other hand cannot wear modern items such as watches although they can get away with spectacles if they are needed.
Also see a previous report on Guédelon, and Michel Guyot’s other project in Arkansas.
From the Upcoming 
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Archaeologists have found something at Stonehenge that is so exceptional that they’re calling it the most exciting find there in fifty years: a second, Neolithic henge.
The new "henge" – which means a circular monument dating to Neolithic and Bronze Ages – is situated about 900m (2,950ft) from the giant stones on Salisbury Plain.
Images show it has two entrances on the north-east and south-west sides and inside the circle is a burial mound on top which appeared much later, Professor Gaffney said.
"You seem to have a large-ditched feature, but it seems to be made of individual scoops rather than just a straight trench," he said.
"When we looked a bit more closely, we then realised there was a ring of pits about a metre wide going all the way around the edge.
"When you see that as an archaeologist, you just looked at it and thought, ‘that’s a henge monument’ – it’s a timber equivalent to Stonehenge.
For several years, shrinking icefields in arctic and mountain regions have been revealing rare artifacts that had been covered by snow and ice for millennia. Most of these reports have come from Canada and Alaska, but recently Craig Lee, a Research Associate from the University of Colorado at Boulder discovered an atlatl dart near Yellowstone Park.
As glaciers and ice fields continue to melt at an unprecedented rate, increasingly older and significant artifacts — as well as plant material, animal carcasses and ancient feces — are being released from the ice that has gripped them for thousands of years, he said.
The dart Lee found was from a birch sapling and still has personal markings on it from the ancient hunter, according to Lee. When it was shot, the 3-foot-long dart had a projectile point on one end, and a cup or dimple on the other end that would have attached to a hook on the atlatl. The hunter used the atlatl, a throwing tool about two feet long, for leverage to achieve greater velocity.
Later this summer Lee and CU-Boulder student researchers will travel to Glacier National Park to work with the Salish, Kootenai and Blackfeet tribes and researchers from the University of Wyoming to recover and protect artifacts that may have recently melted out of similar locations.
Link (with video). Photo: Casey A. Cass/University of Colorado
On Tuesday, workers digging a new level for a vehicle security center at the World Trade Center site ran into a set of evenly-spaced wooden beams. Had someone been building a boat in a basement?
“They were so perfectly contoured that they were clearly part of a ship,” said A. Michael Pappalardo, an archaeologist with the firm AKRF, which is working for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey to document historical material uncovered during construction.
By Wednesday, the outlines made it plain: a 30-foot length of a wood-hulled vessel had been discovered about 20 to 30 feet below street level on the World Trade Center site, the first such large-scale archaeological find along the Manhattan waterfront since 1982, when an 18th-century cargo ship came to light at 175 Water Street.
The ground where the boat was found had been undisturbed for 200 years. Back then, the site was much nearer the Hudson River. Link -via reddit
(Image credit: Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)
Dave Crisp, using only a metal detector, found a hoard of more than 52,000 Roman coins in Frome, UK. They were sealed inside a pot about 30 cm underground:
Somerset County Council archaeologists excavated the pot — a type of container normally used for storing food — it weighed 160kg (350 pounds) and contained 52,500 coins.
The hoard was transferred to the British Museum in London where the coins were cleaned and recorded.
The coins date from AD 253 to 293 and most of them are made of debased silver or bronze.
You can view a photo gallery of the treasure trove at the link.
Neatoramanauts, here’s your chance to play armchair archaeologist. Our friends over at the National Geographic is crowdsourcing a project to identify archaeological treasures in Mongolia using satellite imagery (via the GeoEye Foundation) and other modern tools.
The goal of Valley of the Khans Project is to identify archaeological sites, but the fun part is that you get to participate in a real-time treasure hunt. The project is led by Dr. Albert Yu-Min Lin, a dashing real-life Indiana Jones who’s looking for the lost tomb of Genghis Khan:
Hello fellow explorers!
The entire Valley of the Khans team is very excited to begin the expedition to Mongolia but, for me, the adventure begins today. By enlisting the help of thousands of "virtual explorers" like you, we can start to uncover the mysteries of the Valley of the Khans right now!
The area that we will be exploring has been untouched for more than 800 years. There are no maps, no roadsigns and no one to ask for directions. But we’ve scanned the landscape with super high-resolution satellite imagery. By participating in the online exploration on this site, YOU can join our team by examining these satellite images and searching for clues that will guide our quest to discover the lost tomb of Genghis Khan. Maybe you’ll map out roads and rivers that our expedition can follow to make our way through this inhospitable territory. Perhaps you can identify traces of a nomad’s ger that might be a good place for us to camp. Or maybe you’ll see the buried outline of an ancient tomb that could be the clue we’re searching for…
So don’t let your computer have all the fun looking for aliens on its spare time, check it out and play archaeologist in the homeland of Genghis Khan from the comfort of your own home.
Links: Project Main Page | About the Expedition | Project Blog with daily updates – Thanks Marilyn!
More photos after the jump: more …
Three years ago, Alex posted about the discovery of a 3,000-year old shoe. It was then thought to be the oldest ever found. Now archaeologists have found one about 5,500-years old in a cave in Armenia:
Stuffed with grass, perhaps as an insulator or an early shoe tree, the 5,500-year-old moccasin-like shoe was found exceptionally well preserved—thanks to a surfeit of sheep dung—during a recent dig in an Armenian cave.
About as big as a current women’s size seven (U.S.), the shoe was likely tailor-made for the right foot of its owner, who could have been a man or a woman—not enough is known about Armenian feet of the era to say for sure.
Made from a single piece of cowhide—a technique that draws premium prices for modern shoes under the designation “whole cut”—the shoe is laced along seams at the front and back, with a leather cord.
There’s a comment on its design from fashion mogul Manolo Blahnik at the link.
Link | Photo: Gregory Areshian
Scientists mapping the ruins of the abandoned Maya city of Caracol in Belize knew they had tackled a big job, uncovering the city from the encroaching jungle. They didn’t know how big it really is until modern mapping techniques took a look underneath the forest canopy.
An April 2009 flyover of the Maya city of Caracol used Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) equipment—which bounces laser beams off the ground—to help scientists construct a 3-D map of the settlement in western Belize. The survey revealed previously unknown buildings, roads, and other features in just four days, scientists announced earlier this month at the International Symposium on Archaeometry in Tampa, Florida.
How much bigger is it?
…the project also revealed thousands of new structures, 11 new roads, tens of thousands of agricultural terraces, and even a number of hidden caves throughout a city, which is now known to stretch over 68 square miles (177 square kilometers).
Caracol was burned around A.D. 895, and was completely abandoned by the year 1050. Link -Thanks, Marilyn!
(Image credit: University of Central Florida Caracol Archaeological Project)
