Affectionately known locally as “The Clumps”, the site is owned and managed by Earth Trust
The remains of a tiny Roman dog have been discovered at a popular walking spot.
An archaeological dig at Wittenham Clumps in Oxfordshire has uncovered the 1,800-year-old remains of a 20cm tall pooch.
The animal’s remains were unearthed at the site of a villa believed to have been owned by a wealthy Roman family.
Researchers say the dog is one of the smallest found in the UK, and was likely to have been a “much-loved pet”.
A sketch of what researchers believe the small dog would have looked like
The discovery was made at the site of charity Earth Trust’s headquarters by archaeologists from DigVentures, a social enterprise that organizes crowdfunded archaeological excavations.
Hannah Russ, a zooarchaeologist who analyzed the animal remains, said: “While it’s possible that this dog was used for hunting, we know that Romans in other parts of the empire had begun to breed and keep small dogs as pets.
“The fact that this dog was so small and had bowed legs suggests that she probably wasn’t bred for hunting [and] makes it far more likely that she was kept as a house dog, lap dog, or pet.”
A member of DigVentures holds a brooch also uncovered at the site
Maiya Pina-Dacier, from DigVentures, said the uncovered villa would have been occupied by a “relatively wealthy Roman family, who ran a farm with an assortment of working animals, including hunting or herding dogs – as well as this tiny canine”.
The remains, along with other items from the dig, including a brooch and a copper bracelet, will be displayed for the first time at Earth Trust in August, as part of the Clumps Go Ancient festival.
The Earth Trust said it would include a pop-up exhibition featuring “never-before-seen artefacts” from the dig, and demonstrations to bring to life the discoveries about the people of Wittenham Clumps and their animals.
It said in a statement: “From the Iron Age communities who created the hillfort that is now Castle Hill – and the Roman families who later lived downslope – to the farmers and tenants who manage the land today, this area has been shaped by human use and intervention throughout the ages.”
Nero, the emperor of Rome from AD 54 until AD 68, reportedly uttered those famous last words before his death in exile. Experts believe he may have left behind evidence of his love of the arts in the form of a theater he built near what today is the Vatican.
An archaeological excavation carried out in the courtyard of the frescoed Palazzo della Rovere has brought to light structures and decorations that experts say could be the remains of that theater.
The archeological site at the Palazzo della Rovere is seen.
Daniela Porro, the special superintendent of Rome, said Wednesday this “exceptional” discovery is believed to be where Nero rehearsed poetry and musical performances, a place mentioned in Roman writings, but until now never located.
Archaeologists have been working on the site since 2020 and say they’ve found part of the hemicycle-shaped seating section, along with elegant columns in precious and valuable marbles, refined decorations in gold-leaf on stucco and storage rooms for costumes and scenery.
A table with artifacts is seen at the dig site.
The dig, which was carried out in a circumscribed area within the walls of the grand palazzo, situated on Via della Conciliazione, just a few steps from St. Peter’s Square, also gifted other rich historical findings.
These include the possible remains of the Horti di Agrippina, which is where Caligula built a large circus for horse racing, as well as traces of the production and pilgrimage activities from the medieval age and even artifacts from the 15th century.
Archaeologists say they’re particularly thrilled to have found rare specimens of medieval glass goblets, cooking pots to make bread in, coins, bits of musical instruments and combs made from bone, “tools” used to make rosary beads, and small insignia of medieval Christian devotion worn on pilgrims’ clothing.
Archeologist and medieval history expert Ilaria de Luca displays items found at the excavation site.
Archaeologist Marzia Di Mento, who is in charge of the dig, says that the findings will take years to study.
“It is a superb dig, one that every archaeologist dreams of…being able to dig in this built-up, historically rich area is so rare,” she told reporters.
Artifacts found at the excavation site are stored in containers.
Archeologists say work is still in progress to study, catalogue, and analyze all the findings before the area will be covered over for protection and the grand palazzo and garden restored to its original Renaissance grandeur.
Part of the building will become a Four Seasons hotel that is expected to open in 2025.
Local officials say the artifacts will be put on display and all the dig’s findings put in a city-run public databank to add to the wealth of information gathered over the years on life in Rome throughout the centuries.
Well-Preserved, 42,000-Year-Old Baby Woolly Mammoth Emerges From Yukon Permafrost
A 42,000-year-old baby mammoth is set to go on display for the first time in Western Europe next month at the Natural History Museum.
The baby mammoth, found in Siberia by a reindeer herder in 2007, is little larger than a dog, and has been nicknamed Lyuba.
Lubya, who was named after the wife of the Siberian reindeer herder that found her, has been described as the most complete preserved mammoth in the world.
One month old when she died, the baby mammoth’s corpse was intact enough that fragments of her eyelashes remained as well as remnants of her mother’s milk in her stomach.
Palaeontologist Matthew McCurry at the exhibit.
“When they did the autopsy on her she is so complete that we could get a look at her insides and see her last meal,” Victoria Herridge, a paleobiologist from the Natural History Museum in London, told the Sunday Times.
“She had milk from suckling her mother and also remnants of faecal matter in her gut, which suggest she had been eating her mother’s dung.
This is something living elephants do as the dung provides the infants with microbes to help them ingest their food.”
Lubya, which means ‘love’ in Russian, is thought to have died after stumbling into a salty marsh bog and slowly drowning in the mud.
The mud then froze, preserving the body until herder Yuri Khudi and his son stumbled across it while searching for firewood by the Yuribei river in north-west Siberia.
Lubya will go on display from 23 May until 7 September 2014 as part of a new exhibition entitled Mammoths: Ice Age Giants. Other species in the exhibition will include the dwarf mammoth and the spiral-tusked Columbian mammoth.
Although some enthusiasts may be hoping that this remarkable specimen is well preserved enough to allow scientists to clone the mammoth, as Herridge notes Lubya’s DNA will have “deteriorated” significantly.
Despite the widespread belief that DNA is easily preserved and resurrected, recent research has shown that the molecule only has a half-life of about 521 years, making Jurassic Park-style cloning an impossibility for now.
Registrars and preparators from the Field Museum join the team at Australian Museum to install the exhibit.
Siberian Princess reveals her 2,500-year-old tattoos
The mummy of a woman called the “Altai Princess” is in the museum of the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography in Novosibirsk, Russia.
Tattoos aren’t just a trendy way for people to express themselves – they’re also apparently a time-honored tradition dating back almost three thousand years.
A Siberian mummy, who researchers believe was buried 2500 years ago, will show off her intricate ink when she finally goes on display this month, and her shockingly well-preserved body art makes her look surprisingly modern.
The mummified body of the young woman, believed to be between 25 and 28 years old, was found in 1993, researchers told The Siberian Times.
Since then she has been kept frozen in a scientific institute, but she will soon be available to the public to be viewed from a glass case at the Republican National Museum in Siberia’s capital of Gorno-Altaisk.
The woman, dubbed in the media as the Ukok “princes,” was found wearing expensive clothing – a long silk shirt and beautifully decorated boots – as well as a horse hair wig.
A sculptor’s impression of how Princess Ukok looked 2,500 years ago.
Archeologists told the paper that because she was not buried with any weapons she was not a warrior, and that she was likely a healer or storyteller.
Though her face and neck weren’t preserved, she was inked across both arms and on her fingers, in what researchers say was an indication of status.
Princess Ukok’s hand, as the scientists saw her first, with marked tattoos on her fingers. She was buried with two men and six horses. Because she was not buried with weapons, researchers think that she might have been a healer or storyteller.
“The more tattoos were on the body, the longer it meant the person lived, and the higher was his position,” lead researcher Natalia Polosmak told the Times.
The woman was buried beside two men whose bodies also bore tattoos, as well as six horses.
A drawing of a tattoo on a warrior’s shoulder.
Researchers think the group belonged to the nomadic Pazyryk people, and that their body art is something special even in comparison to other mummies who have been found wih tattoos in the past.
“Those on the mummies of the Pazyryk people are the most complicated and the most beautiful,” Polosmak told the Times.
This diagram shows the placement and greater detail of the princess’ tattoos.
“It is a phenomenal level of tattoo art,” she said. “Incredible.”
Not everyone was pleased that the mummy was uncovered.
This diagram shows placement of the princess’ tattoos on her shoulder.
Controversy erupted after she was discovered, as many believed she should not have been removed from her burial site. Some locals even believed her grave’s disruption caused a “curse of the mummy” which they blamed for the crash of the helicopter carrying her remains.
The “Altai Princess” mummy was found at the Gorny Mountain Altai by Natalya Polos’mak, a scientist of the Novosibirsk Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography of the Siberian branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
“The Altai people never disturb the repose of the interned,” Rimma Erkinova, deputy director of the Gorno-Altaisk Republican National Museum told the Times. “We shouldn’t have any more excavations until we’ve worked out a proper moral and ethical approach.”
Tattoos that appear on the Princess’ hand. Because she was relatively young, researchers theorize, she had fewer tattoos.
Local authorities in the region have declared the area a ‘zone of peace,’ so no more excavations can be done in an effort to prevent plundering, though scientists believe there are many more mummies that can be found.
Rabbits Dig Up Two 9,000-Year-Old Artifacts from Bronze Age; Guess Where They Found It
European rabbits dug up Stone and Bronze Age artifacts on Skokholm Island.
A fluffle of wild rabbits has dug up priceless archaeological treasures on an island off the coast of Wales, in the United Kingdom.
The burrowing bunnies unearthed two artifacts — a 9,000-year-old Stone Age tool and a 3,750-year-old pottery piece, likely from a broken Bronze Age urn, according to the Wildlife Trust of South and West Wales, which manages Skokholm Island, where the objects were found.
Archaeologists have discovered similar artifacts on the U.K.’s mainland, but these new findings are the first of their kind on Skokholm Island, and indicate that humans visited or lived there thousands of years ago, the Wildlife Trust found.
The island, which sits about 2 miles (3.2 kilometers) off the coast of Pembrokeshire, a county in southwest Wales, is known for the tens of thousands of seabirds that nest there in the spring and summer months. Its natural beauty and wildlife have earned it the nickname “Dream Island.”
An aerial view of Skokholm Island, which lies off the coast of Wales.
Archaeological findings over the years showed evidence of prehistoric people on this island, but little is known about them. Starting in 1324, Skokholm Island became a rabbit farm for the next 200 years — a common island practice at that time, according to the Wildlife Trust. It seems that some of these rabbits’ descendants did the digging for the latest finds.
The wardens found the artifacts by these rabbit holes on Skokholm Island.
Wardens Richard Brown and Giselle Eagle, who are monitoring the island while it’s on lockdown due to the pandemic, found the smooth, oval-shaped Stone Age artifact first, while they were near a rabbit warren. They described it as “an interesting looking pebble,” in a March 16 blog post.
The bevelled pebble that rabbits dug up on Skokholm Island.
The duo emailed photos of the pebble to Toby Driver, an archaeologist with the Royal Commission, Wales, who in turn contacted prehistoric stone tool expert Andrew David. As soon as he saw the images, David knew the stone was a significant find.
“The photos were clearly of a late Mesolithic (Middle Stone Age) ‘bevelled pebble,’ a tool thought to have been used in tasks like the preparation of seal hides for making skin-clad watercraft, or for processing foods such as shellfish, among hunter-gatherer communities some 6,000-9,000 years ago,” David wrote in an email to the wardens.
“Although these types of tools are well known on coastal sites on mainland Pembrokeshire and Cornwall, as well as into Scotland and northern France, this is the first example from Skokholm, and the first firm evidence for late Mesolithic occupation on the island,” David added.
Just a few days later, Brown and Eagle found another artifact — a coarse piece of pottery — that rabbits had dug out by the same holes as the previous find. As the wardens wrote in a March 19 blog post, this piece of pottery “to our (very) untrained eyes, looked old.”
This fragment of pottery may have been part of a Bronze Age burial urn.
The pottery fragment came from a thick-walled pot that had been decorated with incised lines around its top, Jody Deacon, the curator of prehistoric archaeology at Amgueddfa Cymru — National Museum Wales, told the wardens. This pot was likely an early Bronze Age vase urn, a container associated with cremation burials, Deacon noted.
The pottery fragment dated to between 2100 and 1750 B.C., or about 3,750 years ago, Deacon said.
The dead were often cremated and buried in urns in western Wales at that time, but this is the first evidence of such an urn in Skokholm Island, or any of the western Pembrokeshire islands, Deacon said.
“This is an incredibly exciting discovery,” the wardens wrote in the March 19 blog post. “It is rather mind blowing that for thousands of years, people have returned to this same area, some of them perhaps working at seal skins, perhaps building skin boats, others burying their dead.”
Thanks to these rabbit-assisted finds, the Royal Commission, Wales now plans to undertake archaeological work on Skokholm Island this summer.
“It seems we may have an early Bronze burial mound built over a middle Stone Age hunter-gatherer site, disturbed by rabbits,” Driver said. “It’s a sheltered spot, where the island’s cottage now stands, and has clearly been settled for millennia.”
World-First Fossil Shows Dinosaur Sitting On Clutch Of Eggs Like A Bird
The ~70-million-year-old fossil in question: an adult oviraptorid theropod dinosaur sitting atop a nest of its fossilized eggs. Multiple eggs (including at least three that contain embryos) are clearly visible, as are the forearms, pelvis, hind limbs, and partial tail of the adult.
It’s hard to imagine a mighty T. rex kneeling delicately above a clutch of eggs, but new research surrounding a fossilized oviraptor suggests that this behavior may have indeed been practiced by some dinosaurs.
The first non-avialan dinosaur (species outside of the clade of dinosaurs related to living birds) fossil to feature an adult dinosaur sat on top of a clutch of eggs that contain embryonic remains has been detailed in Science Bulletin.
What’s more, the embryos were at different stages, suggesting the eggs would hatch at different times, something that is usually determined by when the parent starts incubating.
An attentive oviraptorid theropod dinosaur broods its nest of blue-green eggs while its mate looks on in what is now Jiangxi Province of southern China some 70 million years ago.
The partial skeleton of the oviraptorosaur was found on a nest of at least 24 fossilized eggs.
“This isn’t the first time an oviraptorid has been found in such a way, nor are these the first-ever oviraptorid embryos,” study author Shundong Bi, a professor at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania, told IFLScience.
“But it is the first time that an adult has been found atop embryo-bearing eggs. It’s also the first nesting oviraptorid to be discovered outside the Gobi Desert.”
Brooding, seen in chickens that sit on their eggs to incubate them during development, was thought to be an unlikely behavior in non-avialan dinosaurs whose heavy bodies would surely squish their progeny.
However, this new fossil found near Ganzhou, China, is the first discovered having preserved a non-avialan dinosaur atop an egg clutch that still contains embryonic remains.
The researchers believe the presence of an adult on eggs containing embryos at advanced growth stages provides strong support for the brooding hypothesis in some non-avialan dinosaurs.
Interestingly, the embryos inside the eggs are at different developmental stages, which points to the possibility that had they survived the eggs would’ve hatched at different times.
“The asynchronous hatching was not widespread among dinosaurs,” said Bi.
“This phenomenon, known as asynchronous hatching, is pretty peculiar and uncommon even in modern birds, the living descendants of dinosaurs.”
The researchers say their findings demonstrate that the evolution of reproductive biology along bird-line archosaurs (a large group of vertebrates that includes dinosaurs and pterosaurs and is represented today by birds) was complex and not the linear, incremental process it’s previously assumed to have been.
They theorize that some aspects of non-avialan theropod reproduction may have been unique to these dinosaurs and not passed to the avialan ancestors that eventually gave rise to modern birds.
Recent research detailed how the avialan feature of flight likely evolved twice in dinosaurs before the clade containing modern birds’ ancestors came into the picture.
This new insight presents a further trait of avialan dinosaurs and animals that may have been shared by some of their distant cousins.
500-year-old gold coins discovered in a German monastery were ‘hastily hidden’ during a ‘dangerous situation’
Archaeologists in Germany have uncovered a handful of 500-year-old gold coins buried among the ruins of a medieval monastery.
One of the four gold coins was discovered at a monastery in Germany.
Known as Himmelpforten, the Augustinian Hermit monastery housed monks from its founding in 1253 into the 16th century.
The archaeologists think the four coins were “hastily hidden” by one of the monks in 1525 during an uprising in which farmers stormed the monastery in Wernigerode, a town in central Germany, according to a translated article in Mitteldeutsche Zeitung, a German newspaper.
“The gold coins were of great value, and the small fortune was probably hidden by a monk in an acutely dangerous situation,” Felix Biermann, a project manager and archaeologist from the Saxony-Anhalt State Office for Monument Preservation and Archaeology told Mitteldeutsche Zeitung. “It didn’t end well because the coins couldn’t be recovered.”
Classified as guilders (guldens), a type of currency used during the Holy Roman Empire, the coins include one that was minted in Frankfurt before 1493, during the reign of the Holy Roman emperor Frederick III; another coin minted in Schwabach, outside Nuremberg, sometime between 1486 and 1495; and two coins produced in Bonn by the Archdiocese of Cologne around 1480, according to Newsweek.
In addition to the coins, researchers discovered an array of artifacts, including brass book clasps from the monastery’s library, ceramics, animal bones, a cavalry spur, and lead seals that were used to stamp cloth for commerce, all of which provide insight into the large-scale trade and prosperity of the monastery, according to Mitteldeutsche Zeitung.
All that remains of the monastery itself is the foundations of some buildings, including the main chapel and refectory where the monks would have dined.
The 14,000-year-old ice age village discovered is 10,000 years older than the pyramids
In their oral history, the Heiltsuk people describe how the area around Triquet Island, on the western coast of their territory in British Columbia, remained open land during the ice age.
“People flocked there for survival because everywhere else was being covered by ice, and all the ocean was freezing and all of the food resources were dwindling,” says Heiltsuk Nation member William Housty.
And late last year, archaeologists excavating an ancient Heiltsuk village on Triquet Island uncovered the physical evidence: a few flakes of charcoal from a long-ago hearth.
Analysis of the carbon fragments indicates that the village site — deserted since a smallpox epidemic in the 1800s — was inhabited as many as 14,000 years ago, making it three times as old as the pyramids at Giza, and one of the oldest settlements in North America.
“There are several sites that date to around the same time as the very early date that we obtained for Triquet Island, so what this is suggesting is that people have been here for tens of thousands of years,” says Alisha Gauvreau, a scholar at the Hakai Institute and a PhD candidate at the University of Victoria, who has been working at the Triquet Island site.
But how was it that Triquet Island remained uncovered, even during the ice age? According to Gauvreau, sea levels in the area remained stable over time, due to a phenomenon called sea level hinge.
“So all the rest of the landmass was covered in ice,” she explains. “As those ice sheets started to recede — and we had some major shifts in sea levels coastwide, so further to the north and to the south in the magnitude of 150 to 200 meters of difference, whereas here it remained exactly the same.”
The result, Gauvreau says, is that people were able to return to Triquet Island repeatedly over time. And while nearby sites also show evidence of ancient inhabitants, people “were definitely sticking around Triquet Island longer than anywhere else,” she says. In addition to finding bits of charcoal at the site, she says archaeologists have uncovered tools like obsidian blades, atlatls and spear throwers, fishhook fragments and hand drills for starting fires.
“And I could go on, but basically, all of these things, coupled with the fallen assemblage, tell us that the earliest people were making relatively simple stone tools at first, perhaps expediently, due to the parent material that was available at the time,” Gauvreau says.
The site also indicates that these early people were also using boats to hunt sea mammals, and gather shellfish, she adds. And later on, they traded or travelled great distances to obtain nonlocal materials like obsidian, greenstone, and graphite for tools.
For archaeologists and anthropologists, the find bolsters an idea, called the “Kelp Highway Hypothesis” hypothesis, proposing that the first people who arrived in North America followed the coastline in boats to avoid the glacial landscape.
“It certainly adds evidence to the fact that people were able to travel by boat in that coastal area by watercraft,” Gauvreau says.
And for the Heiltsuk Nation, which has worked with the archaeologists for years to share knowledge and identify sites like Triquet Island, the updated archaeological record provides new evidence, as well.
The nation routinely negotiates with the Canadian government on matters of territory governance and natural resource management — negotiations that depend in part on the community’s record of inhabiting the area over long periods.
Archaeologists at the site are unearthing tools for lighting fires, fish hooks and spears dating back to the Ice Age
“So when we’re at the table with our oral history, it’s like me telling you a story,” Housty says. “And you have to believe me without seeing any evidence.”
But now, he explains, with the oral history and archaeological evidence “dovetailing together, telling a really powerful tale,” the Heiltsuk have new advantages at the negotiating table.
“That’s really going to be very significant … and I think will definitely give us a leg up in negotiations, for sure,” he says.
