Thousands of medieval coins unearthed by metal detectorists in Romania
Metal detectorists have discovered a literal pot of buried treasure deep within a forest in western Romania.
Thousands of medieval coins unearthed by metal detectorists in Romania
In total, the group unearthed roughly 4,860 coins and three silver plates along with a ceramic pot holding the coins, according to a July 13 translated Facebook post announcing the find.
“Such a discovery brings a wonderful feeling,” Raoul Vlad Suta, one of the metal detectorists who made the discovery, wrote in his post, adding that such a find “is the dream of every history and detection enthusiast.”
Suta detailed how he and two companions found the coin hoard: “I received a short but stable signal [on the metal detector], I put the shovel to work,” he wrote. “I noticed a small silver coin as if it was taken out of my pocket. A few more coins followed at a shallow depth; following the signals led us to what seemed to be a vessel’s mouth.”
The coins were issued between 1500 and 1550, during the reign of Vladislaus II (who lived from 1456 to 1516), the king of Bohemia, Hungary and Croatia. The hoard and its ceramic pot weigh nearly 10 pounds (4.5 kilograms) in total, according to the Facebook post.
Suta wrote that finding the coins gave the group “tears of joy.”
The treasure hunters handed over their haul to Nojorid City Hall in western Romania, following a law that states that anyone who finds objects with potential value must notify their local city hall or museum within 72 hours of the discovery. Of the thousands of coins, only four couldn’t be identified by Suta, his friends and town hall officials, he wrote in the post.
Currently, there’s no additional information about why the coins were buried there.
The law states that the metal detectorists “may be entitled to 30% to 45% of the officially determined value of the treasure,” according to Krónika Online, a Romanian website.
Crusader sword found in Holy Land was bent, possibly in naval battle, X-rays reveal
A sword studded in seashells and caked in sand, found at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea near Israel, was likely dropped there by a Crusader during battle between 800 and 900 years ago, a new analysis reveals.
The sword as seen during a diving expedition off the coast of Israel.
Divers discovered the medieval weapon, whose blade measures nearly 3 feet (88 centimeters) long and 1.8 inches (4.6 cm) wide, in 2021 during an underwater expedition. Because the sword was heavily coated in concretions, archaeologists were initially limited in what they could learn about the artifact.
However, those very same caked-on deposits also preserved the weapon. With the help of X-rays, researchers were able to “visually penetrate the layers of marine concretion and glimpse the original outline of the sword,” according to a July 23 Facebook post by the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA).
The X-ray revealed that the blade was bent. Swords damaged during battle can be bent back into shape at a later date, so the fact that this 12th- to 13th-century weapon — dubbed the Newe-Yam sword — remained bent and was not in a sheath known as a scabbard led archaeologists to conclude that it was likely damaged during the Crusades, according to a new study published in the July issue of the journal ‘Atiqot.
The Crusades were a series of religious wars between Christians and Muslims that unfolded between A.D. 1095 and 1291.
“The sword was used by a Crusader warrior who settled in the country after the First Crusade and established the Kingdom of Jerusalem in 1099,” co-author Jacob Sharvit, director of the marine archaeology unit of the IAA, wrote in the Facebook post.
“Considering the bloody battles that took place in the country between the Crusaders and the Muslims, known from several historical sources, we could expect to find more such swords. In practice, we mostly find fragments, very few whole swords.”
He added, “So far, seven swords from this period have been found in the country, most of them discovered in the sea. Swords were not usually discarded, but over the years, once they were no longer in use, the metal was recycled for other uses.”
Swords were considered valuable weaponry at that time, and they would’ve been among a Crusader’s prized possessions. So losing one to the sea during a naval battle would have been detrimental, or even fatal.
“The sword was part of a knight’s or warrior’s personal equipment,” lead author Joppe Gosker, an archaeologist with the IAA, wrote in the Facebook post. “It was the main weapon in face-to-face combat in those days.
Swords required a lot of quality iron and were therefore expensive. In addition, sword fighting required training and practice, and therefore, only the nobility and professional soldiers fought with swords.”
While scans of the seafloor near the sword’s resting place didn’t reveal any human remains, researchers wouldn’t be surprised if the soldier were also buried there.
“The warrior may still lie undiscovered in the depths, to be revealed one day by the shifting sands,” the researchers wrote in the Facebook post
Ancient Roman boat from empire’s frontier unearthed in Serbian coal mine
The wooden remains and the layers of sand above them were damp, indicating the wreck was protected by moisture from the air.
Coal miners in Serbia have discovered the remains of a large wooden boat likely used by the Romans to supply a nearby city and military headquarters on the empire’s frontier.
Archaeologists are waiting for radiocarbon dates of wood from the remains, but they think it may be from the third or fourth centuries A.D. They suggest the ancient vessel carried supplies along small rivers between the Danube River and the Roman city of Viminacium about 1 mile (1.6 kilometers) away, which was established early in the first century A.D.
The ancient wreck was unearthed in late July at the Drmno surface coal mine near Kostolac, about 30 miles (50 km) east of Belgrade.
The wooden remains were buried in a layer of silt about 25 feet (8 meters) below the surface. The mine’s coal seam is reached by cutting away the topsoil with a mechanical digger, and the wreck was found on the wall of the cutting.
Archaeologists think the flat-bottomed boat once carried cargo along waterways between the Danube and the Roman city of Viminacium.
The miners who found it then contacted archaeologists at the nearby Viminacium archaeological park, which is operated by the Belgrade-based Institute of Archaeology.
Organic materials like wood usually rots when exposed to air, but the wooden boards and the sand above them were damp, so it seemed that moisture had helped preserve the ancient vessel, a spokesperson told the Serbian website Sve o arheologiji.
But after it was unearthed, “the great danger was the bright sun, which threatened to dry out the ship too quickly,” so the archaeologist doused the remains with water as they excavated the wreck, the spokesperson noted.
A team of archaeologists excavate the remains of the ancient boat while the coal mine’s giant machines operate nearby.
Vital supply boat
The vessel was originally about 65 feet (20 m) long and about 12 feet (3.5 m) wide. It was flat-bottomed, like a barge, and the archaeologists think it was used to carry cargo between the Danube and Viminacium.
“It is likely that the barge was towed from the shore or driven by oars, and in suitable situations the ship could also use the wind to move, using an auxiliary sail,” the archaeologists said.
The wreck is not the first ancient vessel unearthed nearby: The remains of similar boats were found in the area in 2020, indicating the region was once a navigable backwater of the nearby Danube.
Radiocarbon dating to reveal the boat’s age is being carried out, but archaeologists think it dates from the third or fourth centuries A.D.
The remains were found during operations at the Drmno coal mine. They are visible here on the wall of a cutting, above the person standing near the center of the photograph.
Imperial frontier
Viminacium was a combined Roman settlement and military fort, and after A.D. 87 it was the capital of the Roman Empire’s Upper Moesia (Moesia Superior) frontier province.
It was an important trading hub and a regional center of Roman culture. Archaeologists estimate Viminacium had a population of up to 45,000 people, making it one of the largest settlements in the Balkans at that time.
Several Roman legions were based at the fort there, and the people to the north were notoriously belligerent toward the Romans.
But the city and fort were destroyed by the Huns in 411, who ended Roman rule in much of Europe. Viminacium was rebuilt early in the sixth century by the Byzantine emperor Justinian the Great, but it was destroyed again in 582 by invading Avars from the Eurasian steppe.
The remains of similar boats have been found nearby, indicating the entire area was once a navigable backwater of the Danube.
Roman treasures
Viminacium’s ruins were discovered in the 19th century, and it is now one of Serbia’s most important Roman sites, although it’s estimated that only a small percentage of it has been excavated.
Archaeologists have unearthed tens of thousands of artifacts there, including hundreds made from silver and gold, as well as richly decorated tombs, ancient workshops, palaces, temples, streets, plazas and fortifications; Roman baths; a track for racing chariots; and an amphitheater for 12,000 people.
In 2021 the remains of at least 13 dogs were discovered in the ruins of the amphitheater, where they may have been sacrificed.
World’s Oldest Stone Tools Were Made By Ape-Like Hominid 3.3 Million Years Ago
In the opening sequence of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, an ape-like hominin is depicted as the inventor of the first-ever primitive tool, changing the course of human history forever.
The earliest stone tools ever used are known as the Oldowan toolkit.
Half a century after the film’s release, scientists confirmed that the earliest stone implements were indeed manufactured by a species that predated the Homo lineage, which means humans weren’t the first to create tools.
Nicknamed “Handy Man”, the ancient human species Homo habilis is renowned for its extensive use of the so-called Oldowan toolkit, which consists of basic knapped flakes that could be used as blades. For a while, the extinct hominid was credited with inventing this primitive technology, yet recent discoveries have drastically changed that narrative.
For instance, in 2011, researchers in Kenya stumbled upon a collection of knapped flakes at a site called Lomekwi 3. Dated to 3.3 million years ago, the tools were created about a million years before our Handy ancestor made its entrance and half a million years before the appearance of the genus Homo.
Exactly which pre-human species created these tools is unknown, although fossils belonging to the ancient hominin Kenyanthropus platyops have been found near to the site.
The region was also home to the species Australopithecus afarensis – of which the iconic Lucy was a member – around the time that the tools were made.
Based on their ape-like characteristics, both of these species are generally thought to have been relatively dim-witted. However, the possibility that they may have invented the first-ever stone tools challenges that assumption and implies they may have actually been pretty smart.
To date, researchers have not been able to confirm whether the tools were made by either K. platyops or A. afarensis, although for what it’s worth (which isn’t much), there’s a pretty striking resemblance between Lucy and Kubrick’s tool-making hominids.
Back to the actual science, researchers recently found another set of surprisingly ancient stone flakes in Kenya.
Dated to around 2.9 million years ago, the assemblage is more representative of the Oldowan toolkit than the Lomekwi artifacts.
Amazingly, these tools were found alongside butchered hippopotamus bones, indicating that they were once used to carve up large prey. Nearby, researchers also uncovered the oldest ever tooth belonging to the ancient hominid genus Paranthropus, which was somewhat similar to Australopithecus.
As with the Lomekwi assemblage, this second set of ancient tools cannot be definitively attributed to a known manufacturer, although Paranthropus is certainly a strong candidate. Given their age, though, it’s likely that whoever made the flakes was not human.
Let’s just hope Kubrick wasn’t right about the future of artificial intelligence, too.
Archaeologists Are Too Terrified To Look Inside Tomb Of China’s First Emperor
In 1974, farmers stumbled across one of the most important archaeological discoveries of all time in an unassuming field in the Shaanxi province of China.
The Terracotta Army was buried near the tomb of Qin Shi Huang to protect him in his afterlife.
While digging, they found fragments of a human figure made out of clay. This was just the tip of the iceberg. Archaeological excavations revealed the field was sitting above a number of pits that were jam-packed with thousands of life-size terracotta models of soldiers and war horses, not to mention acrobats, esteemed officials, and other animals.
It appears that the mission of this Terracotta Army was to guard the nearby mausoleum of Qin Shi Huang, the formidable first emperor of the Qin dynasty who ruled from 221 to 210 BCE.
While large parts of the necropolis surrounding the mausoleum have been explored, the emperor’s tomb itself has never been opened despite the huge amount of intrigue that surrounds it. Eyes have perhaps not peered inside this tomb for over 2,000 years, when the feared emperor was sealed inside.
A prime reason behind this hesitancy is that archaeologists are concerned about how the excavation might damage the tomb, losing vital historical information. Currently, only invasive archaeological techniques could be used to enter the tomb, running a high risk of causing irreparable damage.
One of the clearest examples of this comes from the excavations of the city of Troy in the 1870s by Heinrich Schliemann. In his hastiness and naivety, his work managed to destroy almost all traces of the very city he’d set out to uncover. Archaeologists are certain they don’t want to be impatient and make these same mistakes again.
Scientists have floated the idea of using certain non-invasive techniques to look inside the tomb. One idea is to utilize muons, the subatomic product of cosmic rays colliding with atoms in the Earth’s atmosphere, which can peer through structures like an advanced X-ray. However, it looks like most of these proposals have been slow to get off the ground.
Tomb of the First Emperor Qin Shi Huang Di, Xi’an, China.
Cracking open the tomb could come with much more immediate and deadly dangers too. In an account written by ancient Chinese historian Sima Qian around 100 years after Qin Shi Huang’s death, he explains that the tomb is hooked up to booby traps that were designed to kill any intruder.
“Palaces and scenic towers for a hundred officials were constructed, and the tomb was filled with rare artifacts and wonderful treasure. Craftsmen were ordered to make crossbows and arrows primed to shoot at anyone who enters the tomb.
Mercury was used to simulate the hundred rivers, the Yangtze and Yellow River, and the great sea, and set to flow mechanically,” it reads.
Even if the 2,000-year-old bow weapons fail, this account suggests a flood of toxic liquid mercury could wash across the gravediggers. That might sound like an empty threat, but scientific studies have looked at mercury concentrations around the tomb and found significantly higher levels than they’d expect in a typical piece of land.
“Highly volatile mercury may be escaping through cracks, which developed in the structure over time, and our investigation supports ancient chronicle records on the tomb, which is believed never to have been opened/looted,” the authors of one 2020 paper conclude.
For the time being, the tomb of Qin Shi Huang remains sealed and unseen, but not forgotten. When the time is right, however, it’s possible that scientific advancements could finally delve into the secrets that have been lying here undisturbed for some 2,200 years.
An earlier version of this story was published in January 2023.
Beautifully Complete 150-Million-Year-Old Turtle Fossil Discovered In Germany
An incredibly well-preserved fossil of an ancient Jurassic sea turtle has been uncovered in Germany, the first to have a complete skull, shell, and all four limbs.
This flat pancake of a fossil has tortoise a lot about the environment where the turtle would have lived.
The marine turtle had a massive head and would have swum through the shallows of a tropical sea that once covered Europe 150 million years ago.
Across the world, there are some extremely important fossil sites that have provided scientists with an array of specimens that help determine all sorts of information about the way ancient creatures once roamed across the land and seas of ancient Earth.
The Torleite Formation near Painten in southeastern Germany is such a place; an active quarry, it’s also home to hundreds of fossil Jurassic marine creatures such as turtles, crocodilians, fish, and even giant marine reptiles like ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs.
It was here in 2014 scientists uncovered a new specimen of the turtle species Solnhofia parsonsi, dating back around 150 million years. This area is known as the Franconian Alb and contains large amounts of marine sedimentary rocks from the Lower and Upper Jurassic.
The specific area in which the turtle specimen was found had only begun to be investigated in the last 20 years and has provided a wealth of specimens in different taxonomic groups.
The variation in specimens led scientists to suggest that this area would have been once connected to the open sea.
The fossil reveals more about the ecology of this ancient turtle species.
The new specimen is exceptionally well preserved with a complete skull and skeleton visible. “Compared to the size of the carapace, the skull is very large, reaching approximately 40% of the carapace (shell) length,” the authors write in the study.
However, it can only be looked at from the top of the shell down. This is the first fossil with a complete skull, shell, and nearly complete limbs, and only the second of this species found with the head and rear limbs in their natural positions, which helps the team understand more about the turtles’ behavior.
The team thinks that the way the turtle’s paddles differed from the stiff flippers of deep-sea turtles suggests that it did not have a fully pelagic (open sea) lifestyle and so did not spend large amounts of time on the open sea. Instead, they reason that the paddle formation along with a difference in tail length suggests that this turtle’s ecology was more suited to being a shallow-water coastal marine species.
The Mystery Of The Modern “London Hammer” Found Encased In Ancient Rock
While walking along Red Creek, London, Texas, in June 1936, Emma Zadie Hahn and her husband Max Edmond Hahn made an unusual discovery: a piece of wood poking out of what appeared to be an ancient rock formation.
The story goes that ten-ish years later, their son, who was clearly born with the merest hint of curiosity that they lacked, smashed open the rock to see what was inside. What he found was a hammer. Where it gets weirder is that it was clearly a modern(ish) hammer.
The hammer attracted the unhelpful attention of Young Earth Creationist Carl Baugh, who claimed that the rock around the hammer was from the Cretaceous period.
When they split it open, this is what they found.
This would mean that whoever dropped the hammer of 19th-century design did so while (e.g.) running away from a triceratops.
For Baugh, who was himself incorrect, this was evidence that evolution theory was incorrect.
“If the artifact is truly from the Cretaceous time frame, where does this leave evolutionary theory, since man was not supposed to have evolved for another 100-million years or so?” Baugh asked. “If the artifact is relatively recent, that means that the Cretaceous Hensell Sand formation from which it came is relatively young… Again, where does that leave evolutionary theory with its traditional dates for the Cretaceous formations?”
The answer, of course, was that the hammer was modern, but it had become encased in the rock by geological processes not known to Baugh.
“The stone is real, and it looks impressive to someone unfamiliar with geological processes.
How could a modern artifact be stuck in Ordovician rock?” investigator Glen J. Kuban asked in a 1997 paper on the hammer, published in Paleo.
“The answer is that the concretion itself is not Ordovician.
Minerals in solution can harden around an intrusive object dropped in a crack or simply left on the ground if the source rock (in this case, reportedly Ordovician) is chemically soluble.”
While an extremely cool find, the rock formation is not as ancient as it appears.
Likely, a miner dropped the hammer a century ago, or perhaps a touch earlier, after which the rock formed around it. It was not, repeat, not, proof of The Flintstones.
A rare 2,500-year-old marble disc, designed to protect ancient ships and ward off the evil eye discovered near Palmachim Beach
A rare 2,500-year-old marble disc designed to protect ancient ships and ward off the evil eye was discovered by a lifeguard diving at sea and turned over to the Israel Antiquities Authority.
The Israel Antiquities Authority announced from social media on July 18 that the object the lifeguard turned over was a 2,500-year-old, eye-shaped marble disc that was attached to ships to ward off the evil eye.
Experts say the relic, found during a dive by lifeguard David Shalom at the Yavne-Yam archaeological site near Palmachim Beach, dates back to the 5th to 4th centuries BC.
Yaakov Sharvit, Director of the Marine Archaeology Unit at the Israel Antiquities Authority, explains: “From drawings on pottery, mosaics, and ancient coins, as well as from historical sources from the 5th century BCE, we learn that this design was common on ships’ bows and served to protect against the evil eye and envy, aided navigation, and acted as a pair of eyes looking ahead and warning of danger.
This decoration is still common today on modern ships in Portugal, Malta, Greece, and the far east.”
The large white marble disc, 20 cm in diameter, is flat on one side and curved on the other, and it has a central cavity with traces of paint appearing as two circles around the center.
It is identified as an eye motif, in Greek “ophtalmoi,” and such discs adorned the bows of ancient warships and merchant’s vessels.
Lead or bronze nails attached the center of the disc to the ship’s hull. Archaeologists have turned up a wealth of artifacts in the same area.
Although this artifact was once common and one would expect to find many similar artifacts, it is, in fact, rare. So far, only four similar ancient items have been discovered in the Mediterranean: two from the wreck of an ancient merchant ship found at the Tektaş Burnu site off the western coast of Turkey, between the islands of Samos and Kios, dating to 440–425 BCE, and two on the Mediterranean coast of Israel—one from the Carmel Beach and the other, just discovered, on the Yavneh-Yam coast.
In water surveys conducted by the Marine Archaeology Unit of the Israel Antiquities Authority since the 1980s, finds from shipwrecked ships testifying to extensive commercial activity at the site were discovered.
