Traces of 2,250-Year-Old Settlement Found in England
The foundations of an Iron Age settlement have been uncovered during work to build a new roundabout. The discoveries, including pottery dating back about 2,250 years, came to light at the site of a junction near Upton-upon-Severn, Worcestershire.
The Iron Age site came to light during work to build a roundabout near Upton-upon-Severn, Worcestershire
In August and September digs took place after surveys showed Iron Age remains might be found there.
The finds give a “vital glimpse” into life at the time, archaeologist Robin Jackson said.
The site was first spotted on aerial photos during the planning stage to improve the junction of the A38 and A4104, the county council said.
The discovery gives archaeologists a “vital glimpse” into Iron Age life, one expert said
An initial investigation turned up the pottery which showed the site had been occupied between 300 and 100BC.
Archaeologists also found a large ditched enclosure at the heart of the area which they believe may have been used to protect and distribute cereal harvests.
Only about a third of the site had been explored as excavations were restricted to the area disturbed by work for the roundabout, Mr Jackson said.
“It has given us a vital glimpse into what life would have been like in the Iron Age”, he added and said more analysis of the findings will take place in 2022.
Only a third of the settlement has been excavated as this is the area disturbed by the roundabout work
Previous roadworks have uncovered other archaeological finds in the county.
Musket balls and belt buckles were among English Civil War artefacts from the Battle of Worcester in 1651, unearthed during work on the A4440 Southern Link Road, Worcester, in 2019.
Detectorist finds 10,000 Roman coins in Huntingdon hoard
A hoard of almost 10,000 Roman coins has been found in two pottery containers, nested inside each other “a bit like Russian dolls”. They were discovered by a metal detectorist in a field near Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire, in spring 2018.
All the 9,724 coins were made of base metal and were probably hidden at a time of turmoil in the wake of the 3rd Century breakaway empire.
The “muddy hoard” was taken to the British Museum for conservation.
The coins were removed from the pot in three layers
The county’s finds liaison officer Helen Fowler said the detectorist initially unearthed one copper-alloy coin.
“Then a few more were found and as the number of signals from the detector increased, so did the concentration of the spread of the coins,” she said.
“Before the end of the day the finder had dug down and seen the top of a hoard of coins.”
Other Gallic Empire emperors include Postumus, Tetricus I and II, Victorinus, Marcus Aurelius Marius and Domitanus II
The detectorist, who had the landowner’s permission for the search, promptly covered it up and reported the find.
Miss Fowler and the British Museum’s Dr Andrew Brown spent two days excavating the hoard, which had originally been hidden in two pottery containers, “one nested directly inside the other, a bit like Russian dolls”, she said.
She suspects the inner pot had started to crack under the weight of the coins, so a second larger pot was required.
The experts nicknamed it the “muddy hoard”, she added.
The find took two days to excavate before being taken to the British Museum for sorting and conservation
The coins date to AD251-74 and are believed to have been hidden in the wake of the reconquest of the breakaway Gallic Empire.
It had been established in AD260 and ruled Britain, Gaul (roughly modern-day France) and Spain until Emperor Aurelian reunited the Empire in AD274.
Now the hoard has been declared treasure by Cambridgeshire Coroner’s Court, it is awaiting independent valuation.
Two Cambridgeshire museums have expressed interest in acquiring the hoard.
British Museum experts said most of the coins were imitations, made at a time when official coinage was in short supply
A Corinthian Helmet from the Battle of Marathon found with the warrior’s skull Inside
The Corinthian helmet type is one of the most immediately recognisable types of helmet, romantically associated with the great heroes of Ancient Greece, even by the Ancient Greeks themselves who rapidly moved to helmet types with better visibility, but still depicted their heroes in these helmets.
In modern portrayals of Ancient Greek warriors, it is always the Corinthian type that is depicted, although often modified to suit the look desired – for instance in one movie the helmet was modified to expose more of the face of the actor.
It was a helmet made of bronze which in its later styles covered the entire head and neck, with slits for the eyes and mouth. A large curved projection protected the nape of the neck. Out of combat, a Greek hoplite would wear the helmet tipped upward for comfort.
This practice gave rise to a series of variant forms in Italy, where the slits were almost closed since the helmet was no longer pulled over the face but worn cap-like.
Although the classical Corinthian helmet fell out of use among the Greeks in favour of more open types, the Italo-Corinthian types remained in use until the 1st century AD, being used, among others, by the Roman army.
This helmet was excavated by George Nugent-Grenville, 2nd Baron Nugent of Carlanstown, on the Plain of Marathon in 1834, according to letters from Sutton dated 2 & 20 August 1826.
Mound (Soros) in which the Athenian dead were buried after the battle.
2,500 years earlier, on the morning of September 17, 490 BC, some 10,000 Greeks stood assembled on the plain of Marathon, preparing to fight to the last man. Behind them lay everything they held dear: their city, their homes, their families. In front of the outnumbered Greeks stood the assembled forces of the Persian empire, a seemingly invincible army with revenge, pillage and plunder on its mind.
The two sides faced each other directly, waiting for the fight to start. The Athenians stalled for days, anticipating reinforcements promised by Sparta. But they knew they could not wait for long.
The Persians, expecting as easy a victory as they had won against enemies so many times before, were in no hurry.
The Greeks, knowing the time for battle had come, began to move forward. Ostensibly, they advanced with focus and purpose, but beneath this firm veneer, as they looked on a vastly larger enemy — at least twice their number — many must have been fearful of what was to come.
The Persian archers sat with their bows drawn, ready to loose a barrage of arrows that would send fear and confusion through the Greek ranks. Eventually, though, the infantry on both sides engaged in battle. Moving towards each other and perhaps with the Greeks running the final 400 metres whilst undoubtedly under fire from the Persian archers, the two armies clashed.
A few hours later the bloody battle ended. Herodotus records that 6,400 Persian bodies were counted on the battlefield, and it is unknown how many more perished in the swamps. The Athenians lost 192 men and the Plataeans 11.
Pheidippides giving the word of victory at the Battle of Marathon
One final legend of Marathon and one which has carried its name up to the present day is Herodotus’ account of a long-distance messenger (hēmerodromos) named Phidippides.
He was sent to enlist the help of the Spartans before the battle and he ran to Sparta, first stopping at Athens, a total distance of 240 km (a feat repeated by an athlete in 1983 CE).
Later sources, starting with Plutarch in the 1st century CE, confuse this story with another messenger sent from Marathon after the battle to announce victory and warn of the Persian fleet’s imminent arrival in Athens.
In any case, it was from this second legend that a race – covering the same distance as the 42 kilometres between Marathon and Athens – was established in the first revival of the Olympic Games in 1896 CE to commemorate ancient Greek sporting ideals and the original games at Olympia.
Fittingly, the first marathon race was won by a Greek, Spiridon Louis.
Russian Statue Discovered to Be Older Than the Pyramids
Gold prospectors first discovered the so-called Shigir Idol at the bottom of a peat bog in Russia’s Ural mountain range in 1890. The unique object—a nine-foot-tall totem pole composed of ten wooden fragments carved with expressive faces, eyes and limbs and decorated with geometric patterns—represents the oldest known surviving work of wooden ritual art in the world.
Hunter-gatherers in what is now Russia likely viewed the wooden sculpture as an artwork imbued with ritual significance.
More than a century after its discovery, archaeologists continue to uncover surprises about this astonishing artefact.
As Thomas Terberger, a scholar of prehistory at Göttingen University in Germany, and his colleagues wrote in the journal Quaternary International in January, new research suggests the sculpture is 900 years older than previously thought.
Based on extensive analysis, Terberger’s team now estimates that the object was likely crafted about 12,500 years ago, at the end of the Last Ice Age. Its ancient creators carved the work from a single larch tree with 159 growth rings, the authors write in the study.
“The idol was carved during an era of great climate change, when early forests were spreading across a warmer late-glacial to postglacial Eurasia,” Terberger tells Franz Lidz of the New York Times.
“The landscape changed, and the art—figurative designs and naturalistic animals painted in caves and carved in rock—did, too, perhaps as a way to help people come to grips with the challenging environments they encountered.”
According to Sarah Cascone of Artnet News, the new findings indicate that the rare artwork predates Stonehenge, which was created around 5,000 years ago, by more than 7,000 years. It’s also twice as old as the Egyptian pyramids, which date to roughly 4,500 years ago.
As the Times reports, researchers have been puzzling over the age of the Shigir sculpture for decades. The debate has major implications for the study of prehistory, which tends to emphasize a Western-centric view of human development.
The wood used to carve the Shigir Idol is around 12,250 years old.
In 1997, Russian scientists carbon-dated the totem pole to about 9,500 years ago.
Many in the scientific community rejected these findings as implausible: Reluctant to believe that hunter-gatherer communities in the Urals and Siberia had created art or formed cultures of their own, says Terberger to the Times, researchers instead presented a narrative of human evolution that centered European history, with ancient farming societies in the Fertile Crescent eventually sowing the seeds of Western civilization.
Prevailing views over the past century, adds Terberger, regarded hunter-gatherers as “inferior to early agrarian communities emerging at that time in the Levant. At the same time, the archaeological evidence from the Urals and Siberia was underestimated and neglected.”
In 2018, scientists including Terberger used accelerator mass spectrometry technology to argue that the wooden object was about 11,600 years old. Now, the team’s latest publication has pushed that origin date back even further.
As Artnet News reports, the complex symbols carved into the object’s wooden surface indicate that its creators made it as a work of “mobiliary art,” or portable art that carried ritual significance. Co-author Svetlana Savchenko, the curator in charge of the artifact at the Sverdlovsk Regional Museum of Local Lore, tells the Times that the eight faces may contain encrypted references to a creation myth or the boundary between the earth and sky.
“Wood working was probably widespread during the Late Glacial to early Holocene,” the authors wrote in the 2018 article. “We see the Shigir sculpture as a document of a complex symbolic behavior and of the spiritual world of the Late Glacial to Early Mesolithic hunter-gatherers of the Urals.”
The fact that this rare evidence of hunter-gatherer artwork endured until modern times is a marvel in and of itself, notes Science Alert. The acidic, antimicrobial environment of the Russian peat bog preserved the wooden structure for millennia.
João Zilhão, a scholar at the University of Barcelona who was not involved in the study, tells the Times that the artefact’s remarkable survival reminds scientists of an important truth: that a lack of evidence of ancient art doesn’t mean it never existed. Rather, many ancient people created art objects out of perishable materials that could not withstand the test of time and were therefore left out of the archaeological record.
“It’s similar to the ‘Neanderthals did not make art’ fable, which was entirely based on the absence of evidence,” Zilhão says. “Likewise, the overwhelming scientific consensus used to hold that modern humans were superior in key ways, including their ability to innovate, communicate and adapt to different environments. Nonsense, all of it.”
Spanish researchers claim to have found lost ancient building dedicated to Hercules
The legendary temple of Hercules Gaditanus, who was known as Melqart in Phoenician times, was a key pilgrimage site in ancient times.
According to classical records, the temple witnessed the passage of historical figures such as Julius Caesar and the Carthaginian conqueror Hannibal, and dated at least as far back as the ninth century BC.
But thousands of years later, its location remains a mystery, and finding the temple has become something of a holy grail for historians and archeologists, who have been searching for it for centuries.
Aerial view of the temple’s possible location.
Now there is a possible answer to this great mystery. Ricardo Belizón, a Ph.D. student at Seville University in southern Spain, has come up with a new hypothesis, which is backed by scientists from his university and the Andalusian Institute of Historical Heritage (IAPH).
Thanks to free software and digital terrain modeling, Belizón has identified traces of a monumental building in the Caño de Sancti Petri, a shallow channel in the Bay of Cádiz, between the towns of Chiclana de Frontera and San Fernando, in the southern region of Andalusia.
The hypothetical view that the archaeologist García y Bellido made of the Hercules temple, in 1968, based on the one in Jerusalem.
The temple of Hercules Gaditanus is mentioned in classical Greek and Latin literature as the place where Julius Caesar wept bitterly before a representation of Alexander the Great and where the Carthaginian conqueror Hannibal went to offer thanks for the success of his military campaign a century and a half earlier.
All these references mention “a changing environment, in contact with the sea, subject to the changing tides, in a temple where there must have been port structures and a seafaring environment,” says Milagros Alzaga, head of the Center for Underwater Archaeology (CAS), who also participated in the research.
A 3D model showing the Boqueron point in San Fernando (Cádiz) and the rectangular structure of the possible temple of Hercules Gaditanus now submerged under the Caño of Sancti Petri
Following decades of academic controversy and different proposals for the temple’s location, the one put forward now by Seville University and the IAPH falls within a radius earmarked as the most obvious.
The site is a huge marshy channel dominated by an islet and the castle of Sancti Petri, which rises above it.
For more than two centuries, the area has been yielding important archaeological finds, now on show in the Museum of Cádiz, such as large marble and bronze sculptures of Roman emperors and various statuettes from the Phoenician period.
All these discoveries helped to delineate the location of the temple of Hercules Gaditanus as lying somewhere between the slopes of the islet itself and a slither of fine sand and a rocky intertidal zone, known as Boquerón point.
World’s oldest family tree reconstructed from Stone Age tomb
A nearly 6,000-year-old tomb unearthed in England holds the remains of 27 family members, representing a five-generation lineage descended from one man and four women, researchers have found using DNA analysis.
An artist’s impression of how the Hazleton North barrow would have looked when it was newly built about 5,700 years ago.
The findings suggest there were polygamous marriages in the upper echelons of Neolithic society at that time because the researchers think it was unlikely that the ancestral man had four wives one after another; instead, he probably had more than one wife at the same time.
The analysis reconstructs one of the oldest family trees ever charted, said Iñigo Olalde, a population geneticist at the University of Basque Country in Bilbao, Spain, and one of the lead authors of a study published Tuesday (Dec. 22) in the journal Nature. Scientists from Harvard University in Massachusetts, Newcastle University in the United Kingdom and the University of Vienna in Austria were also involved in the research.
The new techniques are likely to be quickly applied to other collections of ancient human DNA, he said. “This study is important because it’s the first large family tree that we get from prehistory,” he said. “But probably in the next few months or a year, we will get many more.”
Neolithic bones
The bones in the study were from the human remains of 35 people excavated in the 1980s from the Hazleton North barrow in the Cotswold Hills, near the twin cities of Cheltenham and Gloucester in western England.
The barrow, or burial mound, was in a farmer’s field where hundreds of years of ploughing had threatened to destroy it completely, so archaeologists carried out the excavation to preserve what was left, Olalde said.
A few years ago, a different team of researchers extracted genetic material from the bones and teeth of the entombed remains, and Olalde worked with the DNA sequences they contained to piece together how the individuals were related.
It soon became clear that the interrelationships were very complex. “When this became apparent, I thought ‘Oh my God,'” he said. “It was quite surprising, but quite fun, to find all this family.” The analysis could pin down the interrelationships from just 27 of the 35 bodies, including two young girls.
Genetic analysis of the 35 people buried in two tomb chambers in the barrow shows that 27 of them were close biological relatives.
The genetic analysis shows that five generations of one family descended from one man and four women, were buried in the two tomb chambers of the Hazleton North barrow.
The Hazleton North tomb consisted of two L-shaped chambers within a much larger barrow made of earth and stone.
The barrow had been badly damaged by farmers ploughing the land for crops, and the tomb chambers were excavated in the 1980s to preserve what was left. The bones of 35 people were found.
The results showed that the men were usually buried near their fathers and their brothers. This finding suggested that descent was patrilineal — in other words, later generations buried at the tomb were connected to the earliest generation through their male relatives, the researchers said.
But the tomb was also split into two L-shaped chambers, located in the north and south of the structure, and the choice of which chamber individuals were buried in depended on the first-generation women they were descended from — the descendants of two of the women were buried in the northern chamber, and the descendants of the other two women were buried in the southern chamber.
That finding suggested these first-generation women were also socially significant in their community and that their status was recognized when the tomb was built, Olalde said.
Family matters
Olalde also identified four men buried in the tomb whose mothers had been part of the lineage but whose fathers were not — termed “stepsons.” These stepsons could have been adopted into the family when their mothers joined it, although it was also possible that the women bore children from men outside the family who were not recognized as their partners, he said.
Two of the daughters of the lineage who had died in childhood were buried in the tomb, but no adult daughters of the lineage were buried there; instead, they may have been interred in the family tombs of their male partners, Olalde said.
In the same tomb, he also identified the remains of three women and five men who had no genetic relationship to the family. It’s possible that the women were married to men buried in the tomb and had either no children or only adult daughters who were then buried somewhere else, he said.
The significance of the five unrelated men is not known, but they may have been adopted into the family or somehow connected through relationships that can’t be determined genetically, Olalde said. The Hazleton North tomb dates to very early in the Neolithic period in England, and it’s likely that the immediate ancestors of the people buried there had come to Britain from continental Europe as part of an immigrant wave of Neolithic farmers at that time, he said.
While Neolithic tombs found on the European continent don’t show such complexity, Olalde said, the relationships between those buried in the Hazleton North tomb probably reflect much earlier kinship structures within the immigrant society.
Last meal of a man mummified in a bog reconstructed after 2400 years
The Tollund Man is one of the most famous ‘bog bodies’ ever discovered in northern Europe. Even though the 30- to 40-year-old human was buried in a bog more than 2,400 years ago, the acidic peat has mummified his body to a remarkable degree, preserving his hair, brain, skin, nails, and intestines – even the leather noose around his neck.
A close-up of Tollund Man’s face.
Despite all the evidence, we still don’t really know why he was killed. An updated analysis of the man’s gut has now revealed all the contents of his last meal, and it’s looking more and more like he was some sort of human sacrifice.
Roughly a day before the Tollund Man was hung and buried in the bog, researchers say he ate porridge, containing barley, flax, and seeds from plants and weeds.
That’s similar to what scientists found in the early 1950s when the body was first unearthed in what is now modern Denmark. But unlike past analyses, this one has also noticed a few new ingredients, like the fatty proteins of fish as well as remnants of threshing waste, which comes from separating grain.
That’s an intriguing discovery, as a recent analysis of another bog body, known as the Grauballe Man, has also turned up a surprisingly large quantity of threshing waste not noticed before.
The Grauballe Man was also killed and buried in an acidic bog, and the similar contents of his last meal to the Tollund Man’s last meal may indicate a ritual of sorts.
Tollund Man on display at Museum Silkeborg.
While other bog bodies appear to have eaten porridge or bread with a side of meat or berries, threshing waste and an abundance of seeds might indicate a special occasion. Either that, or these ingredients were simply added for flavor or nutrition.
“Although the meal may reflect ordinary Iron Age fare, the inclusion of threshing waste could possibly relate to ritual practices,” the authors write.
This isn’t the first time the Tollund Man or the Grauballe Man have been suspected victims of sacrifice.
While other bog bodies found might have fallen dead or drowned in the peat by accident, the way the Tollund Man was killed and then carefully buried, with his eyes and mouth closed shut and his body in a fetal position, has some scientists thinking he was a sacrifice to the gods.
Considering that the Tollund Man was buried near a place where Iron Age people used to dig for peat, it’s possible his body represented a form of gratitude for the land.
Some Roman historian accounts from the time have even written about similar human sacrifices in northwestern Europe, although these were often biased reports that might have stretched the truth about certain tribes.
The remarkably preserved face of Tollund Man.
Apart from the way in which the Tollund Man was buried, his gut is one of the juiciest clues we have. Further research will be needed to determine whether other bog bodies also ate meals containing threshing waste or seeds, or if these were, in fact, special ingredients given to humans before they were sacrificed.
The Tollund Man may be long dead, but his mystery continues to live on.
5 Ice Age Mammoths Discovered Near Busy Road in England
Experts who unearthed a 200,000-year-old mammoth graveyard say it is “one of Britain’s biggest Ice Age discoveries in recent years”. Archaeologists found the remains of five animals, including two adults, two juveniles, and an infant, at a quarry near Swindon.
The remains of at least five Ice Age mammoths were found at the quarry
The dig began after two keen fossil hunters spotted a Neanderthal hand axe.
Officials from the archaeological organisation DigVentures said that what they went on to find was “exceptional”.
The remains belong to a species of Steppe mammoth, an ancestor of the Woolly mammoth.
Close to the mammoth remains, the team also found a number of stone tools made by Neanderthals.
A research team led by archaeologists from DigVentures discovered “surprisingly well-preserved” evidence at the site
DigVentures began the excavations after being alerted to the site by Sally and Neville Hollingworth, from Swindon.
Ms Hollingworth said: “We were originally hoping to find marine fossils, and finding something so significant instead has been a real thrill.
“Even better than that is seeing it turn into a major archaeological excavation
“We couldn’t be more pleased that something we’ve discovered will be learned from and enjoyed by so many people.”
Excavations were carried out in 2019 and 2020 after Sally and Neville Hollingworth spotted the remains in 2017
Lisa Westcott Wilkins from DigVentures said: “Finding mammoth bones is always extraordinary, but finding ones that are so old and well preserved, and in such close proximity to Neanderthal stone tools is exceptional.”
Other discoveries at the site include delicate beetle wings and fragile freshwater snail shells as well as stone tools.
Research is ongoing to understand why so many mammoths were found in one place, and whether they were hunted or scavenged by Neanderthals.
The team recovered bones including tusks, leg bones, ribs and vertebrae belonging to a species of Steppe mammoth
Duncan Wilson, Chief Executive of Historic England, said: “This represents one of Britain’s most significant Ice Age discoveries in recent years.
“The findings have enormous value for understanding the human occupation of Britain, and the delicate environmental evidence recovered will also help us understand it in the context of past climate change.”
The discoveries are explored in a new BBC documentary ‘Attenborough and the Mammoth Graveyard’, with Sir David Attenborough
It is believed the site dates back to between 210,000 to 220,000 years ago.
With sites from this period rarely so well-preserved, it is thought these new discoveries will help archaeologists, palaeontologists, and palaeoenvironmental scientists address big questions about Neanderthals, mammoths, and the impact of a rapidly changing climate on life in Ice Age Britain.
The discovery will be featured in a new BBC One documentary Attenborough and the Mammoth Graveyard which will be broadcast on 30 December.
Some of the bones are now being examined for evidence of butchery, and further work is being planned at the site
