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
Pharaonic artefacts that were smuggled out of Egypt in 2014 were returned to the country on Monday. The 36 pieces were seized on arrival at Valencia, Spain, that year.
“This handover came as a result of effective judicial co-operation, and the result of concerted efforts between the Public Prosecution, the Egyptian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Embassy of the Arab Republic of Egypt in Spain,” read a prosecution statement posted on Facebook on Monday.
The repatriated items include busts made from limestone, marble and granite; bowls, vases, figurines and an ornate wooden box.
A collection of 36 ancient Egyptian artefacts that were just returned to Egypt 7 years after they were smuggled out of a port in Alexandria.
Prosecutors celebrated the return of the smuggled artefacts as a win for Egyptian-Spanish bilateral relations.
In their statement, they thanked Spain’s security officials for their commitment to preserving Egypt’s cultural heritage.
The artefacts were received by an Egyptian delegation including the country’s ambassador at a ceremony held at the National Archaeological Museum in Madrid on Monday.
They had been taken there to be assessed before the Egyptian delegation was contacted to come and retrieve them.
Spanish and Egyptian officials attend a ceremony at Madrid’s National Archaeological Museum. The ceremony was held to mark the return of a group of smuggled artefacts from Spain to Egypt.
Investigations into the smuggling of these artefacts began in June 2014, the public prosecutor’s statement read.
It said that security officials had proved at the time that the smuggled items left the coastal Egyptian city of Alexandria before they were seized by Spanish officials at the port of Valencia in the same year.
Egypt repatriates 114 smuggled artefacts from France
The items had been hidden onboard a container ship and forged documents were submitted to Spanish authorities to facilitate the smuggling.
Since 2014, Egyptian prosecutors have been following up on the case with Spanish authorities, the statement, released on Monday, said.
This year, Spain’s judiciary ruled that the items should be returned to Egypt. Word was sent to Egyptian officials, who formed a delegation to retrieve them.
A collection of ancient Egyptian relics was seized by Spanish authorities at a port in Valencia in 2014. The items were smuggled out of Egypt in 2014 and returned in 2021.
Egyptian artefacts have long been smuggled overseas.
The practice increased markedly in the period that followed a popular uprising in 2011 that caused a wave of political instability and lapses in security. The country’s tourism ministry announced this year that in the past decade, Egyptian authorities had repatriated 30,000 artefacts.
They had reached France, Denmark, Belgium and the US, among many countries.
Several prominent Egyptologists have launched awareness campaigns to help Egypt to retrieve smuggled artefacts, many of which are sold at discreet auctions at some of the world’s foremost auction houses.
A haul of more than 5,000 artefacts housed at the Museum of the Bible, in Washington, DC, was returned to Egypt in January.
The Vikings are remembered as fierce fighters, but even these mighty warriors were no match for climate change. Scientists recently found that ice sheet growth and sea-level rise led to massive coastal flooding that inundated Norse farms and ultimately drove the Vikings out of Greenland in the 15th century.
The Vikings first established a foothold in southern Greenland around A.D. 985 with the arrival of Erik Thorvaldsson, also known as “Erik the Red,” a Norwegian-born explorer who sailed to Greenland after being exiled from Iceland.
Other Viking settlers soon followed, forming communities in Eystribyggð (Eastern Settlement) and Vestribyggð (Western Settlement) that thrived for centuries. (At the time of the Vikings’ arrival, Greenland was already inhabited by people of the Dorset Culture, an Indigenous group that preceded the arrival of the Inuit people in the Arctic, according to the University of California Riverside).
Around the 15th century, signs of Norse habitation in the region vanished from the archaeological record.
Researchers previously suggested that factors such as climate change and economic shifts likely led the Vikings to abandon Greenland.
Now, new findings show that rising seas played a key role, by submerging miles of coastline, according to data presented Wednesday (Dec. 15) at the annual conference of the American Geophysical Union (AGU), held this week in New Orleans and online.
Between the 14th and 19th centuries, Europe and North America experienced a period of significantly cooler temperatures, known as the Little Ice Age.
Ruins of a church in Hvalsey, a Norse settlement in Greenland. Vikings built the structure around the 14th century.
Under these chilly conditions, the Greenland Ice Sheet — a vast blanket of ice covering most of Greenland — would have become even bigger, Marisa Julia Borreggine, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University, said in a presentation at the AGU conference.
As the ice sheet advanced, its increasing heaviness weighed down the substrate underneath, making coastal areas more prone to flooding, Borreggine said.
At the same time, the increased gravitational attraction between the expanding ice sheet and large masses of sea ice pushed more seawater over Greenland’s coast.
These two processes could have driven widespread flooding along the coastline — “exactly where the Vikings were settled,” Borreggine said.
The scientists tested their hypothesis by modeling estimated ice growth in southwestern Greenland over the 400-year period of Norse occupation and adding those calculations to a model showing sea-level rise during that time. Then, they analyzed maps of known Viking sites to see how their findings lined up with archaeological evidence marking the end of a Viking presence in Greenland.
Their models showed that from about 1000 to 1400, rising seas around Greenland would have flooded Viking settlements by as much as 16 feet (5 meters), affecting about 54 square miles (140 square kilometers) of coastal land, Borreggine said.
This flooding would have submerged land that the Vikings used for farming and as grazing pastures for their cattle, according to the models.
However, sea-level rise was probably not the only reason the Vikings left Greenland.
Other types of challenges can cause even long-standing communities to collapse, and a perfect storm of external pressures — such as climate change, social unrest and resource depletion — may have spurred the Vikings to abandon their settlements for good, Borreggine said.
“A combination of climate and environmental change, the shifting resource landscape, the flux of supply and demand of exclusive products for the foreign market, and interactions with Inuit in the North all could have contributed to this out-migration,” she said. “Likely a combination of these factors led to the Norse migration out of Greenland and further west.”
When the Galloway hoard was unearthed from a ploughed field in western Scotland in 2014, it offered the richest collection of Viking-age objects ever found in Britain or Ireland. But one of the artefacts paled in comparison with treasures such as a gold bird-shaped pin and a silver-gilt vessel because it was within a pouch that was mangled and misshapen after almost 1,000 years in the ground.
Now that pouch has been removed and its contents restored, revealing an extraordinary Roman rock crystal jar wrapped in exquisite layers of gold thread by the finest medieval craftsman in the late eighth or early ninth century. About 5cm high, it may once have held a perfume or other prized potion used to anoint kings, or in religious ceremonies. It had been carefully wrapped in a silk-lined leather pouch, reflecting its significance.
The hoard, which included about 100 objects, was buried around AD900 and contained artefacts from the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, Ireland and as far away as Asia. It was unearthed by a metal detectorist on what is now Church of Scotland land in Kirkcudbrightshire.
The rock crystal jar was part of the Galloway hoard, unearthed in Kirkcudbrightshire in 2014.
Dr Martin Goldberg, NMS’s principal curator of early medieval and Viking collections, described the jar as “really beautiful” and all the more exceptional because his research has led him to conclude that the rock crystal carving was in fact, Roman. It was perhaps 600 years old by the time it was transformed into a gold-wrapped jar.
He said: “So it’s a really surprising and unique object.”
Dr Leslie Webster, former keeper of Britain, prehistory and Europe at the British Museum, said: “Rock crystal is unusual in itself. It … was greatly prized in the antique world for its transparency and translucency, and so it’s associated with purity. So it was, I think even in its time, very, very special.
“I’ve seen a lot of Anglo-Saxon finds over the years in my professional career, some of them amazing. But this absolutely knocks them all into a cocked hat.”
The base of the rock crystal jar.
The restoration has revealed an unexpected Latin inscription on the jar’s base. Spelt out in gold letters, it translates as “Bishop Hyguald had me made”. This is crucial evidence that some of the hoard’s material may have come from a church in the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria, which included Dumfries and Galloway and stretched as far north as Edinburgh and as far south as Sheffield.
At the start of the 10th century, Alfred the Great was pushing back the Danes, laying the foundations of medieval England and Alba, the kingdom that became medieval Scotland. It is unclear whether the hoard was buried by a Viking – Norse sagas refer to riches being buried to be accessed in the afterlife – or someone fearing Viking raids at a time when ecclesiastical treasures were being robbed from monasteries.
Goldberg said that silk was then a particularly luxurious and exotic material: “It’s come from Asia, so it’s travelled thousands of miles. It’s an example of how precious they thought this object inside was,” he said.
Although Bishop Hyguald may have been a prominent figure in Northumbrian ecclesiastical circles, church chronicles of the period are incomplete, partly because of the Viking invasions.
Goldberg expressed excitement at finding the name. “So much of the past is anonymous, especially when you’re looking at very early history,” he said. “There are very few names to work with. But this is adding new information, building a much richer picture.”
The rock crystal design resembles the capital of a Corinthian column, with carved lobes that look like foliage, he realised. “It’s almost a perfect model of a Corinthian column, but the scale is minute,” he said.
There is the possibility that this jar still bears trace elements of the potion it once held and that its precise chemicals can be revealed.
Goldberg said: “The type of liquid that we would expect would be something very exotic, perhaps a perfume from the Orient, something’s that’s travelled in the same way that the silk has. There were certain types of exotic oil that were used in anointing kings and ecclesiastical ceremonies.”
Ninety-seven of the hoard’s artefacts are included in a touring exhibition, titled The Galloway hoard: Viking-age treasure. It is at Kirkcudbright Galleries, near the site of its discovery, until 10 July, transferring to Aberdeen Art Gallery from 30 July to 23 October. The jar is undergoing final work but, from Monday, a new film and digital model will be featured.
Neolithic site of Monte D’Accoddi: Is This European Megalithic Altar the Oldest Pyramid in the World?
Monte d’Accoddi is a Neolithic archaeological site in northern Sardinia, located in the territory of Sassari. The site consists of a massive raised stone platform thought to have been an altar.
It was constructed by the Ozieri culture or earlier, with the oldest parts dated to around 4,000–3,650 BC.
We think immediately about the most similar known examples: the Mesopotamian ziqqurat or the first step pyramid of Djoser in Egypt. But is it possible that these monumental types, thousands of miles away, have common ancestry?
The site was discovered in 1954 in a field owned by the Segni family. The original structure was built by the Ozieri culture or earlier c. 4,000–3,650 BC and has a base of 27 m by 27 m and probably reached a height of 5.5 m.
It culminated in a platform of about 12.5 m by 7.2 m, accessible via a ramp. No chambers or entrances to the mound have been found, leading to the presumption it was an altar, a temple or a step pyramid.
It may have also served an observational function, as its square plan is coordinated with the cardinal points of the compass.
The initial Ozieri structure was abandoned or destroyed around 3000 BC, with traces of fire found in the archaeological evidence.
Around 2800 BC the remains of the original structure were completely covered with a layered mixture of earth and stone, and large blocks of limestone were then applied to establish a second platform, truncated by a step pyramid (36 m × 29 m, about 10 m in height), accessible by means of a second ramp, 42 m long, built over the older one.
This second temple resembles contemporary Mesopotamian ziggurats and is attributed to the Abealzu-Filigosa culture.
The dolmen and a carved boulder in the foreground
Archaeological excavations from the chalcolithic Abealzu-Filigosa layers indicate the Monte d’Accoddi was used for animal sacrifice, with the remains of sheep, cattle, and swine recovered in near equal proportions.
It is among the earliest known sacrificial sites in Western Europe, providing insight into the development of ritual in prehistoric society, and earning it a designation as “the most singular cultic monument in the early Western Mediterranean”.
The carved boulder
The site appears to have been abandoned again around 1800 BC, at the onset of the Nuragic age.
Based on the evidence of architecture, ritual deposits and diagnostic pottery, G. and M. Webster argued, in 2017 & 2019, for the monument’s status as a product of a migration event (probably exilic) initiated from Mesopotamia, during the first half of the 4th millennium B.C.
This view is now considered obsolete and scholars are focusing on a different interpretation of local evolution.
Surrounding Area:
The surroundings of the Monte d’Accoddi have been excavated in the 1960s, and have provided the signs of a considerable sacred centre.
Near the south-eastern corner of the monument there is a dolmen, and across the ramp stands a considerable menhir, one of several standing stones which was formerly found in the vicinity.
The foundations of several small structures (possibly residential) were excavated, and several mysterious carved stones.
The most impressive of these is a large boulder carved into the shape of an egg and then cut through on a subtle curving three-dimensional line.
