Category Archives: EUROPE

EUROPE, GERMANY, WORLD

800-Year-Old Hoard Unearthed in Northern Germany

800-Year-Old Hoard Unearthed in Northern Germany

The front of one gold earring in the Byzantine style that a metal detectorist found in Germany.

A trainee metal detectorist in northern Germany recently hit on something his mentor never expected: an 800-year-old hoard of gold jewelry and silver coins that hints at the area’s trade connections.

The large hoard contained a dazzling collection of artifacts. “The hoard consisted of two very high-quality gold earrings set with semi-precious stones, a gilded pseudo-coin brooch, two gilded stone-studded finger rings, a ring fragment, a small formerly gilded perforated disc, a ring brooch, and about 30 silver coins, some of them heavily fragmented,” Ulf Ickerodt, director of the State Archaeological Department of Schleswig-Holstein (ALSH), told Live Science in an email. 

For decades, amateur and professional archaeologists have been working together to investigate the region of Schleswig-Holstein, and in particular the UNESCO world heritage site of Haithabu.

Known as Hedeby in Danish, the site was the second-largest Nordic town and was important to the Vikings between the eighth and 11th centuries.

Haithabu was destroyed and abandoned around 1066, ending the Viking era in the region, but a century or two later someone purposefully buried the bag full of valuables nearby.

A selection of silver coins was found in the hoard. They date to the time of King Valdemar II.

The detectorists came across the hoard while walking a well-studied patch of land. They reported the find to the ALSH, and a team of archaeologists then excavated the site to reveal items including silver and gold objects with preserved textile fragments adhering to them.

Perhaps the most remarkable items in the hoard are the two earrings. “They probably date to the time around and after 1100 and are in the tradition of Byzantine goldsmiths,” Ickerodt said.

The hoard also contained an imitation of an Islamic coin — an Almohad gold dinar — that had been made into a brooch. The Almohad caliphate was a Muslim dynasty that ruled over southern Spain and northern Africa between the 12th and 13th centuries.

The 30 silver coins, minted during the time of Danish King Valdemar II, suggest that the hoard was buried sometime after 1234. 

The front of the second gold earring in the Byzantine style.
The back of the second gold earring in the Byzantine style
The back of one gold earring in the Byzantine style.

The combination of Danish coins and western Mediterranean jewelry is particularly interesting and hints at the cosmopolitan nature of the area. 

“Islamic coins were well known in southern Scandinavia between the 9th and 11th centuries,” Marjanko Pilekić, a numismatist in Germany who was not involved in this study, told Live Science by email.

The money may have “reached this area en masse through long-distance trade contacts, robbery, tribute, among others,” he said. “It was a popular practice to pierce or loop the coins and wear them.”

A gilded pseudo-coin fibula. This imitation Islamic coin was fashioned into a brooch.

The discovery of hoards is rare in Schleswig-Holstein, and it’s unclear whether these items were personal property or stolen, if they were meant to be delivered to someone else, or if they were buried for ritual reasons.

“Especially in times of crisis,” Ickerodt said, “the resulting danger leads to the hiding of possessions.” The Haithabu area was not abandoned for long after its destruction in the mid-11th century.

Across the inlet of Schlei, Schleswig had begun developing as a settlement and trading center. “An extensive north-south and east-west trade network have developed here since the early Middle Ages, in which the Mediterranean region, the North Sea, and the Baltic Sea were integrated,” Ickerodt said. “The hoard was certainly not put down by chance.”

EUROPE, ITALY, WORLD

Signs of Surgery Examined on Medieval Woman’s Skull

Signs of Surgery Examined on Medieval Woman’s Skull

Signs of Surgery Examined on Medieval Woman’s Skull
The woman’s skull shows clear traces of a large cross-shaped incision in the top, with a partially-healed oval of bone at the center; and a patch on her forehead where the bone has been scraped thin. Researchers think both are evidence of trepanations, possibly in an attempt to cure extreme pain she was suffering from two large abscesses on her upper jaw.

The skull of an early medieval woman found in Italy shows signs of two trepanations –  surgeries for making holes in the head.

There were several reasons for trepanation, but in this case, the procedures seem to have been attempting to remedy an illness, researchers reported in a new study. However, they couldn’t determine exactly what that illness was.

“We suppose that this individual died from pathologies that may have been related to her condition,” Ileana Micarelli, a bioarchaeologist at the University of Cambridge, told Live Science. “But we are not certain about the reason.” Micarelli is the lead author of the new study, published Jan. 23 in the International Journal of Osteoarchaeology, part of which she wrote as a doctoral student at the Sapienza University of Rome. 

The skull’s most remarkable features, according to the study authors, are traces of a huge cross-shaped incision that show that most of the skin of the woman’s scalp was peeled back, with a partially healed oval of bone at its center that seems to be the result of a trepanation performed up to three months before she died.

Lombard castle

The skull is one of 19 that have survived since excavations in the 19th century of an early medieval cemetery at Castel Trosino in central Italy. The castle was a Lombard stronghold from the sixth until the eighth centuries A.D.

The woman’s skull was found in the 19th century during excavations at a cemetery at Castel Trosino in central Italy, about 80 miles (130 kilometers) northeast of Rome.

From around the sixth to eighth century A.D., Castel Trosino was a stronghold of the Lombard people — Germanic invaders who established a kingdom in Italy after the fall of the Roman Empire — and the researchers think this woman was a wealthy Lombard.

Although hundreds of burials were found during the excavations, just 19 skulls have survived. The rest of the woman’s skeleton is lost, which complicates any modern analysis, Micarelli said.

As well as the cross-shaped incision, the skull shows clear signs of a second surgery, when the bone behind the woman’s forehead was scraped thin after the skin there was peeled back. This appears to have been an attempt at a second trepanation, Micarelli said. There is also evidence that the woman died before the second procedure could be completed: The patch of scraped bone doesn’t go all the way through the skull, and there is no sign that it ever healed, Micarelli said. 

But the new scientific analysis doesn’t show any reason why this woman would have voluntarily undergone both of these extreme surgeries, which must have been painful, although painkillers from plants were known of at the time, she said.

Micarelli speculated that the woman may have suffered extreme pain from two large abscesses on her upper jaw, which could have spread the infection to her brain. “We can imagine that these were quite painful as well,” she said.

Ancient Remedy

The researchers made silicone molds of the scars on the bones of the skull, and then used the molds to make casts with epoxy resin that they could study.
Computed tomography (CT) scans show that a hole at the top of the woman’s skull was scraped through the entire bone, but had partially healed; while the scraped patch of bone on the woman’s forehead had not completely penetrated her skull before she died.

Bioarchaeologist Kent Johnson, an associate professor of anthropology at the State University of New York, Cortland who wasn’t involved in the study, said there is evidence that trepanations have been carried out for thousands of years. “The practice of trepanation is seen on almost every continent, wherever people have lived,” he told Live Science. “It’s a long-standing and pretty widespread practice.”

In most cases, trepanation was performed in an attempt to cure an ailment and mainly to alleviate trauma to the skull, such as swelling of the brain caused by a blow to the head, Johnson said. However, some scholars have suggested that the surgery sometimes had a ritual purpose.

Indeed, Micarelli and her colleagues considered that the trepanations on the Castel Trosino skull may have been performed for cultural reasons — something is seen among the Avar people in the Carpathian Basin (parts of modern-day Hungary and Romania) in the early medieval period — or as a judicial punishment. However, the study authors ruled out both of those ideas in the case of the Lombard woman’s skull.

In fact, it’s possible that the incisions were not from trepanation at all, said John Verano, an anthropologist and professor at Tulane University and author of “Holes in the Head: The Art and Archaeology of Trepanation in Ancient Peru” (Dumbarton Oaks, 2016) who wasn’t involved in the Castel Trosino research.

He suggested that what Micarelli and her colleagues interpreted as a trepanation on the top of the skull may instead have been an attempt to scrape away infected bone.

“I [have] never seen a trepanation like this, if indeed it is a trepanation,” he told Live Science in an email. “This is a complex case with multiple possible scenarios to explain the bone reaction.”

EUROPE, ITALY, WORLD

New Excavation at Pompeii Underway

New Excavation at Pompeii Underway

The goal is to improve conservation, remodeling the excavation front and acquiring new archaeological data

In Pompeii, excavations are once again in an area covering approximately 3,200 m2, almost an entire block of the ancient city buried in 79 AD by Vesuvius. 

The project is part of a broader approach which, developed during the years of the Great Pompeii Project, aims to rectify and solve the hydrogeological and conservation problems of the excavation fronts, i.e. the boundary between the excavated and the unexplored part of the ancient city.

 The latter amounts to about 15 hectares of blocks and houses still buried under lapilli and ash, almost a third of the ancient town.

The layout of the new excavation, located in Insula 10 of Regio IX, along Via di Nola, is therefore the same already implemented in the excavation of Regio V during the years 2018-2020 which, under the direction of the then director, Massimo Osanna , saw the emergence of the house of Orion, the house with a garden and the Themopolium.

In addition to improving the conditions of conservation and protection of the millenary structures through arranging the excavation fronts, which have always been elements of vulnerability due to the pressure of the ground on the ancient walls and the outflow of rainwater, the new excavations make use of the various professionals of archeology, including archaeologists, archaeobotanists, numismatic volcanologists, ancient topographers, as well as architects, engineers and geologists,

“Excavating in Pompeii is a huge responsibility – declares the Director of the site, Gabriel Zuchtriegel -. Excavation is a non-repeatable operation, what is excavated is forever. 

Therefore, we need to document and analyze each find and all the stratigraphic relationships well and immediately think about how to secure and restore what we find.”

Excavation is still at the beginning, but the masonry ridges of the upper floors of the ancient buildings are already beginning to emerge, including a house, transformed in its last stages into a fullonica (laundry) and already excavated around 1912, and a house with an oven and upper cell. 

In even higher levels, archaeologists have documented a series of holes made in the ground in perhaps more recent years and presumably functional to the agricultural use of the land or perhaps linked to the lapilli quarrying activities that the area underwent in the modern era. Eighteenth-nineteenth-century views (see attached painting by Jacob Philipp Hackert) show how the plateau above the excavations was used for various agricultural crops, between wooded areas and rural buildings, and farmers’ greenhouses were still present until 2015.

A landscape, the historical one of the decades of the rediscovery of Pompeii, which the Park wants to enhance and tell also through another project that aims at the redevelopment of the green areas of the site and its surroundings. 

In recent weeks, the procedure for selecting a partner for the cultivation of the Park’s existing trees is underway in the context of a public-private partnership, which provides for the expansion of the cultivated areas, and in the future also the introduction of olive groves , orchards and vegetable gardens.

“The size of a catastrophe is also measured according to the possibility of forgetting it, of making it fall into oblivion – comments the director – And that landscape of crops, woods and pastures that was born over the centuries after the eruption on the site of the ancient city , is like a small comfort compared to the terrible tragedy of 79 AD which destroyed the entire city of Pompeii in two days. 

The memory of the tragedy faded, life returned. So much so that after the excavations began in 1748, it took 15 years to understand that they were digging in Pompeii and not in Stabia.” 

ASIA, EUROPE, RUSSIA, WORLD

Scientists dissect 3,500-year-old bear discovered in Siberian permafrost

Scientists dissect 3,500-year-old bear discovered in Siberian permafrost

A brown bear that lay almost perfectly preserved in the frozen wilds of eastern Siberia for 3,500 years has undergone a necropsy by a team of scientists after it was discovered by reindeer herders on a desolate island in the Arctic.

Scientists conduct an autopsy of a fossil brown bear with the geological age of 3,460 years, found in the permafrost of northern Yakutia by reindeer herders in 2020, in Yakutsk, Russia February 21, 2023.

“This find is absolutely unique: the complete carcass of an ancient brown bear,” said Maxim Cheprasov, laboratory chief at the Lazarev Mammoth Museum Laboratory at the North-Eastern Federal University in Yakutsk, eastern Siberia.

The female bear was found by reindeer herders in 2020 jutting out of the permafrost on Bolshoy Lyakhovsky Island, part of the New Siberian archipelago around 4,600 km east of Moscow.

Because it was found just east of the Bolshoy Etherican River, it has been named the Etherican brown bear.

The extreme temperatures helped preserve the bear’s soft tissue for 3,460 years, as well as remains of its final repasts – bird feathers and plants. The bear is described as being 1.55 metres (5.09 ft) tall and weighing nearly 78 kg (12 stone).

“For the first time, a carcass with soft tissues has fallen into the hands of scientists, giving us the opportunity to study the internal organs and examine the brain,” said Cheprasov.

The scientific team in Siberia cut through the bear’s tough hide, allowing scientists to examine its brain, internal organs and carry out a host of cellular, microbiological, virological and genetic studies.

The pink tissue and yellow fat of the bear was clearly visible as the team dissected the ancient beast.

They also sawed through its skull, using a vacuum cleaner to suck up the skull bone dust, before extracting its brain.

“Genetic analysis has shown that the bear does not differ in mitochondrial DNA from the modern bear from the north-east of Russia – Yakutia and Chukotka,” Cheprasov said.

He said the bear was probably aged about 2-3 years. It died from an injury to its spinal column.

It is, though, unclear how the bear came to be on the island, which is now divided from the mainland by a 50 km (31 mile) strait. It may have crossed over ice, it might have swum over, or the island might still have been part of the mainland.

The Lyakhovsky islands contain some of the richest palaeontological treasures in the world, attracting both scientists and ivory traders hunting for woolly mammoths.

ENGLAND, EUROPE, WORLD

Archaeologists have found seven pairs of Anglo-Saxon brooches in seven graves during an excavation in Gloucestershire

Archaeologists have found seven pairs of Anglo-Saxon brooches in seven graves during an excavation in Gloucestershire

Archaeologists have found seven pairs of Anglo-Saxon brooches in seven graves during an excavation in Gloucestershire

Archaeologists have found seven pairs of Anglo-Saxon saucer brooches, one pair in each of seven burials unearthed in an excavation in South West of England Gloucestershire.

The wonderful discovery was announced on Twitter by Cotswold Archeology.

At the site, the Cotswolds Archaeology team unearthed more than 70 Anglo-Saxon burials, some of which had luxurious grave goods. They are from the 5th or 6th centuries.

Seven pairs of gold-gilt plate (or saucer) brooches were found, in seven separate graves. Plate brooches such as these were decorative items, worn in pairs at the chest and used to fasten clothing.

They’re known as saucer brooches after their shape: a circular central body with a raised rim.

They are made of gilded copper alloy and were relief-cast (cast from a single piece of sheet metal) with decorative motifs in geometric patterns.

The designs on cast saucer brooches are based on geometric motifs. The commonest design is the running spiral, so-called because each of the spirals is linked to the next and they run around the brooch, normally with a pellet in the center. The commonest number of spirals is five or six, but there are occasionally more.

Cast saucer brooches are similar to button brooches, with the upturned rim that gives them their name. They were worn in pairs, so in graves, it is normal to find two very similar, but not mould-identical, brooches together.

Anglo-Saxon saucer brooches.

The saucer brooches are still a high-status signifier for burials from this early period of Anglo-Saxon history in England, often found in tandem with other expensive pieces of jewelry.

Ranging in size from 20-70 mm in diameter, saucer brooches were worn in pairs across the chest to fasten garments. Their designs are more simple than, for example, the long square-headed brooches which were so large they offered much more space to create complex, highly sophisticated designs.

“Those we uncovered were either positioned one on each shoulder or two next to each other on the left shoulder with an associated clothing pin, giving a vivid impression of how they once looked on their wearers,” they wrote on their Cotswold Archeology Facebook page.

ENGLAND, EUROPE, WORLD

3,000-Year-Old leather Shoe discovered On A Beach In Kent, UK

3,000-Year-Old leather Shoe discovered On A Beach In Kent, UK

3,000-Year-Old leather Shoe discovered On A Beach In Kent, UK

A Bronze Age relic found on a Kent beach is believed to be the oldest shoe ever found in the United Kingdom. The shoe, made of leather, is 3,000 years old and was discovered by archaeologist Steve Tomlinson.

Tomlinson sent the shoe to an East Kilbride, Scotland unit for carbon dating even though he didn’t think it was particularly noteworthy when he first discovered it. He got a response stating the shoe was from the late Bronze Age five weeks later.

“The date they had given me was just astonishing. It’s incredible, and it’s so, so rare. Textiles like this don’t survive often, they have to be found in anaerobic conditions,” Tomlinson told Kent Online.

The shoe is potentially the oldest found in the British Isles, and is also thought to be the smallest Bronze Age shoe found in the world. The shoe is 15cm long, and it is thought that it was worn by a child aged two- to three years old.

Previously, the 2,000-year-old shoe discovered by archaeologists at the Somerset quarry in 2005 was thought to be the oldest in the United Kingdom.

The shoe after cleaning.

However, the discovery in Kent is even older – and is also potentially the smallest Bronze Age shoe ever found in the world,” Kent Online reports.

“I will certainly look forward to the future and what we can all learn from this incredible find. Finding something like that is quite extraordinary. It opens up history too; we just know nothing about these kinds of things,” Tomlinson said.

Now, additional research is being done to see what kind of animal the leather was made from and whether any DNA can be derived from the artifact.

The Bronze Age shoe is anticipated to go to the British Museum once all scientific investigations have been completed.

ASIA, EUROPE, RUSSIA, WORLD

In Medieval burial ground, a rare embroidered Deisis depicting Jesus Christ was discovered

In Medieval burial ground, a rare embroidered Deisis depicting Jesus Christ was discovered

In Medieval burial ground, a rare embroidered Deisis depicting Jesus Christ was discovered

Russian archaeologists have uncovered a rare embroidered Deisis depicting Jesus Christ in a medieval burial ground.

46 graves have been dug up during excavations; one of them contained a woman who was buried with an embroidered Deisis depicting Jesus Christ and John the Baptist and was between the ages of 16 and 25.

The discovery was made during the construction of the Moscow-Kazan highway, where archaeologists found an 8.6-acre medieval settlement and an associated Christian cemetery.

The iconography of Jesus Christ known as Deesis, which can be translated from Greek as “prayer” or “intercession,” is one of the most potent and prevalent images in Orthodox religious art.

The composition of the Deisis unites the three most important figures of Christianity. A tripartite icon of the Eastern Orthodox Church showing Christ usually enthroned between the Virgin Mary and St. John the Baptist.

Photo: Institute of Archaeology of the Russian Academy of Sciences

The fabric is 12.1 cm long by 5.5 cm wide and is composed of two parts joined by a vertical seam made of a woven gold ribbon with a braided pattern.

The fabric’s lining did not survive, but a microscopic examination revealed birch bark remnants and needle punctures along the lower and upper edges.

In the center of the fabric is a frontal image of Jesus Christ making a blessing gesture, and to the right of him is John the Baptist praying. A second figure, probably Mary, was once on the left, but it has since disappeared, according to the inspection.

The archaeologists believe the embroidered fabric was once a dark silk samite headdress.

Similar examples include the embroidered crosses and faces of saints discovered in the Karoshsky burial ground in the Yaroslavl region, as well as the Ivorovsky necropolis near Staritsa that features an image of Michael the Archangel wielding a spear.

EUROPE, GERMANY, WORLD

The first Roman fort with wooden defenses was discovered in Germany

The first Roman fort with wooden defenses was discovered in Germany

The first Roman fort with wooden defenses was discovered in Germany
The ancient Romans erected a fence topped with these wooden spikes in a effort to defend a silver mining operation that ultimately ran dry.

For the first time, archaeologists have discovered wooden defenses surrounding an ancient Roman military base. The fence topped with sharpened wooden stakes, akin to today’s barbed wire, is the kind of fortification known to have existed from ancient writings—including by Caesar—but no surviving examples had previously been found.

The intimidating defense measures are located in what is now the town of Bad Ems in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. Excavations on the site began after a local hunter, Jürgen Eigenbrod, noticed faint markings on the ground in a field in 2016.

The differences in color in sections of the grain, it turned out, were caused by the remnants of ditches dug by the Romans.

Using geomagnetic prospecting, archaeologists have since discovered evidence of no fewer than 40 towers at the site, as well as a smaller camp, on opposite sides of the valley.

The area appears to have only served as a camp for a couple of years before burning down, reports Frankfurt’s Goethe University.

It appears that the ancient Romans were tunneling into the earth, searching for deposits of silver. At first, archaeologists believed that fire remains and melted slag were evidence that the Romans had set up a smelting works to process silver ore.

Hunter Jürgen Eigenbrod spotted these markings in a field in Germany, which turned out to be traces of an ancient Roman ditch.

But the writings of the ancient historian Tacitus reveal that the Roman governor Curtius Rufus’s efforts to mine silver in the area failed in the year 47 A.D. Expecting untold riches, the Romans had set up a heavily fortified base manned by military troops—which explains the barbed wire-like defenses, meant to deter sudden raids.

Unfortunately for them, a rich vein of the precious metal would not be unearthed in the area until millennia later, during archaeological excavations in 1897.

There was enough silver there that Romans could have continued mining operations for two centuries—if they had only kept digging.

The remains of the ancient fire, it would seem, came from a watch tower, not a profitable smelting works.

The ancient Romans erected a fence topped with these wooden spikes in a effort to defend a silver mining operation that ultimately ran dry.

These futile ancient efforts make for a fascinating story—Frederic Auth, the leader of the excavations since 2019, won first prize for his account of the history of the site at the 2022 Wiesbaden Science Slam.

Research and excavations are slated to continue, ledby Markus Scholz, a professor of archaeology and ancient Roman history of Roman at Goethe University; archaeologist Daniel Burger-Völlmecke, and Peter Henrich of the General Directorate for Cultural Heritage in Rhineland-Palatinate. Meanwhile, the ancient wooden spikes are now at the Römisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum in Mainz.