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.

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 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.

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.

Researchers Uncovered a 5,000-Year-Old Crystal Dagger Buried in Spain

Inside an ancient tomb near Seville, researchers found the remains of several individuals buried in a ritualistic fashion, as well as a most striking artefact: a quite beautiful dagger made from rock crystal.

The intricately carved crystal dagger has been dated to at least 3000 BCE, making it the “most technically sophisticated and esthetically impressive collection of rock crystal material culture ever found in Prehistoric Iberia,” according to Spanish researchers who investigated the site.

Prehistoric humans in Europe made most of their tools from chert and flint. Tools made by knapping ‘rock crystals’ (macro-crystalline quartz) were far less prevalent, but nevertheless, people developed a technique for their manufacturing that appeared during late prehistory in certain European regions, such as the southwest Iberian Peninsula in the third millennium BCE.

Although rock crystal tools were more difficult to fashion and the raw materials weren’t as abundant as sedimentary rock, prehistoric people likely cherished them due to their social value.

Just as we stand in awe today at their sight, one would imagine that people were even more impressed by the thousands of years ago.

This particularly exquisite rock crystal tool, an 8.5-inch long dagger, was found in one of eight megalithic tombs from Valencina de la Concepción, a site near Seville in Spain that is considered one of the most significant for the study of Copper Age Iberia.

The tomb, known as the Montelirio tholos, was excavated between 2007 and 2010.

It is a great megalithic construction with a 39-meter (128-foot) corridor leading to the main chamber with a 4.75-meter (15.5-foot) diameter from which, through a narrow corridor, a secondary chamber is accessible.

Researchers found the remains of at least 25 individuals, alongside numerous sumptuous grave goods, including shrouds and clothes made of tens of thousands of perforated beads and decorated with amber beads, as well as many flint arrowheads, found fragments of gold blades, ivory objects, and of course the dazzling crystal core.

The arrowheads, blade, and rock crystal dagger were found at the back of the main chamber. No other objects were found in the rest of the chamber, which is suspicious.

The accumulation of artefacts right next to the main chamber’s access corridor “suggest an offering similar to those discovered in the main corridor, where the arrowheads, although made of lower quality materials, were found in large groups associated with an altar and other offerings (plants),” said researchers at the University of Granada and the University of Seville in a study published in Quaternary International.

At least several females and one male-identified within Montelirio tholos are believed to have died due to poisoning.

The remains of the women were arranged in a circular fashion in a chamber next to the bones of the male, who may have been a person of high status. The dagger itself was found in a different chamber “in association with an ivory hilt and sheath.”

There are no sources of quartz of the kind used in the dagger near the site, which suggests the materials were sourced from far afield.

The researchers say this is another reason why these crystal daggers and arrowheads may have been reserved to a few elite individuals who could afford them, having a dual significance.

“On the one hand, it had a social significance due to the exoticism of the material and the fact that its transformation required very specific skills and probably some degree of technical specialisation. They probably represent funerary paraphernalia only accessible to the elite of this time period. The association of the dagger blade to a handle made of ivory, also a non-local raw material that must have been of great value, strongly suggests the high-ranking status of the people making use of such objects.”

“On the other hand, rock crystal must have had a symbolic significance as a raw material invested with special meanings and connotations. The literature provides examples of societies in which rock crystal and quartz as raw materials symbolise vitality, magical powers and a connection with ancestors.”

Archaeologists identify oldest Muslim graves ever found in Europe

An archaeological site in northeast Spain holds one of the oldest-known Muslim cemeteries in the country, with the discovery of 433 graves, some dating back to the first 100 years of the Islamic conquest of the Iberian Peninsula. 

The finds confirm that the region, along the frontier between the warring Islamic and Christian worlds in the turbulent early Middle Ages, was once dominated by Muslim rulers, who were later replaced by Christian rulers and their history forgotten.

The archaeologists unearthed the ancient graves from a maqbara or Muslim necropolis, dating from between the eighth and the 12th centuries, this summer in the town of Tauste, in the Ebro Valley about 25 miles (40 kilometres) northwest of Zaragoza.

The remains show that the dead were buried according to Muslim funeral rituals and suggest the town was largely Islamic for hundreds of years, despite there being no mention of this phase in local histories.

“The number of people buried in the necropolis and the time it was occupied indicates that Tauste was an important town in the Ebro Valley in Islamic times,” lead archaeologist Eva Giménez of the heritage company Paleoymás told Live Science.

Giménez and the company Paleoymás were contracted for the latest excavations by El Patiaz Cultural Association, which was founded by local people in 1999 to investigate the history of the town.

Their initial excavations in 2010 suggested that a 5-acre (2 hectares) Islamic necropolis at Tauste might hold the remains of up to 4,500 people. But the association’s limited funds meant only 46 graves could be unearthed in the first four years of work.

Giménez said the latest discoveries hint that even more Muslim graves could still be found. “We now have information that indicates that the size of the necropolis is greater than what was known,” she said.

Muslim conquest

The graves date all the way back to the time when Muslim armies from North Africa that were allied with Islam’s Umayyad caliphate in Damascus invaded what is now Spain in A.D. 711. By 718, they had conquered most of the Iberian Peninsula — today’s Spain and Portugal — except for some mountainous regions of the northwest that remained independent Christian kingdoms.

The Muslim invaders, called “Moors” by the Christians, then attempted to conquer Gaul — now France — but were turned back, first at the Battle of Toulouse in 721 and then at the Battle of Tours in 732, where they were defeated by a smaller Frankish army led by the nobleman Charles Martel. It’s said the Frankish use of heavy cavalry played a decisive part in the battle, Live Science previously reported.

After that, Muslim leaders established their rule south of Barcelona and the Pyrenees, the mountain range that divides Spain and France. The Ebro Valley around Zaragoza, however, stayed in Muslim hands.

The Muslim-ruled region became known as al-Andalus — with the “Andal” part possibly from the name of the Vandals the Muslims had conquered — and reached its cultural peak in about the 10th century with advances in mathematics, astronomy and medicine. By some accounts, the regime was relatively benign. Jews and Christians were allowed to practice their religions if they chose not to convert to Islam, but they paid extra tax, called jizya, and were treated as a lower social class than Muslims.

Muslim rule in Spain began to fragment after the 11th century, and the Christian kingdoms in the north grew more powerful. The last Muslim emirate, at Granada, was defeated in 1492 by the armies of Castile in the final battle of the Christian Reconquista led by Isabela and Ferdinand, the first queen and king of Spain. Islam was outlawed, and violent anti-Muslim persecutions continued until the early 17th century.

The influence of Islamic rule has been recognized in nearby parts of the region, but history was silent about the Islamic phase at Tauste.

Ancient graves were sometimes unearthed in the town, but they were dismissed as those of victims of a cholera pandemic that killed almost a quarter-million people in Spain in 1854 and 1855, said Miriam Pina Pardos, the director of the Anthropological Observatory of the Islamic Necropolis of Tauste for El Patiaz.

Unearthing Islam

Some members of El Patiaz suspected an 11th-century church tower in the town had Islamic origins — a suspicion confirmed when examinations showed it was once a minaret in the distinctive Zagri architecture.. 

So in 2010, the group began excavations led by archaeologist Francisco Javier Gutierrez. They learned the ancient graves at Tauste contained individuals buried with Muslim rituals, and not in the style of a mass burial that might have been expected for victims of the cholera pandemic, Pina Pardos said.

For instance, each grave held the remains of a single person, typically placed lying on their right side so that their gaze was oriented toward Mecca, and each was covered with a mound of earth, Gutierrez said. Some may also have had a wooden cover, now missing.

The graves also showed other distinctive Muslim features: They were just large enough to accommodate the body, and the dead were buried in a white shroud, regardless of their social status, she said. To this day, Muslim rituals do not allow the dead to be buried with grave goods, but fragments of ceramics found nearby in the excavations since 2010 showed they dated to between the eighth and 12th centuries, Giménez said.

While the existence of the Islamic graveyard was known from the earlier excavations, “what was not known where the dimensions and density of the tombs,” she said. “It has been expected and unexpected at the same time.”

The latest discoveries, in a single street known to be part of the ancient necropolis, show the extent of Muslim influence in the town over several centuries., 

The cemetery was in use continuously for more than 400 years, they found. “This tells us about a constant and deeply rooted [Islamic] population in Tauste since the beginning of the eighth century,” Giménez said.

Spanish court throws out lawsuit against US treasure hunters

A Spanish court has shelved a lawsuit against American treasure hunters that accused them of having destroyed an underwater archaeological site when they looted a sunken galleon for tons of precious coins over a decade ago.

In 2007, the Florida-based Odyssey Marine Exploration scooped up over half a million silver and gold coins from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean when it discovered a sunken Spanish galleon.

Spain disputed the company’s claim to the treasure, which was worth an estimated US$500 million ($667.95 million).

Following a five-year legal battle in US courts, Odyssey had to return the treasure to Spain in 2012.

A separate case investigating whether the Odyssey had committed a crime by allegedly destroying the underwater site where it found the Nuestra Senora de las Mercedes ship was tossed out in 2016.

Now, another court has said that an appeal by Spanish archaeologists against that decision has been thrown out as well. This decision is not open to appeal.

In court documents seen by The Associated Press, the panel of three judges presiding over the court in the southern city of Cádiz said the five-year statute of limitations for the alleged crime had already passed.

READ ALSO: TREASURE HUNTER DISCOVERS £200,000 WORTH OF ANCIENT COINS IN THE FARMER’S FIELD

But they also complained that a 2013 request made to the US for the owners of Odyssey to be questioned in the case was never heeded.
“Even though we share our surprise, puzzlement, and even anger, for what we can only call the unprecedented course of this case, it would be senseless to let it go on if we consider the statute of limitation,” the judges wrote.

The Mercedes galleon was sunk by British ships near the Strait of Gibraltar in 1804. It was transporting 574,553 silver coins and 212 gold coins from metals that were mined and minted in the Andes.

Upon its return from the US, the treasure was given a home at Spain’s National Museum of Underwater Archaeology in the Mediterranean city of Cartagena.

Possible Neanderthal Hunting Tactic Explored

Juan Negro crouched in the shadows just outside a cave, wearing his headlamp. For a brief moment, he wasn’t an ornithologist at the Spanish National Research Council’s Doñana Biological Station in Seville. He was a Neandertal, intent on catching dinner. As he waited in the cold, dark hours of the night, crowlike birds called choughs entered the cave.

The “Neandertal” then stealthily snuck in and began the hunt.

This idea to role-play started with butchered bird bones. Piles of ancient tool- and tooth-nicked choughs bones have been found in the same caves that Neandertals frequented, evidence suggesting that the ancient hominids chowed down on the birds. But catching choughs is tricky.

During the day, they fly far to feed on invertebrates, seeds and fruits. At night though, their behaviour practically turns them into sitting ducks. The birds roost in groups and often return to the same spot, even if they’ve been disturbed or preyed on there before.

So the question was, how might Neandertals have managed to catch these avian prey?

To find out, Negro and his colleagues decided to act like, well, Neandertals. Wielding bare hands along with butterfly nets and lamps — a proxy for nets and fire that Neandertals may have had at hand— teams of two to 10 researchers silently snuck into caves and other spots across Spain, where the birds roost to see how many choughs they could catch.

Using flashes of light from flashlights to resemble fire, the “Neandertals” dazzled and confused the choughs. The birds typically fled into dead-end areas of the caves, where they could be easily caught, often bare-handed. Hunting expeditions at 70 sites snared more than 5,500 birds in all, the researchers report September 9 in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution.

The birds were then released unharmed. It was “the most exciting piece of research” Negro says he’s ever done.

The results demonstrate that through teamwork, choughs can be captured without fancy tools at night and offer a likely way that Neandertals could have captured choughs. But actual Neandertal bird-catching behaviour remains unknown. If this is in fact how Neandertals hunted, it adds to claims that their behaviour and ability to think strategically is more sophisticated than they are often given credit for.

“The regular catchment of choughs by Neandertals implies a deep knowledge of the ecology of this species, a previous planning for its obtaining, including procurement techniques, and the ability to plan and anticipate dietary needs for the future,” says Ruth Blasco.

A taphonomist at the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution in Tarragona, Spain, Blasco is an expert in the Neandertal diet.

Such role-playing, she notes, is “commonly used by scholars as valid analogies to infer processes that happened in the past.” For instance, reenactments with replicas of wooden spears have suggested that Neandertals could have hurled the weapons to hunt prey at a distance.

The researchers re-creating chough hunts used butterfly nets to catch birds fleeing sites with narrow entrances, as well as bigger nets partially covering larger openings. But “the easiest thing was to grab the birds by hand,” Negro says.

“You have to be intelligent to capture these animals, to process them, to roast and eat them,” he notes. Previous studies have shown that Neandertals may have been similarly adept at foraging for seafood. “We tend to think that [Neandertals] were brutes with no intelligence,” Negro says, “but in fact, the evidence is accumulating that they were very close to Homo sapiens.”

Amateur Divers Discover Trove of 53 Roman Gold Coins in Spain

Two amateur divers swimming along the Spanish coast have discovered a huge hoard of 1,500-year-old gold coins, one of the largest on record dating to the Roman Empire. The divers, brothers-in-law Luis Lens Pardo and César Gimeno Alcalá, discovered the gold stash while vacationing with their families in Xàbia, a coastal Mediterranean town and tourist hotspot.

The duo rented snorkelling equipment so they could go freediving with the goal of picking up trash to beautify the area, but they found something far richer when Lens Pardo noticed the glimmer of a coin at the bottom of Portitxol Bay on Aug. 23, El País reported. 

When he went to investigate, he found that the coin “was in a small hole, like a bottleneck,” Lens Pardo told El País in Spanish. After cleaning the coin, Lens Pardo saw that it had “an ancient image, like a Greek or Roman face.” Intrigued, Lens Pardo and Gimeno Alcalá returned, freediving to the hole with a Swiss Army knife and using its corkscrew to unearth a total of eight coins. 

Stunned by the find, Lens Pardo and Gimeno Alcalá reported it the next day to the authorities. “We took the eight coins we had found and put them in a glass jar with some seawater,” Lens Pardo said.

Soon, a team of archaeologists from the University of Alicante, the Soler Blasco Archaeological and Ethnological Museum and the Spanish Civil Guard Special Underwater Brigade, in collaboration with the Town Council of Xàbia, came together to excavate and examine the treasure. 

With the help of the archaeologists, they found that the hole held a hefty pile of at least 53 gold coins dating between A.D. 364 and 408 when the Western Roman Empire was in decline. Each coin weighs about 0.1 ounces (4.5 grams).

The coins were so well preserved, archaeologists could easily read their inscriptions and identify the Roman emperors depicted on them, including Valentinian I (three coins), Valentinian II (seven coins), Theodosius I (15 coins), Arcadius (17 coins), Honorius (10 coins) and an unidentified coin, according to a University of Alicante statement.

The hoard also included three nails, likely made of copper, and the deteriorated lead remains of what may have been a sea chest that held the riches.

The hoard is one of the largest known collections of Roman gold coins in Europe, Jaime Molina Vidal, a professor of ancient history at the University of Alicante (UA), a researcher at the University Institute of Archaeology and Historical Heritage at UA and team leader who helped recover the buried treasure, said in the statement.

The coins are also a treasure trove of information, and may shed light on the final phase of the Western Roman Empire before it fell, Molina Vidal said. (In A.D. 395, the Roman Empire split into two pieces: the Western Roman Empire, with Rome as its capital, and the Eastern Roman, or Byzantine, Empire, with Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul) as its capital, Live Science previously reported.)

Perhaps these coins were purposefully hidden during the violent power struggles that ensued during the Western Roman Empire’s final stretch.

During that time, the barbarians — non-Roman tribes such as the Germanic Suevi and Vandals and the Iranian Alans — came to Hispania, the Roman name for the Iberian Peninsula, and took power from the Romans in about 409, according to the statement.

“Sets of gold coins are not common,” Molina Vidal told El País, adding that Portitxol Bay is where ships leaving from Rome’s Iberian provinces stopped before sailing to the Balearic Islands, which includes modern-day Mallorca and Ibiza and then heading to Rome. Given that archaeologists haven’t found evidence of a nearby sunken ship, it’s possible that someone purposefully buried the treasure there, possibly to hide it from the barbarians, likely the Alans, he said.

“The find speaks to us of a context of fear, of a world that is ending — that of the Roman Empire,” Molina Vidal said.

So far, a study of the coins suggests that the gold hoard belonged to a wealthy landowner, because in the fourth and fifth centuries “the cities were in decline and power had shifted to the large Roman villas, to the countryside,” Molina Vidal told El País.

“Trade has been stamped out and the sources of wealth become agriculture and livestock,” he said. As the barbarians advanced, perhaps one of the landowners gathered up the gold coins — which did not circulate as regular money, but were collected by families to serve as signs of wealth — and had them buried in a chest in the bay. “And then he must have died because he did not return to retrieve them,” Molina Vidal said.

After the coins are fully studied, they will go on display at the Blasco Archaeological and Ethnographic Museum in Xàbia. Meanwhile, the Valencian government has allocated $20,800 (17,800 Euros) for underwater archaeology excavations in the area, in case any more treasures are buried in the vicinity. Previously, Portitxol Bay has yielded other discoveries, including anchors, amphorae (ceramic vessels), ceramics and metal remain, and artefacts associated with ancient navigation. 

Archaeologists Find Several Jars Full of Emeralds Connected to El Dorado, Spain

Archaeologists in Colombia have found eight ceramic jars, with metallic figurines and emeralds inside, within a temple and its adjacent graves. 

The ancient Muisca (also called the Chibcha) crafted the jars called “ofrendatarios” about 600 years ago. The Muisca, a people whose civilization flourished in the region at the time, were famous for their metal-crafting skills, and their work may have inspired the legend of El Dorado — a legendary city made of gold. 

Between 1537 and 1540, the Spanish conquered the region, and many of the Muisca were killed during fighting or due to disease. Despite the destruction, the Muisca persevered and thousands of their descendants live on today. 

Archaeologists uncovered the temple and graves in the remains of an ancient Muisca town located near Bogotá, the modern-day capital of Colombia.

A team led by archaeologist Francisco Correa, an archaeologist who conducts excavations prior to construction work, found the ofrendatarios during excavations that were conducted prior to road construction in the area.

Some of the figurines look like snakes and other animals, while others look more like people with headdresses, staffs and weapons. The temple where the ofrendatarios were found may be related to ancestor worship. 

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“It’s very difficult to establish, I think there was some type of cult of the ancestors,” Correa told Live Science.

Ofrendatarios like these have been found at other ancient Muisca sites and may have been offerings of sorts. They have artefacts inside that often include metallic figurines and emeralds. 

The temple and ofrendatarios may also be related to deities worshipped by the Muisca, said Correa, noting that they worshipped a variety of gods, including those associated with the moon and sun. 

Metal-crafting legend

The Muisca were regarded as experts in metal crafting. When the Spanish encountered the Muisca, they were particularly amazed at their goldwork. There were no gold mines nearby, so the ancient Muisca traded for the metal with other groups. 

As for whether the Muisca metalwork — especially their goldwork — inspired the legend of El Dorado, Correa said the group did have a tradition in which during certain ceremonies a chief would appear covered in an ointment that included gold particles.

This ceremony “was one of the motivations of this myth,” said Correa. The ceremony was witnessed by Spaniards and recorded in Spanish chronicles; the story along with the Muisca’s goldwork helped inspire the legend. 

Correa worked with the Museo Del Oro & Xavierian University’s Industrial Engineering department to conduct the excavation. He also got assistance from Artec 3D, which provided an Artec Eva scanner that he used to create 3D scans of the artefacts.