Category Archives: WORLD

Sutton Hoo: One of the most magnificent archaeological finds in England

Sutton Hoo: One of the most magnificent archaeological finds in England

In 1939, an excavation was carried out on two 6th and 7th-century cemeteries at Sutton Hoo, near Woodbridge in Suffolk, England.  Beneath Mound No. 1, a stunning archaeological discovery was made. 

Historians were amazed to find an undisturbed ship burial that contained a wealth of outstanding artefacts of significant cultural and historical significance.

The archaeological team found the complete outline of the ship perfectly preserved in the sand of the burial chamber.  The wood of the ship had decomposed, but the stains in the sand gave an accurate depiction of the construction of the ship, and all the metal rivets were perfectly in place. 

The ship was built from oak and was found to have a tall, rising stem and stern that measured 27 meters.  At its broadest part, the ship was 4.4 meters wide, and it had an inboard depth of 1.5 meters.  The hull followed a clinker construction style, with nine planks on each side of the hull riveted together with iron rivets.

The ship had been laboriously carried from the river and carefully placed in a prepared trench.  It was buried at a depth where only the stem and stern posts peeked out of the ground. 

The body and all the funeral artefacts were then placed in the ship, and the site was covered with a soil mound.  The burial place remained undisturbed until carefully uncovered by archaeologists in 1939.

Sutton Hoo Helmet at the British Museum

This excavation was an incredibly important find, as it straddled the time in English history between myth and legends and the creation of historical documentation. It is generally accepted that the ship was the tomb of Raedwald, who was the ruler over East Anglia.

There was no body found, but analysis of the soil indicates that there was a body that had been destroyed by the acidic soil.  The coffin or wooden platform that carried the body was close to 9 feet long. 

From the distribution of the artefacts, it appears the head was placed at the western end of the platform.  The archaeologists found an iron ringed bucket, an iron lamp that still had its beeswax fuel inside, and high-quality personal items such as a helmet, belt buckle, shoulder tabs, jewellery, coins, silverware, and armour. 

The artefacts found in the tomb have provided a wealth of information about the Anglo-Saxon Kingdom of East Anglia as well as the Anglo-Saxon civilization.

Replica of the Sutton Huo Helmet in the British Museum

Only one occurrence of Middle Eastern bitumen had been found in the British Isles prior to this discovery, but the Sutton Hoo bitumen is older than the previously discovered specimen. This new discovery is very exciting, as it adds further evidence to the theory that the Anglo-Saxons traded over a far wider territory than was previously thought.

The bitumen was not left in the grave by mistake.  It was deliberately placed at the head and foot of the body, and its proximity to the body indicates its value to the people.  It is not clear if this bitumen was a diplomatic gift or if it was a product gained through trade routes, but its presence in the grave indicates that the Anglo-Saxons traded widely and made use of goods brought from afar.

Model of the ship’s structure as it might have appeared, with chamber area outlined Photo Credit

It is evidence that the bitumen deposits in the Middle East were traded north through the Mediterranean Sea and across Europe to reach as far north as England, Mail Online reported.

The discovery of trade goods such as this bitumen adds extensively to our understanding of how people lived in this era since the myths and legends of that time tend to obscure facts.  Historians can use these artefacts to try to identify how trade routes worked, and thus learn more about how people moved and interacted so long ago.

This Ancient Underground City Was Big Enough to House 20,000 People

This Ancient Underground City Was Big Enough to House 20,000 People

Chicago, like a lot of other modern cities, has a hidden secret: It’s home to miles of passageways deep underground that allows commuters to get from one place to another without risking nasty weather.

This Ancient Underground City Was Big Enough to House 20,000 People

Los Angeles, Boston, New York, and Dallas all have their own networks of underground tunnels, as well.

But there’s a place in Eastern Europe that puts those forgotten passages to shame. Welcome to Derinkuyu — the underground city.

A Subterranean Suburb

Picture this. It’s 1963, and you’re on a construction crew renovating a home. You bring your sledgehammer down on a soft stone wall, and it all crumbles away, revealing a large, snaking passageway so long that you can’t see where it ends.

This is the true story of how the undercity at Derinkuyu was (re-)discovered. While those workers knew they’d found something special, they couldn’t know just how massive their discovery had been.

Stretching 250 feet (76 meters) underground with at least 18 distinct levels, Derinkuyu was a truly massive place to live. Yes, live. There was room for 20,000 people to stay here, complete with all necessities (and a few luxuries) — fresh water, stables, places of worship, and even wineries and oil presses. It isn’t the only underground city in the area known as Cappadocia, but it’s the deepest one we know of, and for many years, it was believed to be the largest as well. (Another recently discovered location may have been home to even more people.)

Derinkuyu and the other 40-ish underground cities nearby are made possible thanks to the prevalence of tuff in the area, a kind of volcanic rock that solidifies into something soft and crumbly. That makes it relatively easy to carve enormous subterranean passages — but why would you want to? The answer lies in the cities’ origins.

Defense Against the Sword Arts

Derinkuyu isn’t exactly inhospitable on the surface level (after all, that’s where the people who found it were living). So why did ancient people decide to build their living quarters below the surface? Because they weren’t hiding from the broiling sun or annual meteor showers.

They were clearly hiding from invading forces, with massive, rolling stone doors to block off each floor should any armies breach the fortress. But who were the people of the caves, and who were they defending themselves against? The answer to the second question depends on the answer to the first.

The earliest known people to live in the area were the Hittites, who ruled the Turkish Peninsula from about the 17th to 13th centuries B.C.E. — well over three millennia ago.

Some scholars point to artefacts with Hittite cultural elements, such as a small statue of a lion, found in the underground caves. That suggests these ancient people would have been taking refuge from invading Thracians.

This Ancient Underground City Was Big Enough to House 20,000 People

If they were, it didn’t work forever: A tribe of Thracians, the Phrygians, conquered the area next. It’s possible that the Hittites never lived underground, however; an alternate theory says that it was the Phrygians, not the Hittites, who spawned the subterranean city.

Since the construction of many of the immense underground complexes is dated to some time between the 10th and 7th centuries B.C.E., and the Phrygians lived there until the 6th century B.C.E., they’re generally regarded to have created the first caves. In that case, they may have been hiding from the Persian host under Cyrus the Great that eventually did take over the region.

Lost and Found

The Persians would have used those caves as well, as would all of the people to come after. Eventually, according to some sources, early Christians around the 2nd century C.E. took root in the caves as they fled Roman persecution. This pattern continued throughout the centuries and millennia to come — in fact, Greek Christians were still using the caves as late as 1923.

It’s pretty incredible, then, that the caves would have been forgotten in the 40-odd years between their last residents and their “re-discovery.”

It’s more likely, then, that it wasn’t the caves themselves, but the extent of the caves that were forgotten. While the holes burrowed into the area’s fairy chimneys would have been obvious even from a distance, it’s likely that the people living in more modern accommodations never realized that the caves in the wilderness outside of the urban area reached 18 stories down.

Iron Age Rock Art Discovered During Rescue Excavation Beneath House in Turkey

Iron Age Rock Art Discovered During Rescue Excavation Beneath House in Turkey

An unexpected discovery has revealed ancient artwork that was once part of an Iron Age complex beneath a house in southeastern Turkey. The unfinished work shows a procession of deities that depicts how different cultures came together.

Looters initially broke into the subterranean complex in 2017 by creating an opening on the ground floor of a two-story home in the village of Başbük. The chamber, carved into the limestone bedrock, stretches for 98 feet (30 meters) beneath the house.

When the looters were caught by authorities, a team of archaeologists did an abbreviated rescue excavation to study the significance of the underground complex and the art on the rock panel in the fall of 2018 before erosion could further damage the site. What the researchers found has been shared in a study published Tuesday by the journal Antiquity.

Archaeologists followed a long stone staircase to an underground chamber, where they found rare artwork on the wall.

The artwork was created in the 9th century BC during the Neo-Assyrian Empire, which began in Mesopotamia and expanded to become the largest superpower at the time.

This expansion included Anatolia, a large peninsula in Western Asia that includes much of modern-day Turkey, between 600 and 900 BC.
“When the Assyrian Empire exercised political power in south-eastern Anatolia, Assyrian governors expressed their power through art in Assyrian courtly style,” said study author Selim Ferruh Adali, associate professor of history at the Social Sciences University of Ankara in Turkey, in a statement.

An example of this style was carved monumental rock reliefs, but Neo-Assyrian examples have been rare, the study authors wrote.

Combining cultures

The artwork reflects an integration of cultures instead of outright conquest. The deities have their names written in the local Aramaic language. The imagery depicts religious themes from Syria and Anatolia and were created in the Assyrian style.

“It shows how in the early phase of Neo-Assyrian control of the region there was a local cohabitation and symbiosis of the Assyrians and the Arameans in a region,” Adali said. “The Başbük panel gives scholars studying the nature of empires a striking example of how regional traditions can remain vocal and vital in the exercise of imperial power expressed through monumental art.”

The artwork shows eight deities, all unfinished. The largest is 3.6 feet (1.1 meters) in height. The local deities in the artwork include the moon god Sîn, the storm god Hadad and the goddess Atargatis. Behind them, the researchers could identify a sun god and other divinities.

The depictions combine symbols of Syro-Anatolian religious significance with elements of Assyrian representation, Adali said.

Part of the artwork features Hadad, the storm god, and Atargatis, the principal goddess of northern Syria.

“The inclusion of Syro-Anatolian religious themes (illustrates) an adaptation of Neo-Assyrian elements in ways that one did not expect from earlier finds,” Adali said. “They reflect an earlier phase of Assyrian presence in the region when local elements were more emphasized.”
Upon discovering this artwork, study author Mehmet Önal, a professor of archaeology at Harran University in Turkey, said, “As the dim light of the lamp revealed the deities, I trembled with awe as I realized I was confronted with the very expressive eyes and majestic face of the storm god Hadad.”

Mysteries remain

The team also identified an inscription that may show the name of Mukīn-abūa, a Neo-Assyrian official who served during the reign of Adad-nirari III between 783 and 811 BC.

The archaeologists suspect that he had been assigned to this region at the time and was using the complex as a way to win over the appeal of the local population.

But the structure is incomplete and has remained unfinished for all this time, suggesting that something caused the builders and artists to abandon it — perhaps even a revolt.

“The panel was made by local artists serving Assyrian authorities who adapted Neo-Assyrian art in a provincial context,” Adali said. “It was used to carry out rituals overseen by provincial authorities. It may have been abandoned due to a change in provincial authorities and practices or due to an arising political-military conflict.”

Adali was the epigraphist of the team who read and translated the Aramaic inscriptions in 2019 using photos captured by the research team, who had to work quickly to study the site.

“I was shocked to see Aramaic inscriptions on such artwork, and a sense of great excitement overtook me as I read the names of the deities,” Adali said.

The site was closed after the 2018 excavations because it is unstable and could collapse. It is now under the legal protection of Turkey’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism. The archaeologists are eager to continue their work when excavations can safely resume and capture new images of the artwork and inscriptions and possibly uncover more artwork and artefacts.

Skeleton With Stone-Encrusted Teeth Found In Mexico Ancient Ruins

Skeleton With Stone-Encrusted Teeth Found In Mexico Ancient Ruins

Archaeologists who found the 1,600-year-old skeleton near Mexico’s ancient Teotihuacan said the woman was 35-40 when she died with an intentionally deformed skull and teeth encrusted with mineral stones

Archaeologists in Mexico have recently uncovered a 1,600-year-old skeleton of a woman who had mineral-encrusted teeth and an intentionally elongated skull – evidence that suggests she was part of her society’s upper class.

While it isn’t uncommon for archaeologists to find deformed remains, the new skeleton is one of the most “extreme” ever recorded.

“Her cranium was elongated by being compressed in a ‘very extreme’ manner, a technique commonly used in the southern part of Mesoamerica, not the central region where she was found,” the team said, according to an AFP report.

The team, led by researchers from the National Anthropology and History Institute in Mexico, found the woman in the ancient ruins of Teotihuacan – a pre-Hispanic civilisation that once lay 50 kilometres (30 miles) north of Mexico City, existing between the 1st and 8th century AD before it mysteriously vanished.

The woman, who the researchers have named The Woman of Tlailotlacan after the location she was found inside the ancient city, not only had an elongated skull, but she had her top two teeth encrusted with pyrite stones – a mineral that looks like gold at first glance.

She also had a fake lower tooth made from serpentine – a feature so distinctive, the team says it’s evidence to suggest that she was a foreigner to the ancient city.

The researchers don’t give any details on how these body modifications were performed 1,600-years-ago, or why they were common in the first place.

But based on other cultures, such as the Mayans, artificial cranial deformation was likely done in infancy using bindings to grow the skull outwards, possibly to signal social status.

While very little is known about the woman’s faux-golden grill, researchers from Mexico did find 2,500-year-old Native American remains with gems embedded in their teeth back in 2009.

In that study, the team said that sophisticated dental practices made the modifications possible, though they were likely used purely for decoration and weren’t symbols of class. 

“It’s possible some type of [herb-based] anaesthetic was applied prior to drilling to blunt any pain,” team member José Concepción Jiménez, from Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History, told National Geographic.

It’s also important to note that the current team’s findings have yet to be published in a peer-reviewed journal, so we will have to take their word on it for now until they can get their report ready for publication.

The Mexican team aren’t the only ones to discover some interesting human remains lately, either. Back in June, researchers from Australia uncovered 700,000-year-old ‘hobbit’ remains on an island in Indonesia.

More recently, just last week, researchers in China what might be a skull bone belonging to Buddha inside a 1,000-year-old shrine in Nanjing, China.

Needless to say, archaeologists all over the world have been quite busy this year, and we can’t wait to see what they uncover next.

Scientists Extract DNA From Ancient Humans Out of Cave Dirt

Scientists Extract DNA From Ancient Humans Out of Cave Dirt

Around 45,000 years ago, in a Belgian cave, a Neanderthal died. As its body decayed, its cells split apart, spilling their contents onto the cave floor.

Becky Miller collects sediment from Trou al’Wesse (Monika V. Knul)

Those remnants included the Neanderthal’s DNA, some of which stuck to minerals in the sediment. There, leashed to the very rock, the DNA persisted, long after its owner’s body had disappeared and its bones had been carted off by scavengers. And in 2015, a group of scientists scooped it up.

Viviane Slon from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and her colleagues have now managed to extract and sequence the DNA of ancient animals from sediment that’s up to 240,000 years old. By doing so, they can infer the presence of Neanderthals, Denisovans, and other extinct hominids without ever having to find their bones. “We were surprised by how well it works,” says Slon. “The success rates were amazing.”

“I absolutely loved this,” says Jennifer Raff, who studies ancient DNA at the University of Kansas, and who was not involved in the study. “Although people have been working on recovering ancient DNA from sediments for a few years now, this is unprecedented in scope and success. My notes on the paper are full of exclamation marks. Woolly rhinoceros! Woolly mammoth! Cave bear! Neanderthal and Denisovans!”

Animals have a vast genetic aura that extends beyond their physical bodies into the world around them. Their DNA falls to the ground in balls of dung, zips through the air in blood-sucking insects, and leaches into the soil during decomposition.

Scientists who study living animals have used this environmental DNA (eDNA) to identify everything from elephants and earthworms. They can conduct a census of the natural world without needing to spot any actual animals—a boon when working with rare or hard-to-spot species in inaccessible habitats.

For about 15 years, palaeontologists have tried to use the same technique to study the creatures of prehistory. Just last year, for example, Beth Shapiro from the University of California, Santa Cruz and her colleagues used sedimentary DNA to figure out when and why the second-to-last group of mammoths, which lived on St. Paul Island in Alaska, went extinct.

Studies like these break the traditional reliance on fossils, which can be hard to find, or may have never formed at all. “If one must rely on finding bones, one will always have incomplete data,” explains Shapiro. “But by isolating DNA directly from sediments, we can dramatically expand what we know about where people (or other species) were, when they got there, and how long they stayed.”

“It’s a solution to a number of ethical conundrums in our field.”

Slon’s team is now the first to successfully recover the DNA of ancient humans directly from sediments. They collected samples from seven sites in Europe and Asia, where Neanderthals or Denisovans are known to have lived, and chemically treated their samples to liberate the trapped DNA. In sediment, the vast majority of DNA will come from bacteria and other microbes in the soil.

Only a small fraction comes from animals. To get at that bit, the team created molecules that specifically recognize mammalian DNA, that they could use to fish those sequences out of the crowd.

They focused on mitochondrial DNA—a small cluster of genes that sits outside the main set, and is easier to find because it’s so abundant. And to check that these DNA strands were genuinely ancient, and not bits of genetic material dropped by the palaeontologists themselves, the team looked for the distinctive types of damage that accumulate as DNA sits around for thousands of years.

In addition to DNA from mammoths, woolly rhinos, and cave bears, Slon recovered the mitochondrial DNA of Neanderthals from four caves— El Sidrón in Spain, the Chagyrskaya and Denisova Caves in Russia, and Trou Al’Wesse in Belgium. That third site is especially interesting. We know Neanderthals used Trou Al’Wesse because of the tools and butchered animal bones that they left behind, but none of their visible remains have ever been found. Their molecular remains, however, are still there.

At Denisova Cave, the team also found the DNA of the site’s namesake—the Denisovans. The only known fossils of these hominids are a finger bone and two teeth from the same cave.

In 2010, Slon’s colleagues, led by Svante Paabo, sequenced the mitochondrial DNA from these specimens and realized that they belonged to a previously unknown hominid. That was how the world discovered the existence of Denisovans, and we have learned more about them through their DNA than through their bones. Slon’s work continues that tradition—she found Denisovan DNA in sediment that’s far older than any of the unearthed fossils. “It’s evidence that Denisovans occupied the cave for tens of thousands of years earlier than we thought,” she says.

Now that they know their techniques work, the team can check for hominid DNA in parts of the world where no fossils have been found, or where the historical presence of humans is unclear. For example, Shapiro wants to look at sediments across the Alaska routes that humans likely took on their way to colonizing the Americas. “This is a fantastically useful tool that will empower future archaeological research,” she says.

Even when fossils are present, it’s hard to extract DNA from them without pulverizing them in the process. Slon’s work gets around that problem. “Some descendant communities are okay with us doing genetics research on their ancestors, but not okay with destroying any part of their remains in order to obtain DNA,” says Raff. “But this approach allows us to recover ancient DNA without having to destroy remains. It’s a solution to a number of ethical conundrums in our field.”

Neolithic figurine, over 7,000 years old, unearthed at Turkey’s Çatalhöyük

Neolithic figurine, over 7,000 years old, unearthed at Turkey’s Çatalhöyük

An 8,000-year-old statuette of what could be a fertility goddess has been unearthed at a Neolithic site in Turkey, according to archaeologists.

The 8,000-year-old figurine is notable for its craftsmanship, with fine details likely made with thin tools, like flint or obsidian, by a practised artisan.

The figurine, discovered at Çatalhöyük in central Turkey, was wrought from recrystallized limestone between 6300 and 6000 B.C. That material is rare for an area where most previously discovered pieces were sculpted from clay, the researchers said.

The archaeologists think this figurine, which is conventionally associated with fertility goddesses, is also representative of an elderly woman who had risen to prominence in Çatalhöyük’s famously egalitarian society.

Goddess figurines were common in the Neolithic period, with those found at Çatalhöyük usually depicting a plump woman with her hair tied in a bun, sagging breasts and a pronounced belly, they said. 

The newfound figurine differentiates itself from similar statuettes not only in its material and quality but also in its craftsmanship, according to Ian Hodder, a professor of anthropology at Stanford University who is overseeing the Çatalhöyük site. Hodder said that he “realized immediately that it was a very special find.”

At 6.7 inches tall (17 centimetres) and 4.3 inches (11 cm) wide, the figurine has fine details such as elaborate fat rolls on the limbs and neck.

Unlike other goddess statuettes, the limestone figurine also depicts the woman with her arms separated from her torso and an undercut below the belly to separate it from the rest of the body.

These finer details would have only been possible with thin tools, like flint or obsidian, the researchers said, which suggests that the carving could only have been made by a practised artisan.

With its fine artistry and its discovery in the newer, shallower parts of the site (meaning that it was likely buried later), Hodder said that the figurine might signal a shift from a sharing economy to an exchange economy, where resources could be accumulated unevenly.

“We think society was changing at this time, becoming relatively less egalitarian, with houses being more independent and more based on agricultural production,” Hodder said in a statement.

The archaeologists think that the figurine was made after Neolithic Çatalhöyük, where resources were often pooled, and changed toward a more stratified society.

The fatness of the goddess statue could represent high status rather than an elevated place in a society of equals, Hodder said.

Whatever the shift, it did not happen overnight. Humans first settled in Çatalhöyük around 7500 B.C., with the society reaching its peak around 7000 B.C., according to archaeologists. The ancient settlement was abandoned around 5700 BC.

An Unknown Ancient Civilization in India Carved This Rock Art

An Unknown Ancient Civilization in India Carved This Rock Art

A passion for hiking first brought two engineers into the hills and plateaus of India’s picturesque Konkan coast. But now they return for clues to the identification of a lost civilization.

An Unknown Ancient Civilization in India Carved This Rock Art
One of the human figures depicted in the newly documented petroglyphs

As BBC Marathi’s Mayureesh Konnur reports, the duo, Sudhir Risbood and Manoj Marathe, have helped catalogue hundreds of rock carvings etched into the stone of hilltops in the western part of India’s Maharashtra state.

The depictions include a crocodile, elephant, birds, fish and human figures. They may date back to 10,000 B.C., and they come from the hands of people who belonged to an as-yet-unknown civilization. Some of the petroglyphs were hidden beneath soil and mud deposited during the intervening millennia. Others were well-known by locals and considered holy.

Risbood and Marathe have been hiking for years, leading a small group of enthusiastic explorers to interview locals and rediscover this lost art. “We walked thousands of kilometres,” Risbood tells BBC Marathi.

“People started sending photographs to us and we even enlisted schools in our efforts to find them. We made students ask their grandparents and other village elders if they knew about any other engravings.”

The region had three documented petroglyph sites before the hikers started their search, reported Mayuri Phadnis for the Pune Mirror in 2015.

The duo initially identified 10 new sites home to 86 petroglyphs. “Judging by the crudity, they seem to have been made in the Neolithic era,” Sachin Joshi, a researcher with Pune’s Deccan College of Archeology said.

Just a few months later, in a follow-up story for the Pune Mirror, Phadnis reported that thanks to supporting from the district administration, the hiking group identified 17 more sites, and its petroglyph count had reached above 200.

“We have long feared that these sites would be destroyed before more research could be done on them,” Risbood told Phadnis of the Pune Mirror. “With the administration stepping in, we believe this heritage can be saved.”

The petroglyphs are featured on the Ratnagiri district’s tourism website, and researchers are working to decipher their meanings and figure out who may have carved them.

The director of the Maharashtra state archaeology department, Tejas Gage, tells BBC Marathi that since the petroglyphs primarily show animals and people, he suspects the original artists may have come from a hunter-gatherer society.

“We have not found any pictures of farming activities,” he says. “This man knew about animals and sea creatures. That indicates he was dependent on hunting for food.”

BBC Marathi notes that the state government has allocated 240 million rupees (about $3.3 million) for further study of 400 of the identified petroglyphs.

Bronze Age Pot Discovered in Wales

Bronze Age Pot Discovered in Wales

An archaeological dig has uncovered what could be the earliest house found in Cardiff. Volunteers and archaeologists from the Caerau and Ely Rediscovering (CAER) Heritage Project, found a clay pot which could be about 3,000 years old.

Bronze Age Pot Discovered in Wales
The clay pot found by the CAER could be about 3,000 years old

The group were looking for the missing link between the late Iron Age and the early Roman period.

Co-director of the project Dr David Wyatt said what they found was “much more remarkable.”

The archaeologists said the roundhouse, located near Cardiff West Community High School, could provide the earliest clues on the origins of Cardiff.

Over 300 people have taken part in the dig, at Trelai Park, about half a mile away from the Caerau Hillfort, a heritage site of national significance.

Archaeologists and community members had previously discovered finds of Neolithic, Iron Age, Roman and medieval origins at the hillfort.

Experts believed the settlement dubbed “Trelai Enclosure” could provide the missing link between the late Iron Age and early Roman period, showing what happened to people once they had moved on from the hillfort.

‘Incredible development’

The pot was found and recovered by archaeologist Tom Hicks and volunteer Charlie Adams

But, the roundhouse predates it, a clay pot discovered at the site has given the team a firmer indication of the time period the building can be traced to.

Dr Wyatt added that they believed the roundhouse could have been constructed in the mid to late Bronze Age, going back to between 1500 and 1100 BC.

“The enclosure definitely predates the hillfort, people were living here before the hillfort was built.

“It’s an incredible development and sheds light on the earliest inhabitants of Cardiff,” he added.

Project co-director Dr Oliver Davis said: “What we’ve found is completely unexpected and even more exciting.

“This enclosure could be providing us with the earliest clues on the origins of Cardiff, the pot that’s been found is beautifully decorated and preserved – it is extremely rare to find pottery of this quality.

“It’s also unusual to find a Bronze Age settlement in Wales – there are only one or two other Bronze Age sites in this country.”

‘Opportunity to learn’

It is hoped the ‘remarkable discovery’ will help archaeologists learn more about people living at the site

Nearly 300 volunteers have participated in the dig so far, run by CAER, a partnership between Cardiff University, Action in Caerau and Ely (ACE), local schools, residents and heritage partners.

Archaeologist Tom Hicks and volunteers Charlie Adams both found and recovered the pot during the dig.

Mr Hicks said: This is a very well-preserved example of Bronze Age pottery, and a significant find for the archaeological record in the region.

“It’s a great opportunity for us to learn more about the lives of the people living on the sire around 3,000 years ago.”

He added that further scientific analysis may be able to tell what the pot was used for before it ended up in the enclosure ditch, and how or where the pot was made.

Headteacher at Cardiff West Community High School, Martin Hullard said: “We’re delighted to be involved in this exciting archaeological project, our students have loved learning about the history that’s just a stone’s throw away from their school.”