Sunken Medieval Village is Eerily Emerging from an Italian Lake
At the bottom of a lake, a forgotten medieval town that has been ‘frozen in time’ looks ready to resurface, probably giving tourists a direct glimpse back into the past.
The streets of the village are usually submerged under 34 million cubic meters of water
Since 1947, the Italian village of Fabbriche di Careggine has been submerged under the waters next to a hydroelectric dam, but for the intervening years, it has remained in remarkably good condition under the man-made lake.
A group of blacksmiths founded the small community in Tuscany in the 13th century and soon became well-known for the ironwork produced there.
Now, the town – which is near to another settlement called Vagli di Sotto – could re-emerge as the dam is drained for maintenance works.
This has happened four times since the dam created Lake Vagli, and each time as the waters receded, the church and several buildings from the old village creep eerily from the past into the present day.
It is hoped that tourists will be able to visit the ghost village in 2021, after Lake Vagli is emptied again
The most recent time the village was at surface level was in 1994, and thousands of tourists flocked to the site to catch a glimpse of 13th-century life.
Pictures taken back then show that the church, the cemetery, and the bridge in and out of town are still standing.
According to the daughter of the ex-mayor of Municipality of Vagli di Sotto – a fairly tenuous source, admittedly – the works could see the submerged settlement dragged out of the depths and into the 21st century.
Lorenza Giorgi, whose father Domenico Giorgi was the mayor back in 1994, said on Facebook that the plan is to drain the lake next year.
She wrote: “I inform you that from certain sources I know that next year, in 2021, Lake Vagli will be emptied.
“The last time it was emptied in 1994 when my father was mayor and thanks to his commitment and to the many initiatives that, with effort, had managed to put up in one summer the country of Vagli welcomed more than a million of people.
“In 1994 my father tells me that it was difficult to attract such a large number of people and that everything was done without burdens on the administration, besides those of ordinary representation of a small municipality.”
But every once in a while, the lake is emptied and the medieval village resurfaces
She continued: “I hope that next year, strong of the past experience of which everyone has a beautiful memory and with the help of social networks, we will be able to repeat and overcome the great success, with just as much attention.”
It has also been reported that the energy company that owns the dam (ENEL) is considering draining the lake in order to boost the ailing tourism industry in the area.
The human skulls date back between 9,500 and 9,000 years ago, (on which) lifelike faces were modeled with clay earth.
DAMASCUS: Archaeologists said on Sunday they had uncovered decorated human skulls dating back as long as 9,500 years ago from a burial site near the Syrian capital Damascus.
“The human skulls date back between 9,500 and 9,000 years ago, (on which) lifelike faces were modelled with clay earth … then coloured to accentuate the features,” said Danielle Stordeur, head of the joint French-Syrian archaeological mission behind the discovery.
Located at a burial site near a prehistoric village, the five skulls were found earlier this month in a pit resting against one another, underneath the remains of an infant, said Stordeur.
The French archaeologist described as “extraordinary” the find at the Neolithic site of Tell Aswad, at Jaidet al-Khass village, 35 kilometers from Damascus.
The discovery was not the first of its kind in the Middle East, but “the realism of two of these skulls is striking,” stressed Stordeur, in charge of the excavation along with Bassam Jamous, the chief of antiquities of Syria’s National Museum.
“They surprise by the regularity and the smoothness of their features,” Stordeur said of the skulls.
“The eyes are shown as closed, underlined by black bitumen. The nose is straight and fine, with a pinched base to portray the nostrils.
The mouth is reduced to a slit,” said Stordeur, of the Asian research house of the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), France’s largest scientific establishment.
The decorated skulls were devoted “only to important individuals, chosen according to social or religious criteria,” she added.
Skeleton of Teen Girl Found Buried Next to Mysterious Pyramid in Egypt
Egyptian archaeologists excavating the ruins of a pyramid 60 miles outside of Cairo have discovered the skeletal remains of a 13-year-old girl huddled inside a tomb.
Exactly how or when she died is a mystery, though the experts say the site itself dates back to the end of the Third Dynasty roughly 4,600 years ago.
The tomb was empty apart from the skeleton, which was buried in the squatting position, but the team also found two animal skulls and three ceramic vessels nearby that were likely placed as funerary offerings.
At least part of the Meidum pyramid, located south of Cairo in Egypt, was built for the pharaoh Snefru.
The skull offerings appear to have come from bulls, according to Egypt’s Ministry of Antiquities.
Researchers came across the burial during work on the partially-collapsed Meidum pyramid, where the team is excavating a cemetery built near the end of the Third Dynasty.
It’s thought that construction on the Meidum period began at the command of the Third Dynasty’s last pharaoh, Huni, and was continued by Sneferu, the first pharaoh of the Fourth Dynasty.
Previous efforts at the site uncovered the tomb of Prince Nefar-Maat, Sneferu’s oldest son.
While the newly-discovered bones indicate the remains belong to a girl who was around 13 years old when she died, much about the burial and the offerings are still unclear.
The skeleton of a 13-year-old girl was discovered in a cemetery next to a 4,600-year-old pyramid in Egypt.
Researchers do not know the identity of the buried teenager.
The latest burial was found surrounded by a partially intact brick wall, and the team is now working to restore and reinforce the structures.
Elsewhere, in the Sinai Peninsula, the Antiquities Ministry says it discovered an ancient workshop that was used to build and repair ships thousands of years ago.
The site dates back to the Ptolemaic era (332 B.C.-30 B.C) and was found during excavations in the Tel Abu Saifi archaeological site, which is said to have once been the location of the Roman fortress Silla.
The find includes two dry dockyards where the ancient ships were worked on.
Researchers say it dates to the Greco-Roman period in Egypt, which lasted from the arrival of Alexander the Great in the 4th century until the 7th century when the Islamic conquest swept the region.
Mysteries of the 2,500-year-old butter found at the bottom of a loch
In Perth and Kinross, butter dated back 2,500 years was discovered at the bottom of a loch. Within a wooden butter bowl, manufactured by an Iron Age culture, traces of milk content were found preserved.
Archaeologists at the bottom of Loch Tay uncovered the wooden dish, where at least 17 crannogs, or Iron Age wooden houses, once stood.
Built from alder with a lifespan of around 20 years, the structures simply collapsed into the loch once they had served their purpose, taking the objects inside with them.
The replica crannog on Loch Tay, where the butter was found
The crannogs were considered high-status sites which offered good security as well as easy access to trading routes along the Tay and into the North Sea.
Rich Hiden, the archaeologist at the Scottish Crannog Centre, said conditions at the bottom of the loch had offered the perfect environment to preserve the butter and the dish.
He said: “Because of the fantastic anaerobic conditions, where there is very light, oxygen or bacteria to break down anything organic, you get this type of sealed environment.
“When they started excavating, they pulled out this square wooden dish, well around three-quarters of a square wooden dish, which had these really nice chisel marks on the sides as well as this grey stuff.”
Analysis on the matter found it was dairy material, with experts believing it likely originated from a cow. Holes in the bottom of the wooden dish suggest it was used for the buttering process.
The butter then may have been turned into cheese by adding rennet, which naturally forms in a number of plants, including nettles.
Mr Hiden added: “This dish is so valuable in many ways.
“To be honest, we would expect people of this time to be eating dairy.
The 2,500-year-old butter dish and the remains of the butter.
“In the early Iron Age, they had mastered the technology of smelting iron ore into to’s so mastering the technology of dairy we would expect.
“So while it may not surprise us that they are eating dairy, what is so important about this butter dish is that it helps us to identify what life was like in the crannogs and the skills and the tools that they had.
“To me, that is archaeology at its finest. It is using the object itself to unravel the story.
“The best thing about this butter dish is that it is so personal and offers us such a complete snapshot of what was happening here.
“It is not just a piece of wood. You look at it and you start to extrapolate so much.
“If you start to pull one thread, you look at the tool marks and you see they were using very fine chisels to make this kind of object.
“They were probably making their own so that gives another aspect as to how life was here.”
It is believed that 20 people and animals lived in a crannog at any one time. Many trees were used to fashion the homes, with hazel woven into panels to make walls and partitions.
Archaeology in Bulgaria reports that an unidentified medieval settlement has been discovered in northwestern Bulgaria by a team of researchers, led by Elena Vasileva of Bulgaria’s National Archaeological Institute with Museum, who were investigating the path of a road construction project.
Near the Danube city of Vidin in Northwest Bulgaria, a previously unknown settlement from the Second Bulgarian Empire in the High Middle Ages and a layer from an early Bronze Age settlement from the 3rd millennium BC were uncovered.
The ruins previously unknown medieval settlement from the time of the Second Bulgarian Empire (1185-1396/1422) and structures from an Early Bronze Age settlement have been found near the town of Tarnyane, 12 kilometres away from Vidin, on the banks of the Voynishka River, which forms two waterfalls before flowing into the Danube.
The discoveries have been during rescue excavations for the construction of the Vidin – Ruzhintsi – Montana road (E79 road) in Northwest Bulgaria, bTV reports citing lead archaeologist Assist. Prof. Elena Vasileva from the National Institute and Museum of Archaeology in Sofia.
Vasileva, who points that construction project often provides invaluable opportunities to study otherwise neglected or unknown archaeological monuments, has been in charge of archaeological site No. 7 out of a total of eight archaeological sites slated for rescue excavations along the route of the road in question. The digs were carried out from September until November 2020.
The previously unknown medieval settlement near Vidin and Tarnyane existed in the 11th – 14th century on an area of a total of 54 decares (nearly 14 acres) on both banks of the Voynishka River.
The previously unknown medieval settlement has been discovered during the construction of a local road.
The previously unknown medieval settlement was inhabited at the time of the Second Bulgarian Empire, between the 11th and the 14th century.
The previously unknown medieval settlement was inhabited at the time of the Second Bulgarian Empire, between the 11th and the 14th century.
The restoration of a Bronze Age vessel found at the site by restorer Ekaterina Ilieva from the Vidin Regional Museum of History.
The archaeological team has excavated there a total of 47 structures from the 11th – 14th century AD.
These include 23 pits with an average depth of 2.5 meters; a moat which is 1 meter deep and 5 meters wide; eight kilns, six dwellings, including three dugouts, and one human grave.
According to the lead archaeologist, the newly discovered site is one of the few open-type settlements, i.e. with no fortifications, from the period of the Second Bulgarian Empire to have ever been researched in today’s Bulgaria.
“It contains all elements of a settlement, namely, dwellings, pits, production kilns, and a necropolis,” Vasileva says.
“Of structures, the most interesting ones are some of the pits that we’ve explored, which have a large diameter and depth, and contain animals remains – of houses and less so of smaller animals – sheep, goats, and poultry.
This practice is typical of such structures from earlier periods, i.e. the time of the First Bulgarian Empire (632/680 – 1018) but not of the later periods,” she explains.
During the medieval settlement’s excavations, the archaeological team has found a total of 350 artefacts, including coins, arrow tips, tools such as knives, chisels, awls, scrapers, loom weights, parts of copper vessels, pottery vessels such as pots and jugs, adornments such as rings, metal and glass bracelets, parts from earrings, buckles, crosses, and medallions.
Towards the end of the 14th century and the beginning of the 15th century, today’s Northwest Bulgaria and part of Eastern Serbia were part of the Vidin Tsardom, a rump state of the Second Bulgarian Empire, which was the last part of Bulgaria to be conquered by the invading Ottoman Turks.
A map of the Second Bulgarian Empire during its height in the first half of the 13th century.
A map of the Second Bulgarian Empire during its height in the first half of the 13th century. The city of Vidin is noted on the map.
A map showing the decline and breakup of the Second Bulgarian Empire in the second half of the 14th century, with some of the rump states, including the Vidin Tsardom.
In addition to the medieval settlement from the Second Bulgarian Empire in the High Middle Ages, the archaeological site near Tarnyane on the Voynishka River also yielded a layer from the Early Bronze Age, from the so-called Magura – Cotofeni Culture, from the 3rd millennium BC. From it, the researchers have excavated one dwelling and one grave.
“The drilling surveying shows that in the 3rd millennium BC the convenient tall bank of the Voynishka River had a settlement, and later, in the 2nd millennium BC, to the south of it there was a necropolis,” Vasileva is quoted as saying.
Both the Early Bronze Age layer and the medieval settlement from the High Middle Ages will be excavated further in 2021.
The rescue excavations in 2020 have included archaeologists and archaeology students from the National Institute and Museum of Archaeology in Sofia, Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”, Veliko Tarnovo University “St. Cyril and St. Methodius”, and experts from the National Institute of Morphology, Pathology, and Anthropology, and the National Museum of Natural History in Sofia.
Mysterious message in a bottle found 126 years later hidden inside the wall of Boston building
A bottle containing a mysterious 126-year-old note was recently found hidden away inside the wall of a building in Boston.
A person living in the Back Bay near Commonwealth Avenue found the bottle tucked into a space between their fireplace flue and an interior wall, according to the Boston Archaeology Program.
Photos shared on Facebook showed a rolled-up piece of paper stuffed inside an old “N. Simons” rye whiskey bottle. The label read, “Importer and Wholesale Liquor Dealer” and had the address “31 & 33 Castle St., Boston” printed on it.
The note inside the bottle had the name “Tom Ford” scrawled on it, along with the phrase “6 on Shea.”
It was dated Sept. 23, 1894.
“We have a mystery for the hive mind this week! A Boston resident found this amazing message in a bottle tucked into the space between their fireplace flue and an interior wall, presumably placed there by past builders,” the social media post read. “Anybody have any ideas about N. Simons, Tom Ford, or “6 on Shea?”
One Facebook user suggested that the note was evidence of secretive “drinking and gambling.”
Another user commented, “There was a (very short-lived) professional football/soccer league in 1894- one of the captains was Dennis Shea.”
As of Wednesday, the origin and meaning behind the note were unclear.
Women’s mass grave sheds light on female victims of the Spanish Civil War
According to a Reuters report, a mass grave holding the remains of ten women from the village of Uncastillo has been uncovered in northeastern Spain. The women were taken from their homes and executed by a fascist firing squad on August 31, 1936, during the first year of the Spanish Civil War.
The mass grave of ten women executed by a fascist firing squad in the early days of the Spanish Civil War has been unearthed by archaeologists in northeastern Spain, bringing attention to the often ignored plight of women in the conflict.
Well, some of their spines are traced by preserved white buttons, the only traces of the clothes they wear the day they were executed on Aug. 31, 1936, after being abducted from their homes the night before in the village of Uncastillo.
The remains of a body with a bullet hole on it is seen during the exhumation of a mass grave with ten women from the town of Uncastillo that were shot in 1936 by the forces of former dictator Francisco Franco, in the cemetery of Farasdues, Spain, December 9, 2020.
Their bodies were dumped in a narrow pit in the local cemetery in neighbouring Farasdues, in the region of Aragon.
Mari Carmen Rios’ grandmother Inocencia Aznares was among them.
A tent covers the exhumation of two mass graves, including one with ten women from the town of Uncastillo that were shot in 1936 by the forces of former dictator Francisco Franco, in the cemetery of Farasdues, Spain, December 9, 2020.
“Why did they kill her?” Because they couldn’t find my uncle? Because she could read and write? Because she voted for the republic? … I don’t know … Nothing they did makes sense,” Rios said.
More than 500,000 people were killed during the 1936-1939 war. Historical foundations estimate over 100,000 bodies remain missing, many in unmarked mass graves.
The leftist coalition government approved a bill in September to finance exhumations from mass graves as part of efforts to “restore democratic memory”.
Academic research on the conflict, though extensive, has been overwhelmingly focused on the experience of men, said Cristina Sanchez, who investigates civil-war violence against women at Zaragoza University.
“Where are all the women? … Now we are finding that they were present as victims of violence and as perpetrators.”
Some were persecuted for their political leanings or activism but many more were killed as substitute victims for their male relatives, she said. Methods of execution were equally savage for both sexes.
“We have deaths by drowning, deaths by hanging, and the majority were killed by firing squad.”
Excavations in Farasdues began in November but the massacre had remained lodged in the area’s collective memory for decades, said archaeologist Javier Ruiz.
The remains of bodies are seen during the exhumation of a mass grave with ten women from the town of Uncastillo that were shot in 1936 by the forces of former dictator Francisco Franco, in the cemetery of Farasdues, Spain, December 9, 2020.
“Carrying off 10 women in one go didn’t happen in many places, at least not in Aragon … In Uncastillo these 10 women have never been forgotten.”
Next to their grave, archaeologists uncovered another site with the bodies of at least seven men, who are yet to be identified.
For Rios, the excavation triggered powerful feelings of outrage, which later gave way to a sense of closure: “When you say ‘We’ve found her, she’s there, we’re going to bury her with grandpa,’ honestly it makes me very happy.”
7.2 million-year-old Pre-human fossil suggests mankind arose in Europe, not Africa
The human lineage separated from that of apes about 7 million years ago in Africa, according to the widely agreed narrative of human evolution. Hominins (early humans) are thought to have lived in Africa until they first spread to Asia and then to Europe around 2 million years ago.
A mix of hominid (genus Homo) depictions; (from right to left) H. habilis, H. ergaster, H. erectus; H. antecessor – male, female, H. heidelbergensis; H. neanderthalensis – girl, male, H. sapiens.
Today, the narrative is being updated by a team of scientists from the University of Tubingen in Germany and the University of Toronto in Canada. They claim that the oldest human ancestor originated in Europe, not Africa, about 7.2 million years ago, about 200,000 years older than previously believed, in two parallel research published in the journal PLOS One.
The researchers base their bold hypothesis largely on the analysis of two fossils: a mandible (lower jaw) found in Greece in 1944 and an upper premolar tooth found in Bulgaria in 2009.
The fossils belonged to an ape-like creature known as Graecopithecus freybergi (“El Graeco,” for short), which roamed the Mediterranean region between 7.18 and 7.25 million years ago.
Though the fossilized jawbone from Greece has been around a while, most scientists had dismissed it as a source of good information due to its poor condition. “It’s not the best specimen in the world,” David Begun of the University of Toronto, who co-authored the new research, told HISTORY.
“It has a lot of damage to the surface of the jawbone itself and a lot of damage to the teeth, so they’re really hard to see, they’re difficult to measure, and it’s hard to say what they look like.” But when Begun’s colleague, Madelaine Böhme, had the idea of using computer tomography, or CT-scanning, to look inside the mandible, things got more interesting.
A 7.24 million-year-old upper premolar of Graecopithecus from Azmaka, Bulgaria.
Root morphology in P4 of cf. Graecopithecus sp. and O. macedoniensis.
“We saw that the roots of the teeth embedded in the mandible were perfectly preserved…and they gave us a lot of new information that we never had about this specimen,” Begun said. “The canine root is quite short and slender and indicates that the canine was small. That’s really important, because in apes—and male apes in particular—the canine is quite large.” This holds true for most male primates, Begun explained, but not all. “This root shows that the canine was already reduced, which is a characteristic that you only see in humans and our fossil relatives.”
In addition, analysis of the two fossils showed that some of the roots of the bicuspid teeth of Graecopithecus—what we call the premolars—had simplified, or fused to form fewer roots. “That is again something that you only see in humans and our fossil relatives. It is extremely rare to find it in living apes, and you don’t see it in any fossil apes from the same time period,” Begun noted.
In the second, complementary study based on sediment in Greece and Bulgaria from that time, Begun and his colleagues found that the climate during the period El Graeco lived there would have been similar to the dry savannahs known to have encouraged the shift to bipedalism that marked early hominin evolution. In fact, it would have been highly similar to the climate of eastern Africa.
Head sketch is by Assen Ignatov of the Bulgarian National Museum of Natural History.
If Graecopithecus is in fact a hominin, it would slightly predate the earliest known human ancestor found in Africa, Sahelanthropus tchadensis. Discovered at a site in Chad, Sahelanthropus is believed to be between 6 and 7 million years old.
Begun emphasized that the new hypothesis doesn’t affect the later story of modern humans and their emergence from Africa. “That story is completely intact,” he told HISTORY. “This is about what happened millions and millions of years before that when the human lineage in its entirety arose.”
Some other experts in human evolution are skeptical of Graecopithecus’ newly anointed status as the earliest known hominin. In particular, they question the claim that the jawbone and tooth shape alone establish its pre-human status.
“We just don’t have enough evidence to come to that conclusion,” Bernard Wood of George Washington University, who was not involved with the new study, told HISTORY. “It’s perfectly possible that one or more fossil apes have roots like that.”
As he pointed out, it’s not uncommon for primates to evolve the same morphological traits or features independently from each other. “If you asked me, how much would I be prepared to bet that this is a hominin,” Wood continued, “you’d have to persuade me to put more than a quarter on [it].”
Begun acknowledges the possibility that El Graeco’s tooth shape and size may have occurred independently from early humans and admitted he would like to have more and better-preserved fossil evidence supporting the new hypothesis. Still, he stands behind his and his colleague’s conclusions about Graecopithecus, based on the fossil evidence they do have—and he believes there is likely more out there.
“I think there’s a pretty good chance that we’ll find new sites in the next few years. We might get lucky, and find some more, better-preserved teeth, and especially limb bones, that could help to answer this question more definitively.”
