Excavation of a development site at Herne Bay, Kent, on the southeastern coast of England, has unearthed a rare medieval bone flute.
The instrument was discovered within the bounds of a rectangular enclosure bounded by a ditch. It was found in a layer with pottery dating to between the 12th and 15th centuries.
It’s a fipple or duct flute, an end-blown flute like a recorder or slide whistle.
The form is an ancient one — the world’s oldest confirmed flute was carved from the bone of a griffon vulture 40,000 years ago, and the Neanderthal Flute, a partial flute carved from a bear bone is 20,000 years older than that — but there are long gaps on the archaeological record between the prehistoric flutes and the ones that emerged in the early Middle Ages and the latter are still rare finds.
Only around 120 archaeological examples have ever been discovered in Britain, ranging in date from the 5th century to the 16th.
The flute was carved from the tibia shaft of a sheep or goat. Five finger holes were bored out of the top, and a thumb hole was out of the bottom of the shaft.
Archaeologists believe it may have had a mouthpiece of some kind that is now lost, but other than that, the flute is intact and in excellent condition.
A cave complex with hieroglyphs and Varangian symbols was discovered in the centre of Ukraine
An ancient cave complex thought to date from Kievan Rus’ has been discovered in central Kyiv at Voznesensky Uzvoz.
Dmytro Perov, a conservationist at Kyiv’s Center for Urban Development, told Radio Kultura that the caves were discovered next to a demolished house that Kyiv housing authorities had deemed unsafe for habitation.
Actually, Dmytro Perov followed his grandmother’s clues. Perov’s grandmother used to talk about a large stone house next to an old cave, but no one knew its location. According to Perov, who had previously examined the area several times, only the front facia of the house remained, concealed by bushes.
The conservationist told reporters that he and his friends decided to go to the old house “on a small expedition to look for caves,” and they discovered an entrance. The first archaeological explorations in the Voznesensky Caves were carried out by Perov and a group of researchers from the Institute of Archaeology last Saturday.
Timur Bobrovskyi, an archaeology professor at the Sofia Kyivska reserve, said he was “amazed that such a treasure was found in the centre of Kyiv” after spending three hours exploring the cave.
A unique discovery in the centre of Kyiv.
The team discovered pottery fragments from the Late Kyivan Rus’ era, an Eastern and Northern European state that existed from the late ninth to the middle of the thirteenth century, in the cave’s northern section.
Perov wrote on Facebook that the team scoured around 40 meters (131 feet) of caves, including the lower cave complex, which he claims is twice as long as the upper passage and has a series of “radial branches.” The most significant discovery, according to Petrov, was “a set of Kyivan Rus hieroglyphs and Varangian symbols from the Early Rus period,” when the region was under the control of Varangian rulers.
While more investigation is required to confirm it, according to Dmytro Perov, they think that some of the carved symbols may date all the way back to the fifth or sixth centuries BC. He says that “animistic images of animals and graffiti” from the Varyaz period, including the rune Algiz (“chicken’s foot”), were also discovered on the walls. This was an ancient Varangian charm, a symbol of safety and longevity.
Several Hellenic Greek colonies were established on the northern coast of the Black Sea, on the Crimean Peninsula, and along the Sea of Azov between the 7th and 6th centuries BC.
The steppe hinterland was occupied by the Cimmerians, Scythians, and Sarmatians. They traded with the Greek/Roman colonies after a period of control by the Roman empire during the first millennium BC.
Rurik, a Varangian or Viking prince, established the Kyivan state in the latter part of the ninth century.
Up until the 13th century, his descendants established and controlled a global trade route to the west.
However, the Kyivan state comprised East Slavic, Norse, and Finnic peoples, making it difficult to determine who left the carved symbols on the cave walls.
2 Viking swords buried upright might have connected the dead to Odin and Valhalla
This sword has a preserved pommel (a knob at the end of the handle) with a “button” on top.
Archaeologists in Sweden have unearthed two Viking swords in neighbouring graves that were buried upright as if they were standing on their points.
Whoever installed the iron swords perpendicular to the surface about 1,200 years ago clearly did so on purpose, as it would have taken a lot of effort — possibly involving a rock or hammer — to wedge the weapons roughly 16 inches (40 centimetres) into the ground, archaeologists told Live Science.
“The placement of the swords reflects an action with a lot of symbolism,” Anton Seiler, Fredrik Larsson and Katarina Appelgren, archaeologists at Arkeologerna, an archaeology firm in Sweden that is part of the government agency National Historical Museums, told Live Science in an email. “When you find swords in graves — which you don’t do very often — they often lie beside the buried individual, as a faithful companion on the voyage to the next world.”
It’s unknown why these two swords were buried upright, but there are a variety of possibilities, one of which is that the standing swords served as a connection to the Norse warrior god Odin and his domain Valhalla, where slain warriors reportedly resided under Odin’s leadership, the Arkeologerna team that helped uncover the sword said.
The archaeologists, who were excavating ahead of a highway construction project, discovered the two sword burials early this fall in Västmanland county in central Sweden. The team found a large grave field covering an area just under 1 acre (60 by 60 meters) and containing at least 100 cremated burials. At the time of its use, the grave field was bordered by two farms, the archaeologists said.
An archaeologist excavates one of the swords in Sweden.
Most of the burials date to the late Iron Age (A.D. 600 to 1000) and were made with stones forming graves up to 23 feet (7 m) in diameter. The two burials bearing swords are each about 16 feet (5 m) across and date to the ninth or 10th centuries A.D., during the Viking Age. However, both of those graves, as well as a third burial containing glass beads, were placed on top of an earlier grave mound that dates to the seventh or eighth centuries A.D., meaning that each of these individuals was part of a “multi-chronological grave monument,” the team said.
It was very uncommon to incorporate old graves into new ones during the late Iron Age, Seiler, Larsson and Appelgren said. “This shows that the construction of the two stone settings with swords were done deliberately, perhaps to create a connection to a certain individual, ancestor, or social group.”
One of the swords is raised, after spending centuries in the ground.
Viking Age swords were expensive objects, so it was a “huge investment” to bury these weapons in graves, as it rendered them “unavailable for future use,” the team added. Both swords are about 35 inches (90 cm) long, and are broken. “They shattered when pressed into the ground, and more than 1,000 years has also contributed to degradation,” the team explained.
The archaeologists plan to piece the fragments together “to determine the exact length and shape of the swords,” and it’s possible that traces of decayed remains, such as wooden or leather sheaths known as scabbards, or inlays of silver on the handles “will become visible during conservation,” Seiler, Larsson and Appelgren said.
In addition to the swords, the two burials contained cremated human and animal bones — including those from horses, dogs and birds that were possibly sacrificed for the burial ceremony — as well as game pieces that were crafted from whale bone, silver knot work, pottery vessels, iron nails and iron rivets, which may reflect Viking boats or other wooden structures. The team also found bear claws, possibly from pelts that have since decayed, and grain, perhaps as fare to the next world, the archaeologists said.
One of the swords, standing upright in the grave before its full excavation.
Why were the swords buried upright?
It’s a mystery why the swords were placed standing up, but one possible explanation is that it was a way of consecrating the deceased to Odin; ground-stuck swords (and in some cases, spears and arrowheads) may have been thought to facilitate the transition to Valhalla, the archaeologists said.
However, some researchers suggest that sharp objects stuck into graves were “a way to prevent the dead from rising,” the team said. “We do not think that applies to these graves, as the swords were such precious objects. Instead, knives or arrowheads could have been used, which would have been significantly cheaper.”
The archaeologists also found bear claws, which were probably from a pelt used during the funeral.
Whatever the reason, it’s likely that the swords also served as a reminder of the dead to the living. The pommels of the swords “lay superficially in the graves and must have been visible during the Viking Age,” Seiler, Larsson and Appelgren said. “Perhaps it was the case that the relatives sometimes visited the graves, and by touching the swords made connections with the dead.
The archaeologists plan to soon analyze the human remains in the sword burials, which will help them determine each person’s sex, age at death, and if just one or multiple people were interred in each grave. It’s tempting to think that these graves all contain men, but “we cannot be sure of this,” as female Vikings have been found buried with weapons, they said.
While the team still has to radiocarbon date the burials, “one can suspect that the graves with swords were built at the same time,” Seiler, Larsson and Appelgren said. “They were next to each other, built in the same burial mound and with similar grave goods. Perhaps they reflect two brothers/sisters in arms who died in the same battle? This is of course hypothetical but certainly represents a breath-taking possibility.”
See the face of an 18th century ‘vampire’ buried in Connecticut
Using DNA extracted from a skull, a forensic artist created a facial reconstruction of a man believed to be a vampire from the 18th century.
In the late 18th century, a man was buried in Griswold, Connecticut, with his femur bones arranged in a criss-cross manner — a placement indicating that locals thought he was a vampire. However, little else was known about him.
More than 200 years later, DNA evidence is revealing what he may have looked like. (And yes, he was genetically human.)
After performing DNA analyses, forensic scientists from a Virginia-based DNA technology company named Parabon NanoLabs, and the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory (AFDIL), a branch of the U.S. Armed Forces Medical Examiner System based in Delaware, concluded that at the time of death, the deceased male (known as JB55) was about 55 years old and suffered from tuberculosis.
Using 3D facial reconstruction software, a forensic artist determined that JB55 likely had fair skin, brown or hazel eyes, brown or black hair and some freckles, according to a statement.
Based on the positioning of the legs and skull in the grave, researchers suspect that at some point the body was disinterred and reburied, a practice often associated with the belief that someone was a vampire. Historically, some people once thought that those who died of tuberculosis were actually vampires, according to the statement.
“The remains were found with the femur bones removed and crossed over the chest,” Ellen Greytak, director of bioinformatics at Parabon NanoLabs and the technical lead for the organization’s Snapshot Advanced DNA Analysis division, told Live Science. “This way they wouldn’t be able to walk around and attack the living.”
To perform the analyses, forensic scientists began by extracting DNA from the man’s skeletal remains. However, working with bones that were more than two centuries old proved challenging.
“The technology doesn’t work well with bones, especially if those bones are historical,” Greytak said. “When bones become old, they break down and fragment over time. Also, when remains have been sitting in the environment for hundreds of years, the DNA from the environment from things like bacteria and fungi also end up in the sample. We wanted to show that we could still extract DNA from difficult historical samples.”
A common practice was to bury suspected vampires with their legs crossed so that way they couldn’t rise from the dead.
In traditional genome sequencing, researchers strive to sequence each piece of the human genome 30 times, which is known as “30X coverage.” In the case of the decomposed remains of JB55, the sequencing only yielded about 2.5X coverage.
To supplement this, researchers extracted DNA from an individual buried nearby who was believed to be a relative of JB55. Those samples yielded even poorer coverage: approximately 0.68X.
“We did determine that they were third-degree relatives or first cousins,” Greytak said.
Archaeologists originally unearthed the supposed vampire’s remains in 1990.
In 2019, forensic scientists extracted his DNA and ran it through an online genealogical database, determining that JB55 was actually a man named John Barber, a poor farmer who likely died of tuberculosis.
The nickname JB55 was based on the epitaph spelled out on his coffin in brass tacks, denoting his initials and age at death.
Pyramid and Hundreds of New Kingdom Coffins Found in Egypt
A pyramid built for Queen Neith was one of the many discoveries archaeologists made during the excavation.
Just a stone’s throw from King Tut’s tomb, archaeologists have unearthed the pyramid of a never-before-known ancient Egyptian queen; a cache of coffins, mummies and artefacts; and a series of interconnected tunnels.
For the past two years, archaeologists have been working at Saqqara, an archaeological site in Giza, about 20 miles (32 kilometres) south of Cairo. Recently, they discovered a trove of coffins and mummies, which may belong to some of King Tut’s closest generals and advisors during his reign (1333 B.C. until his death in 1323 B.C.).
Archaeologists also focused their attention on a nearby pyramid, which belonged to Teti, the first king of the Sixth Dynasty of Egypt.
“Teti was worshipped as a god in the New Kingdom period, and so people wanted to be buried near him,” Zahi Hawass(opens in new tab), an Egyptologist who is working on the dig and who formerly served as Egypt’s Minister of Antiquities, told Live Science in an email.
“However, most burials known in Saqqara previously were either from the Old Kingdom or the Late Period. Now we have found 22 [interconnected] shafts, ranging from 30 to 60 feet [9 to 18 meters deep], all with New Kingdom burials.” (Also known as the Egyptian Empire, the New Kingdom period lasted from the sixth century B.C. to the 11th century B.C.)
Buried within these shafts, archaeologists found a “huge limestone sarcophagus” along with “300 beautiful coffins from the New Kingdom period,” Hawass said.
“Burials from the New Kingdom were not known to be common in the area before, so this is entirely unique to the site,” Hawass said. “The coffins have individual faces, each one unique, distinguishing between men and women, and are decorated with scenes from the Book of the Dead [an ancient Egypt funerary text]. Each coffin also has the name of the deceased and often shows the Four Sons of Horus, who protected the organs of the deceased.”
Egyptologist Zahi Hawass and one of the mummies discovered at Saqqara, a dig site outside of Cairo.
If discovering the coffins wasn’t astonishing enough when the researchers lifted the coffins’ lids they were surprised to find the mummies in good condition, even after all these centuries.
“This shows that mummification reached its peak in the New Kingdom,” Hawass said. “Some coffins have two lids, and the most amazing coffin so far has a mask of a woman made completely of solid gold.”
He added, “Inside the coffins and tomb shafts are also various artefacts, including games such as the ancient game of Senet, shabtis [small figurines], statues of the god Ptah-Sokar and even a metal axe found in the hand of an army soldier.
In addition, researchers found a pyramid commemorating a queen whose identity was previously unknown.
“We have since discovered that her name was Neith and she had never before been known from the historical record,” Hawass said. “It is amazing to literally rewrite what we know of history, adding a new queen to our records.”
A selection of the coffins and antiquities found at the excavation site will be on display at the Grand Egyptian Museum in Giza, which is slated to open next year.
Iron Age Artifact May Shed Light on Origins of Basque Language
More than 2,000 years after it was probably hung from the door of a mud-brick house in northern Spain to bring luck, a flat, lifesize bronze hand engraved with dozens of strange symbols could help scholars trace the development of one of the world’s most mysterious languages.
The Hand of Irulegi was discovered last year near Pamplona.
Although the piece – known as the Hand of Irulegi – was discovered last year by archaeologists from the Aranzadi Science Society who have been digging near the city of Pamplona since 2017, its importance has only recently become clear.
Experts studying the hand and its inscriptions now believe it to be both the oldest written example of Proto-Basque and a find that “upends” much of what was previously known about the Vascones, a late iron age tribe who inhabited parts of northern Spain before the arrival of the Romans, and whose language is thought to have been an ancestor of modern-day Basque, or euskera.
Until now, scholars had supposed the Vascones had no proper written language – save for words found on coins – and only began writing after the Romans introduced the Latin alphabet. But the five words written in 40 characters identified as Vasconic, suggest otherwise.
The first – and only word – to be identified so far is sorioneku, a forerunner of the modern Basque word zorioneko, meaning good luck or good omen.
Javier Velaza, a professor of Latin philology at the University of Barcelona and one of the experts who deciphered the hand, said the discovery had finally confirmed the existence of a written Vasconic language.
“People spoke the language of the Vascones in the area where the inscriptions were found,” he said.
“We had imagined that to be the case but until now, we had hardly any texts to bear that out. Now we do – and we also know that the Vascones used writing to set down their language … This inscription is incontrovertible; the first word of the text is patently a word that’s found in modern Basque.”
Velaza’s colleague Joaquín Gorrochategui, a professor of Indo-European linguistics at the University of the Basque country, said the hand’s secrets would change the way scholars looked at the Vascones.
“This piece upends how we’d thought about the Vascones and writing until now,” he said. “We were almost convinced that the ancient Vascones were illiterate and didn’t use writing except when it came to minting coins.”
According to Mattin Aiestaran, the director of the Irulegi dig, the site owes its survival to the fact that the original village was burned and then abandoned during the Sertorian war between two rival Roman factions in the first century BC. The objects they left behind were buried in the ruins of their mud-brick houses.
“That’s a bit of luck for archaeologists and it means we have a snapshot of the moment of the attack,” said Aiestaran. “That means we’ve been able to recover a lot of day-to-day material from people’s everyday lives. It’s an exceptional situation and one that has allowed us to find an exceptional piece.”
Despite the excitement surrounding the deciphering of the inscription, Velaza counselled calm study rather than giddy conjecture. After all, he added, the hand hails from one particular moment in time and tells us only that the people in the area then spoke and wrote the Vasconic language.
“That doesn’t mean we know how long they’d been there, nor what their future was after that moment,” he said.
“It’s true that this is an extraordinarily important text but I’d urge a bit of caution about using it to extrapolate too many conclusions about what happened afterwards. But linguistically speaking, it’s going to provide linguists who specialise in the Vasconic language and Proto-Basque with something they haven’t had until now.”
He added: “I think we should be excited – but we should still be very rigorous scientifically speaking.”
Not every recent Basque language discovery has lived up to its billing. Two years ago, a Spanish archaeologist was found guilty of faking finds that included pieces of third-century pottery engraved with one of the first depictions of the crucified Christ, Egyptian hieroglyphics, and Basque words that predated the earliest known written examples of the language by 600 years.
Although the archaeologist, Eliseo Gil, claimed the pieces would “rewrite the history books”, an expert committee examined them and found traces of modern glue as well as references to the 17th-century French philosopher René Descartes.
New York returns nearly 200 looted antiquities to Pakistan
The Manhattan district attorney’s office has returned 192 looted antiquities with a value of nearly $3.4 million to Pakistan. District Attorney Alvin L. Bragg, Jr. announced the repatriation in a press release on Thursday.
US museums return trove of looted treasures to Nigeria The return is the culmination of a years-long investigation into the sale of artifacts looted from countries all over the world.
According to the release, 187 of the items are linked to the Indian American antiquities dealer Subhash Kapoor, who stands accused of running a multi-million-dollar trafficking network via his Manhattan gallery, Art of the Past.
The district attorney’s office returned the antiquities during a repatriation ceremony on Thursday at the Pakistan Consulate in New York, according to the release.
“Mehrgarh dolls,” some of the earliest examples of figurines created by humans, were among the artefacts returned to Pakistan.
“These remarkable works of art were ruthlessly removed from their rightful home and trafficked without regard for their immense cultural and spiritual value,” said Ivan J. Arvelo, New York special agent in charge at Homeland Security Investigations (HSI).
Earlier this month, Kapoor was sentenced by an Indian court to 10 years in prison for smuggling offences. He has also been indicted alongside seven co-defendants in the US, where investigators say he helped traffic thousands of treasures stolen from temples, ruins and archaeological sites across Asia.
The Manhattan district attorney’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit has seized more than 2,500 artefacts, worth an estimated $143 million, as part of its investigations into Kapoor.
Speaking to CNN earlier this month, the disgraced dealer’s lawyer said he intends to challenge attempts to extradite his client to the US. According to Consul General Ayesha Ali, Thursday’s repatriation ceremony follows an earlier return of 45 stolen artefacts, linked to another convicted smuggler, to Pakistan.
Dozens of artefacts seized from the Metropolitan Museum of Art “We began this journey with the DA’s Office and (the Department of Homeland Security) in November 2020, 45 pieces of stolen Gandhara artefacts were returned and today we are very fortunate that another batch of 192 antiquities valued at $3.4 million is being returned,” Ali said in the release.
The objects returned on Thursday include “Mehrgarh dolls,” which are some of the oldest known human-crafted figurines in the world. The ancient statues were looted from a Neolithic archaeological site in Pakistan, according to the release.
The items of unique historical heritage, including the human-sized bronze statue of the Roman Emperor Lucius Verus and the columnar sarcophagus fragments from the ancient city of Perge in Antalya, have been returned to Türkiye from the United States.
Six artefacts, including nine pieces, which were taken from two different auction houses and a collector in the U.S., were taken under protection in the Antalya Museum.
The artefacts, which were returned to the county on Oct. 22, were introduced yesterday at a ceremony attended by the Culture and Tourism Minister Mehmet Nuri Ersoy.
The historical artefacts, which were illegally taken abroad from Anatolia, were returned to Türkiye as a result of the joint efforts of the Culture and Tourism Ministry, the Antalya and Burdur Museum Directorates, the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office and the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
Based on the work of Türkiye’s first female archaeologist, the late Professor Jale İnan, and the information provided by journalist and writer Özgen Acar, the ministry prepared a file for the return of the historical artefacts.
Examinations have been made in the archival and international publications and interviews were also made with the witnesses. Professor Ramazan Özgan and Professor Ertekin Doksanaltı made scientific reports.
The results of the examinations and the reports were sent to the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office and the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
Finally, the human-sized bronze statue of the Roman Emperor Lucius Verus, which was taken out of the country from the ancient city of Bubon in the southern province of Burdur, and the four-piece Roman-era sarcophagus originating from the ancient city of Perge in Antalya were returned.
The statue of Verus is one of the rare human-sized bronze statues that have survived to the present day.
The fact that many of the ancient bronze cast statues were melted and used for various purposes gives the statue of the emperor special importance.
Again, during the examinations, an early Bronze-Age marble Kusura-type idol, which was one of the schematized female figures common in Western Anatolia in the third B.C. and mentioned in both Greek and Roman mythology, and a silver figurine of Apollo from the northern province of Balıkesir that have been smuggled out of the country was found at an auction house in the U.S.
Also, a sitting Attis statuette and a terracotta earth plate from the ancient city of Pisidia Antiokheia of Isparta were found in another auction house.
The sale of four works that were determined to be smuggled from Anatolia was stopped. In total, six artefacts of nine pieces were returned to their homeland.
