Women buried with thick, twisted bronze neck rings and buckets on their feet found in Ukraine
Archaeologists discovered the remains of men buried with weapons such as axes, spearheads, and swords, and women buried with thick twisted bronze neck rings in an 11th-century cemetery near the village of Ostriv, south of Kiev, Ukraine.
Researchers Vsevolod Ivakin and Vyacheslav Baranov presented their study of the remains at the Archaeological Institute of America, which was held Jan. 4-7 in Chicago, according to Live Science.
In 2017, the Ukrainian Institute of Archaeology conducted an expedition that discovered the Ostriv graveyard. Between 2017 and 2022, excavations uncovered 107 inhumation burials from the late 10th and 11th centuries.
The graves’ uniqueness was quickly apparent. Unlike the unusual funerary practices of the Kyivan Rus during this period, the graves were facing south and west rather than north.
The deceased were laid in supine position (on their backs), with outstretched limbs. In most of the graves, there were remnants of wooden coffins. The remains of funerary food offerings (chicken bones and eggshells) were discovered in the graves and in wooden buckets at the feet of some of the deceased.
Some people were buried with extremely valuable items, including slate spindle whorls, jewelry such as bronze neck rings and bracelets, pennanular brooches, cast bronze belt rings, cowrie shell bead necklaces, and weapons such as battle axes, knives, and spearheads.
The skeleton of a woman was buried with elaborate neck rings as well as rings around her arms.
Though the comparison was not exact, the orientation and funerary furnishings bore a strong resemblance to the practices of tribes in the Western Baltic.
Most remarkably, none of the Ostriv graves were cremation burials; the Western Baltic peoples generally burned their dead. Furthermore, Baltic funeral customs do not generally involve buckets.
Archaeologists hypothesize that these key differences may be attributed to restrictions placed on traditional funerary practices by the Christian dukes of Kyiv, primarily Volodymyr the Great (r. 980-1015) and Yaroslav the Wise (r. 1019-1054), and by the process of Christianization of the Baltic settlers of the region during the 11th century.
A stone altar found in the cemetery could have been used for Christian or pagan rituals, or a mixture of the two.
Research continued at the site until 2022 but the excavation has been paused due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Archaeologists discover complete armored 14th-century gauntlet in Switzerland
Excavations in Kyburg in the canton of Zürich, northeastern Switzerland have discovered a 14th-century fully preserved gauntlet of armor in exceptional condition.
Only five 14th-century gauntlets have been discovered in Switzerland thus far, according to the Zurich cantonal infrastructure department on Tuesday.
However, their state of preservation is nowhere near that of the glove discovered in Kyburg. All the iron parts of this one have been found, and some of the fingers are even completely free of corrosion and look as good as new.
The metal parts of the glove were originally riveted to a leather glove. The 25 pieces were also firmly attached to each other, giving the glove great flexibility.
The entire gauntlet measures more than 14 inches long. Individual iron plates overlap like scales and are connected by side rivets. Originally, they would have been riveted to a leather or fabric material before being sewn onto a leather or textile glove. The small plates and flexible underlayers allowed the wearer to comfortably grip a sword and make a fist.
The castle is first mentioned in 1027 under the name of Chuigeburg (“cows-fort”), which name points to an original use as a refuge castle for livestock.
The first fortification at this site was likely built in the second half of the 10th century by the counts of Winterthur.
The early castle was destroyed in 1028 or 1030 by Emperor Conrad II. It was rebuilt and soon became the center of the county of Kyburg which was formed in 1053 as a possession of the counts of Dillingen.
The right glove is completely preserved. At least individual parts of the left one were recovered.
Cantonal archaeologists excavated a site southeast of the castle in the winter of 2021/22 in a rescue operation before constructing a home with a basement.
Archaeologists discovered a medieval weaving cellar that had burned down in the 14th century. Forging may also have taken place in its immediate vicinity; in addition to a casting mold, the archaeologists also discovered over 50 well-preserved metal objects such as hammers, keys, and projectile points – as well as the glove.
Archaeologists also found a completely preserved 14th-century gauntlet, in addition to fragments of its counterpart worn on the other hand.
It is not yet known who the glove belonged to, or why this type of object is so rarely found. Scientific work must now establish whether armour gloves were so rare at the time or whether they were melted down.
A copy of this armour glove will be on display at Kyburg Castle from the end of March as part of its permanent exhibition, complemented by a reconstruction of the rest of the armour. The original will be on display for three weeks in September.
The remnants of a Bronze Age tomb once thought to have been destroyed and lost to history have been discovered in County Kerry on the Atlantic coast of Ireland.
The tomb, known locally as Altóir na Gréine – the sun altar – stood for approximately 4,000 years on a hill outside the village of Ballyferriter on the Dingle peninsula before vanishing in the mid-19th century.
1838 sketch drawing of wedge tomb by Lady Chatterton.
Georgiana Chatterton, an English aristocrat and traveller, had visited the site and sketched the monument in 1838, but 14 years later an antiquarian named Richard Hitchcock reported that it had been broken up and carried away, presumably for building purposes.
The tomb raiders, it turns out, were not so thorough.
Billy Mag Fhloinn, a folklorist who is part of an archaeological mapping project, recently visited and filmed the site. When converting the video into a 3D scan he noticed that a stone in the undergrowth resembled one from Lady Chatterton’s Victorian-era sketch.
He sent the material to the National Monuments Service in Dublin, which dispatched archaeologist Caimin O’Brien, who confirmed it belonged to a so-called wedge tomb dating from the early bronze age between 2500BC and 2000 BC.
There is a capstone and several large upright stones called orthostats, comprising about a quarter of the original tomb, Mag Fhloinn said on Thursday. “People had assumed it was all destroyed.”
The tomb will now be added to the database of national monuments.
Ireland has several hundred wedge tombs, used by bronze age peoples to inter bodies and for ceremonies.
“Most point west or south-west towards the setting sun, so they may be tied into their broader cosmological understanding of the world,” said Mag Fhloinn.
It remains unclear who broke up the tomb, or why. “In the 19th century, there was quite a taboo about the destruction of these sites – it was said it would bring bad luck or disaster,” said Mag Fhloinn.
He is part of a tomb-mapping project run by Sacred Heart University, a US institution with a campus in Dingle.
“The significance of the rediscovery of the wedge tomb is to bring it back into the archaeological record so that the archaeological community can study it,” O’Brien told RTÉ, which first reported the discovery.
“For the first time in over 180 years, archaeologists know where the tomb is situated and it will enhance our understanding of wedge tomb distribution.”
Tony Bergin, president of the Kerry Archaeological and Historical Society, said it was an exciting discovery.
“There is a theory that this specific type of tomb links into a people who carried out copper mining,” he said. “There is also a comparison to similar-type tombs found in Brittany in France.”
A 2,700-Year-Old Temple Discovered on the Greek Island of Evia
An aerial view of the horseshoe-shaped altar located inside the temple.
Archaeologists in Greece have discovered a 2,700-year-old temple that houses a horseshoe-shaped altar overflowing with offerings.
Constructed of bricks, the temple is 100 feet (30 meters) long and is located next to the Temple of Amarysia Artemis, a sanctuary dedicated to the Greek goddess Artemis, which researchers found in 2017 on the island of Evia, according to a translated statement from Greece’s Ministry of Culture.
During excavations in 2023, archaeologists found the second temple.
“One of the peculiarities of this temple is the significant number of structures found inside it,” the researchers wrote on Jan. 9 in a translated Facebook post detailing their findings.
Those structures included several hearths located in the temple’s nave, including the ash-caked altar stacked with offerings such as pottery; vases; Corinthian alabaster, or the carved mineral gypsum; gold and silver jewelry studded with coral and amber; amulets; and bronze and iron fittings. The altar also contained several pieces of charred bone.
Archaeologists unearthed several bronze figurines shaped like bulls and a ram as well as a bull’s head made of clay.
Some of the pottery pieces predate the newfound temple and were fired during the late eighth century B.C., leading researchers to suspect that the altar may have once resided outside the temple and was later moved indoors.
In the sixth century B.C., brick partitions were placed at the sanctuary’s heart for added support, leading researchers to think that the temple was “partially destroyed” by a fire, according to the statement.
Under the temple, archaeologists found several dry stone walls from a different building that once stood at the site, along with several bronze figurines shaped like bulls and rams.
They also unearthed remnants of buildings from the eighth and ninth centuries B.C. next to the first temple, as well as a fortification system dating to the more recent early Copper Age, or roughly 4000 to 3500 B.C.
Laser mapping reveals the oldest Amazonian cities, built 2500 years ago
A lidar map of the city of Kunguints in the Ecuadorian Amazon reveals ancient streets lined with houses.
Archaeologists once believed the ancient Amazon rainforest was an inhospitable place, sparsely populated by bands of hunter-gatherers. But the remains of enormous earthworks, pyramids, and roads from Bolivia to Brazil discovered over the past two decades have proved conclusively that the Amazon was home to large, complex societies long before European colonizers arrived. Now, there’s evidence that another human society—the oldest yet—left its mark on the region: A dense network of interconnected cities, now hidden beneath the forest in Ecuador’s Upano Valley, has been revealed by the laser mapping technology called lidar.
The settlements, described today in Science, are at least 2500 years old, more than 1000 years older than any other known complex Amazonian society.
Lidar, which allows researchers to see through forest cover and reconstruct the ancient sites below, “is revolutionizing our understanding of the Amazon in pre-Columbian times,” says Carla Jaimes Betancourt, an archaeologist at the University of Bonn who wasn’t involved in the new work.
Finding such an ancient urban network in the Upano Valley highlights the long-unrecognized diversity of ancient Amazonian cultures, which archaeologists are just beginning to be able to reconstruct.
Stéphen Rostain, an archaeologist at CNRS, France’s national research agency, began excavating in the Upano Valley nearly 30 years ago. His team focused on two large settlements, called Sangay and Kilamope, and found mounds organized around central plazas, pottery decorated with paint and incised lines, and large jugs holding the remains of the traditional maize beer chicha.
Radiocarbon dates showed the Upano sites were occupied from around 500 B.C.E. to between 300 C.E. and 600 C.E. “I knew that we had a lot of mounds, a lot of structures,” Rostain says. “But I didn’t have a complete overview of the region.”
That changed when Ecuador’s National Institute for Cultural Heritage funded a lidar survey of the valley in 2015. Specially equipped planes beamed laser pulses into the forest and measured their return path, revealing topographic features otherwise invisible under the trees.
The lidar data allowed Rostain and his collaborators to see the connections between settlements and also uncovered many more. “Each day it was Christmas, with a new gift,” Rostain says. The team identified five large settlements and 10 smaller ones across 300 square kilometers in the Upano Valley, each densely packed with residential and ceremonial structures.
The cities are interspersed with rectangular agricultural fields and surrounded by hillside terraces where people planted crops, including the corn, manioc, and sweet potato found in past excavations. Wide, straight roads connected the cities to one another, and streets ran between houses and neighborhoods within each settlement. “We’re talking about urbanism,” says co-author Fernando Mejía, an archaeologist at the Pontifical Catholic University of Ecuador.
A large complex of earthen platforms in Nijiamanch, one of the urban settlements in the Upano Valley.
Although the researchers don’t yet know how many people lived in the Upano Valley, the settlements were large: The core area of Kilamope, for example, covers an area comparable in size to the pyramid-studded Giza Plateau in Egypt or the main avenue of Teotihuacan in Mexico.
The extent of Upano’s landscape modification rivals the “garden cities” of the Classic Maya, the authors say. And what’s been discovered so far “is just the tip of the iceberg” of what could be found in the Ecuadorian Amazon, Mejía says.
The network of roads connecting the Upano sites suggests they all existed at the same time. They are a millennium older than other complex Amazonian societies, including Llanos de Mojos, a recently discovered ancient urban system in Bolivia.
The Upano Valley cities were denser and more interconnected than sites in Llanos de Mojos, Rostain says. “We say ‘Amazonia,’ but we should say ‘Amazonias,’” to capture the region’s ancient cultural diversity, he says.
The details of each culture, however, are still coming into view. People in both the Upano Valley and Llanos de Mojos were farmers who built roads, canals, and large civic or ceremonial buildings. But, “We’re just beginning to understand how these cities were functioning,” including how many people lived in them, who they traded with, and how they were governed, says Jaimes Betancourt, who studies Llanos de Mojos.
So it’s too soon to compare the Upano cities with societies such as the Classic Maya and Teotihuacan, which were “much more complex and more extensive,” says Thomas Garrison, an archaeologist and geographer at the University of Texas at Austin who specializes in lidar and wasn’t involved in the work. Still, he says, “It’s amazing that we can still make these kinds of discoveries on our planet and find new complex cultures in the 21st century.”
Mystery Of Pyramids Submerged On the Cuban Coast More Than 50,000 Years Ago
In 2001, a Cuban-Canadian research team discovered what could be the ruins of an ancient city that sank more than 50,000 years ago between Yucatan and the western coast of Cuba. The team worked on “Project Exploramar,” which discovered the well-preserved USS Maine, three miles off the Cuban coast at 1150 m depth in 2000.
On December 7, 2001, BBC News announced the discovery of an ancient sunken city with unusual features off the coast of the Guanahacabibes peninsula in the Pinar del Río province of Cuba. It was found using an underwater robot equipped with cameras, lights, and sonars at more than 2,000 feet (650 meters) below the sea’s surface covering an area of 2 square kilometers (200 hectares).
The discovery was reported by Canadian Marine Engineer Paulina Zelitsky along with her husband Paul Weinzweig. She stumbled upon the fantastic geometric patterns which she found 2000 feet underwater while studying the grainy, black and white sonar images on her computer screen, searching for a scientific explanation.
Map showing the location of the supposed ancient city discovered by Paul Weinzweig and Paulina Zelitsky.
Paulina Zelitsky was born in Poland and studied engineering in the former Soviet Union. During the Cold War, she worked on a submarine base in Cuba but defected to Canada, where she married Paul Weinzweig, and together, they set up a company called Advanced Digital Communications (ADC).
The expedition that resulted in the discovery of megalithic structures off the coast of Cuba was a joint venture between ADC, the National Geographic Society, and the Centre for Marine Archaeology and Anthropology at the Cuban Academy of Sciences in Cuba. The Cuban government employed Zelitsky & her team to assist in the location of a sunken treasure that is believed to lie off the coast in a variety of vessels.
The structures, located at a depth of approximately 650 meters, seemed to have an urban pattern and generated significant headlines such as “The Discovery of Atlantis in Cuba.” ADA mapped the ocean floor surrounding Cuba for three years under contract with the Cuban government. Using their 265-foot ship, Ulises, they found about 20 shipwrecks, including the USS Maine, and vast oil fields in deep waters around the island.
The shapes appear to be arranged in patterns, the scientists say. The images, made with sophisticated sonar, show an area of about 100 by 200 meters.
“The structures we found on the side scan sonar simply are not explicable from a geological point of view. There is too much organization. too much symmetry, too much repetition of form,” Weinzweig said.
Discovery Made
According to Zelitsky, the research vessel Ulises sailed in the Yucatan Channel just off the west coast of Cuba that day, hired by the Castro government to look for undersea oil and gas, as well as old treasure ships if they could be found.
As Zelitsky and Weinzweig were watching the screen, the empty plain of the sea bed suddenly gave way to images of massive geometric shapes, apparently cut from stone. As more shapes came into view, some appeared to be arranged in patterns over a large area of about 20 square kilometers.
Some stones seemed to be cut into blocks, and some blocks looked perfectly aligned. They appeared to form corridors and the outlines of rooms, the two scientists said. There were round stones and pyramid-shaped ones, too.
“The sea bottom in that area is an undulating sand plain. What they were seeing should not have been there. We were shocked, and frankly, we were a little frightened. It was as though we should not be seeing what we were seeing. Our first thought was maybe we found some kind of secret military installation,” said Zelitsky.
“Nothing is known for certain now,” Weinzweig noted, “but the oral tradition in early Mexico speaks of an advanced civilization of tall white people who came from the East, and of an island that sank in a great natural disaster.” In the ancient language of some early Central American Indians, he said, “The word Atlantic means ‘our good father,’ or, ‘the place where our good father rests.’”
Paulina Zelitsky and her husband Paul Weinzweig.
What if the intriguing shapes found by the sonar are just carved over the centuries by whimsical nature? Zelitsky and Weinzweig did not think so. Besides, she added that they believed it to be the remnants of a city that had been built by locals upon a land bridge connecting Cuba to the mainland at some point, although such a bridge is not known to have ever existed.
“There is no granite in Cuba or the Yucatan. That area features limestone,” Zelitsky said. Granite is found in Central Mexico and was used by ancient people such as the Maya and an older civilization, the Olmec, in their construction of cities and buildings.
This site, perhaps built by a culture that far pre-dates the famous Maya of the Yucatan Peninsula, might have been the victim of a vast, mysterious cataclysm that somehow dropped 2,000 feet beneath the surface of the sea. The Maya developed a magnificent civilization on the Yucatan Peninsula beginning about A.D. 250 and peaking about A.D. 900. Spain finally completed its conquest of the Maya in about 1500.
The Maya produced advanced architecture, paintings, pottery, and sculpture, and their grasp of mathematics and astronomy was remarkable for that time. They might have developed the first calendar and were among the first to make paper and books of tree bark. They cut large stone blocks and made buildings, courtyards, and pyramids, many for the worship of numerous gods.
But Zelitsky thought the Mega site pre-dates even the ancient Maya by a lot.
Then other voices arose that expressed their opinion about the discovery, such as Archaeologist Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews of Bad Archeology. According to him, during the ice age, the city would never have been above sea level unless the place it was built on had sunk first.
A computer-generated mock-up of the supposed city
“However, if we take Plato at his word – as we must if we assume Atlantis to have been a historical place – the violence of its sinking makes it improbable that an entire city could have survived plunging more than 600 m into an abyss. Rapid sinking would devastate structures; the persistence of mud just below the surface suggests that the sinking was not to a depth of 600-740 m. Unless we are prepared to jettison Plato’s text – the sole source for the story of Atlantis – we cannot identify the features found by Paulina Zelitsky with Atlantis,” he explained.
A similar discovery was made off the coast of Yonaguni Island in Japan in 1986. The find was known as the “Yonaguni Monument,” an artificial rock formation submerged in prehistory. There, strange megaliths up to 5 stories high were found.
Are the Cuba underwater ruins really the sunken underwater city? Could it be another piece of evidence of the lost mystical Atlantis? Unfortunately, there is simply not enough imagery data, and the ruins might be anything. Interestingly, there seems to have been no real follow-up expedition to the site, which some have seen as rather suspicious and conspiratorial.
In a Californian gold mine, 40 million-year-old tools were found
At Table Mountain and other locations in the gold mining region around the middle of the nineteenth century, miners discovered hundreds of stone artifacts and human bones buried deep inside their tunnels.
Experts claim that these bones and artifacts were found embedded in layers from the Eocene epoch (38-55 million years).
The Auriferous Gravels of the Sierra Nevada of California, written by Dr. J. D. Whitney, the leading government geologist in California, was published in 1880 by Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of Comparative Zoology.
However, because the information went against accepted Darwinist theories on human origins, it was excluded from scholarly discussions. In 1849, gold was found in the gravels of old riverbeds on the slopes of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, drawing large numbers of rowdy adventurers to settlements including Brandy City, Last Chance, Lost Camp, You Bet, and Poker Flat.
Initially, solitary miners searched for flakes and nuggets among the gravels that had made their way into the present-day streambeds. Auriferous (gold-bearing) gravels were quickly washed from hillsides by high-pressure water jets while other gold-mining businesses bored holes into mountainside deposits and followed the gravel deposits wherever they led.
The miners found hundreds of stone items as well as human fossils. The scientific community received the most crucial information from Dr. J. D. Whitney.
Artifacts from hydraulic mining and surface deposits were of questionable age, while deep mine shaft and tunnel artifacts could be more accurately dated. According to J. D. Whitney, the geological evidence revealed that the auriferous gravels were at least Pliocene in age.
However, according to modern geologists, some of the gravel layers are Eocene in origin. In Tuolumne County’s Table Mountain, several holes were dug, traveling through thick strata of latite, a basaltic volcanic substance, before arriving to the gravels containing gold.
In other instances, the tunnels stretched hundreds of feet horizontally beneath the latite top. The age of findings from the gravels directly above the bedrock might be between 33.2 and 55 million years old, and those from other gravels could be between 9 and 55 million years old.
According to William B. Holmes, a physical anthropologist at the Smithsonian Institution, “If Professor Whitney had fully appreciated the story of human evolution as it is understood today, he would have hesitated to announce the conclusions formulated, notwithstanding the imposing array of testimony with which he was confronted.” Or, to put it another way, the theory had to be rejected if the evidence did not support it, which is exactly what happened.
The Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, still has some of the items Whitney mentioned on exhibit.
Darwinism and other isms had an effect on how archaeological evidence was handled in Hueyatlaco, Mexico. Archaeologists working under the direction of Cynthia Irwin-Williams found stone tools there in the 1970s that were associated to bones from butchered animals.
A group of geologists, including Virginia Steen-McIntyre, dated the location.
The age of the site was established using four different techniques: stratigraphic analysis, zircon fission track dating on volcanic layers above the artifact layers, tephra hydration dating of volcanic crystals found in volcanic layers above the artifact layers, and uranium-series dates on butchered animal bones.
The reason the archaeologists were hesitant to put an age on the site was because they thought that (1) no humans were around 250,000 years ago anyplace on the earth, and (2) no humans visited North America until at most 15,000 or 20,000 years ago.
At Table Mountain and other locations in the gold mining region around the middle of the nineteenth century, miners discovered hundreds of stone artifacts and human bones buried deep inside their tunnels.
Experts claim that these bones and artifacts were found embedded in layers from the Eocene epoch (38-55 million years). The leading government geologist in California, Dr. J. D. Whitney, disclosed this information.
Between 23 and 34 million years old, the well preserved praying mantis was found in amber
In a remarkable natural process, insects and even mammals can be preserved in time for all eternity by becoming encased in tree sap that eventually turns into amber.
In the hit movie Jurassic Park, a scientific character was able to draw dinosaur blood from mosquitoes imprisoned in amber, drawing attention to and popularizing this true phenomena.
A little praying mantis that was found in a piece of amber in 2016 was sold by Heritage Auctions for $6,000 in pristine condition.
Somewhere in the Dominican Republic, the amazing object was found. According to Heritage Auctions, this object is thought to be from the Oligocene epoch, making it somewhere between 23 million and 33.9 million years old. The auction description from a related sale reads as follows:
“The Praying Mantis, one of the rarest and most prized inclusions of all, is present in this specimen. Due to their terrified fight to escape the relentless ooze, these aggressive insects are typically deformed or without limbs when discovered.
The color patterns on this specimen’s short legs, tiny arm spikes, delicate antennae, and enormous, complex eyes are all perfectly maintained, though.
The bug, which is around 12 inches long and is enclosed in a gorgeous polished golden nugget that measures 134 by 114 by 1 inch, is a remarkable example of ancient life. The item is particularly impressive since it also includes three sizable, well-preserved click beetles, making it a museum-quality specimen.
Similar methods can be used in Amber to preserve animals. Researchers discovered a newborn snake’s preserved bones last year that they estimated to be 99 million years old.
One of the scientists who examined the snake specimen is Michael Caldwell, a professor in the biological sciences division at the University of Alberta in Canada. The specimen was given the name Xiaophis myanmarensis by Caldwell and his team.
“Despite being a young snake, it has highly distinctive characteristics on the top of the vertebrae that have never been observed in any fossil snakes of its species.
According to Caldwell, Xiaophis belongs to a group of snakes that appear to be extremely old near the base of the snake family tree.
“Amber gathers whatever it comes in contact with, acting almost like super glue, and keeps it for a hundred million years. It is obvious the snake was living in a forest because, when it captured the young snake, it also caught the forest floor with the bugs, plants, and insect dung, the man stated.
