Researchers stunned by ‘perfect’ £300million shipwreck treasure
The fortune of the Nuestra Senora de las Mercedes, which sunk in a fight near Portugal’s Cape St Marie in 1804, was raised in an American court after a US salvage company took 594,000 gold and silver coins worth £308 million from the site in 2007.
The curator of Spain’s National Museum of Underwater Archeology, Mr. Ivan Negueruela, said: “The finds are of inestimable scientific and historic value.”
It is believed that the ship was shot down before Spain joined the Napoleonic Wars against Britain. When the Amiens Peace of 1802 broke down, Britain declared war on France in an uneasy peace with Spain.
In 2007 some of the cargo was retrieved by the Odyssey Marine Exploration company, which had it flown to Tampa, Florida. A court in 2012, however, forced the treasure hunters to return the haul to Spain.
The items found had been listed in the ship’s manifest, including cutlery inscribed with a passenger’s name. An archaeological report said: “Mention should be made of the perfection with which the documentary sources coincide with archaeological evidence in this case.”
Elisa de Cabo, the Spanish Culture Ministry’s deputy director of national heritage said in 2012 the find was “invaluable”.
She added: “How would you put a price on the Mona Lisa?”
The treasure was worth £300million
The vessel was downed in battle
A similar find could be made this year as researchers from both Spain and Mexico hope to unearth a historic Spanish galleon that fell to the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico in October 1631.
The ship is called the Nuestra Senora del Juncal (Our Lady of Juncal) and sank to the depths while carrying gold, silver, and jewels that could be worth billions today. The vessel and its sailors were hit by vicious storms as they made their way to Spain, and even before the challenging weather, the crew was stripped of its commander due to illness.
With the ship slowly becoming flooded with water, and repair desperately needed, the Nuestra Senora del Juncal plugged away through two weeks of relentless storms.
Coins rescued from the Frigate Mercedes
Dr. Iván Negueruela, the director of Spain’s National Museum of Underwater Archaeology, has claimed the chances of locating and finding the ship are looking good.
He said: “Because the cargo was so valuable – it was carrying lots of ingots – the authorities had a detailed inventory.
“The survivors were also questioned in-depth and their statements help us to reconstruct what happened with quite a high degree of accuracy, so we have a fairly good idea of where the ship sank.”
30,000-year-old stone tools discovered in Mexican Cave suggest humans reached America much earlier than thought
Stone tools unearthed in a cave in Mexico indicate that humans could have lived in the area as early as about 33,000 years ago, researchers report online July 22 in Nature. That’s more than 10,000 years before humans are generally thought to have settled North America.
This controversial discovery enters a new piece of evidence into the fierce debate about when and how the Americas were first populated. The initial peopling of the Americas is a contested and evolving topic, with the exact timing of the first arrivals still unknown.
Historically, Mexico’s understudied and controversial archaeological record has remained on the periphery of First Americans’ research.
Evidence of human presence at Chiquihuite Cave extends this antiquity and attests to the cultural variability of older-than-Clovis sites and the earliest humans on the continent.
“For decades people have passionately debated when the first humans entered the Americas,” said Professor Eske Willerslev, a researcher at St John’s College at the University of Cambridge and director of the Lundbeck Foundation GeoGenetics Centre at the University of Copenhagen.
“Chiquihuite Cave will create a lot more debate as it is the first site that dates the arrival of people to the continent to around 30,000 years ago — 15,000 years earlier than previously thought.”
“These early visitors didn’t occupy the cave continuously, we think people spent part of the year there using it as a winter or summer shelter, or as a base to hunt during migration.”
“We don’t know who they were, where they came from, or where they went. They are a complete enigma,” added Dr. Ciprian Ardelean, an archaeologist at the University of Zacatecas.
“We falsely assume that the indigenous populations in the Americas today are direct descendants from the earliest Americans, but now we do not think that is the case.”
“By the time the famous Clovis population entered America, the very early Americans had disappeared thousands of years before. There could have been many failed colonization that was lost in time and did not leave genetic traces in the population today.”
Professor Willerslev, Dr. Ardelean, and their colleagues excavated a total of 1,930 stone tools such as knives, scrapers, and arrowheads in Chiquihuite Cave.
Archaeologists have unearthed what appears to be stone tools, including this one, in a cave in central Mexico that date to as early as about 33,000 years ago.
“The collection of artifacts reveals advanced flaking skills applied to challenge raw material, represented by green and blackish varieties of recrystallized limestone,” the scientists said.
“The flaked tools reflect a previously unknown and mostly unchanged technological tradition.”
Examples of stone artifacts from Chiquihuite Cave: (a) core, (b-e) flakes; inlay in b emphasizes an isolated platform, (f-j) blades, (k-o) points
The authors also attempted to identify ancient human DNA in all archaeological layers of the cave.
However, no evidence of human DNA within the samples was found. This adds weight to the theory that the early people didn’t stay for long in the cave.
“We identified DNA from a wide range of animals including black bears, rodents, bats, voles, and even kangaroo rats,” said Dr. Mikkel Winther Pedersen, a geneticist at the University of Copenhagen.
“We think these early people would probably have come back for a few months a year to exploit reoccurring natural resources available to them and then move on. Probably when herds of large mammals would have been in the area and who had little experience with humans so they would have been easy prey.”
“The location of Chiquihuite Cave definitely rewrites what has conventionally been taught in history and archaeology and shows that we need to rethink where we look for sites of the earliest people in the Americas.”
Posh grave of Iron Age ‘warrior’ buried 2,000 years ago in Roman Britain uncovered
UCL archaeologists have uncovered a richly furnished grave belonging to an Iron Age ‘ warrior ‘ found 2,000 years ago in West Sussex.
Iron Age warrior grave excavated in West Sussex
In the grave were placed iron weapons, including a sword in a highly decorated scabbard and a spear. The burial was discovered during an excavation commissioned by Linden Homes, who are developing a site on the outskirts of Walberton, near Chichester, to create 175 new homes.
The team that made the discovery were from Archaeology South-East (ASE), the commercial branch of UCL’s Institute of Archaeology.
ASE archaeologist Jim Stevenson, who is managing the post-excavation investigations into the burial, said: “There has been much discussion generally as to who the people buried in the ‘warrior’ tradition may have been in life.
Were they really warriors, or just buried with the trappings of one?
Sword midway through conservation and its X-rays
“Although the soil conditions destroyed the skeleton, the items discovered within the grave suggest that the occupant had been an important individual.”
The grave is dated to the late Iron Age/ early Roman period (1st century BC – AD 50). It is incredibly rare, as only a handful are known to exist in the South of England.
X-rays and initial conservation of the sword and scabbard reveal beautiful copper-alloy decoration at the scabbard mouth, which would have been highly visible when the sword was worn in life.
Dotted lines on the X-ray may be the remains of a studded garment worn by the occupant when buried. This is particularly exciting for archaeologists as evidence of clothing rarely survives.
Ceramic jar found in the grave
The grave also held the remains of a wooden container, preserved as a dark stain, likely used to lower the individual into the grave.
Four ceramic vessels were placed outside of this container, but still within the grave. The vessels are jars made from local clays and would usually have been used for food preparation, cooking and storage.
It is likely that they were placed in the grave as containers for funerary offerings, perhaps intended to provide sustenance for the deceased in the afterlife.
Archaeologists are continuing to investigate this new discovery. By looking at other burials with weapons from the same time, they hope to find out more about the identity and social status of this individual, and the local area and landscape around that time.
Site of 18th-Century Steam Engine Uncovered in Slovakia
In recent day’s Nová Baňa, approximately 40 volunteers have worked under the expert supervision of archeologists to unleash a special Potter atmospheric steam engine, the first one of its kind on the continent of Europe.
In the Althandel shaft, the atmospheric steam engine was built and was used in the 18th century. Enthusiasts from the mining group Novobanský had decided a while ago to reveal this treasure to the public, hidden in the garden of one house.
Matej Styk, an expert assistant from the Department of Archaeology of the Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra, said that two-week research followed last year’s findings of the archaeologists. Its aim was to research the discovered construction and the discovered features, proving mining activity in the 18th century.
“In two weeks, we succeeded in uncovering the entire measurement of the Potter engine room, about eight and 14 meters,” he said, as quoted by the TASR newswire. He added that the masonry is compact, undamaged, located about 30 to 40 centimeters under the ground surface.
Bigger than anticipated
Thanks to research, they can prove that activities were ongoing not only in the 18th but also in the 19th century. In the interior of the engine room, the bases of another construction were found, about which there was no knowledge until now.
“There were many tiles from a stove inside,” Styk noted for TASR. “We think that the building was wooden. It has a stone foundation wall and inside another production activity was ongoing.”
Styk noted that the measures of the engine room itself were surprising. The building was bigger than they anticipated.
They succeeded in finding several interesting objects during the research, a mining button from probably the 19th century, a pipe or various iron nails, and components.
Mining failed
The steam engine served to drainage of water from mine. The head of the Slovak mining archive in Banská Štiavnica, Peter Konečný, said that it was built by Isaac Potter in the Althandel shaft in the years 1721-1722.
“Isaac Potter operated this machine alongside his colleagues within the mining industry, which received the right to mine local ores,” Konečný noted, as quoted by TASR.
However, mining was not successful, over in a few years and the machine put out of the operation, Konečný said. Potter remained for several years, but the state, which paid the construction, offered the opportunity to shift it to another private miner, to Hodruša.
“There we lost its traces because the supposed shift to Banská Štiavnica did not happen,” said Konečný for TASR, adding that this assumption is not proven.
The remains of the unique machine should be accessible to the public in the future. The association would like to build an open-air folk museum at the site. They succeeded in persuading the municipality in purchasing the house with the garden where the engine room was discovered.
Museum and replica planned
The head of the association, Zoltán Vén, said that the original owners did not have a clue as to the treasure in the ground. The association was behind the finding, which discovered it inaccessible documents.
Vén noted that they have big plans with the compound. They would like to build a replica of the machine and they have some ideas on how to use the house as well. It should be the headquarters of the mining association and a museum exhibition.
Vén said that last year, British Ambassador Andrew Garth, who is leaving Bratislava at the end of July, also visited the place.
“We would like to have contact with him to be able to go to the UK, as they have one museum piece working. We would like to see it,” Vén summed up, as quoted by TASR.
Bronze Age time capsule: 3,000-year-old vitrified food found in jars in England
The life of the prosperous people of Bronze Age Britain could be “extraordinary proof” that remains under the ground of a 1,100-square meter site destroyed by the fire 3,000 years ago. They suggest that archeologists are about to dig in a brick pit near Peterborough.
Archaeologists found food from between 800-1000 BC in a set of pots, textiles and other material at a Cambridgeshire settlement destroyed by fire during the Bronze Age
Must Farm – part of the Flag Fen Basin, and the site where nine pristine log boats were famously unearthed in 2011 – was protected by a ring of wooden posts before a dramatic fire at the end of the Bronze Age caused the dwelling to collapse into the river.
Its submergence preserved its contents, creating what experts are describing as a “time capsule” of “exceptional” decorated tiles made from lime tree bark.
An Early Iron Age logboat found in the palaeochannel
Rare small pots, jars complete with 1,200-year-old meals, and “sophisticated” exotic glass beads are expected to provide a complete picture of prehistoric life during the nine-month excavation, which is part of a four-year, £1.1 million project at the site.
“We think those living in the settlement were forced to leave everything behind when it caught on fire,” says Kasia Gdaniec, Cambridgeshire County Council’s Senior Archaeologist.
“An extraordinarily rich range of goods and objects are present in the river deposits, some of which were found during an evaluation in 2006.
A Late Iron Age baldric ring with La Tène style decoration, probably part of a shoulder belt for carrying a sword, found in the peat which formed in the Must Farm palaeochannel when then the watercourse became entirely choked by sediment at the end of the first millennium BC
“Among the items was a charred pot with vitrified food inside it and a partially charred spoon, suggesting that the site had been abandoned quickly.
“We anticipate that more of the timber structure, a range of organic remains and fishing equipment and the whole gamut of personal, work, and settlement paraphernalia will be found.
“But we are hoping not to find remains of people that may have suffered the impact of the fire, though this possibility cannot be ruled out.
“It’s an exciting excavation. The finds are well preserved due to the waterlogged sediments within this former river channel. The footprints of the settlement’s former residents still stand, although more discoveries are not expected to emerge until late summer.
The mass of preserved timbers was originally discovered during an excavation in 2006
“Usually at a Later Bronze Age period site you get pits, post-holes and maybe one or two really exciting metal finds,” says David Gibson, the Archaeological Manager at the Cambridge Archaeological Unit.
“Convincing people that such places were once thriving settlements takes some imagination. But this time so much more has been preserved.
“It’s a fantastic chance to find out how people in the Late Bronze Age lived their daily lives, including how they dressed and what meals they ate.”
The location of the site, at the edge of the quarry, meant attempts to preserve it in situ after it was discovered in 2006 proved unviable as a long-term historic record.
“The combination of sudden abandonment followed by exceptional preservation means that there is a real possibility of further exciting discoveries,” says Duncan Wilson, of Historic England.
“This could represent a moment of time from the Late Bronze Age comparable to the connection with the past made by the objects found with the Mary Rose.
“This site is internationally important and gives a fascinating insight into the lives of our ancestors.”
A rapier and sword were found at the clay quarry, now run by a building company, in 1969. The new discoveries will be displayed at the Peterborough Museum and other local venues.
Millennia-Old Rock Art in Israel Offers Window Into Lost Culture
The chance discovery of lines carved into the boulders of an ancient tomb in what is now the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights could offer new insight into an enigmatic culture that thrived thousands of years ago.
Archaeologists discovered rock art engraved inside this 4,000-year-old stone monument in northern Israel. Illustrations highlight the herd of horned animal figures etched into the boulder
In a small clearing in the Yehudiya nature reserve, between yellow weeds and shaded by eucalyptus trees, huge dark basalt boulders and slabs form a small roofed chamber that opens to the east. The megalithic structure is one of the thousands of so-called dolmens scattered around northern Israel and the wider region, burial tombs erected some 4,000-4,500 years ago in the Intermediate Bronze Era.
Today, on the plateau captured in 1967 from Syria, with Israeli soldiers securing the frontier just 23 kilometers (14 miles) away, scientists seek to shed light on the region’s distant past. The identity and beliefs of those who built the monuments remain largely unknown. But a recent serendipitous finding of rock art might change that.
The rock art findings — published in a recent article by Sharon and Berger in the journal Asian Archaeology — display the animal drawings in this ancient culture for the first time.
About two years ago, “when one of the rangers here in the park walked her daily walk, she looked inside and saw something carved in the walls,” recalled Uri Berger, an archaeologist with the Israel Antiquities Authority.
The ranger contacted the IAA, and “when we looked inside we saw this is not just lines carved or some stains on the wall, this is rock art,” Berger said. The lines form the shapes of six horned animals of varying sizes, three facing east and three facing west, with two of them — likely a male and female — directly facing each other.
Another horned animal is carved into the interior of one panel, facing the other six. The zoomorphic depictions, hidden in plain sight since the study of the dolmens began 200 years ago, were the first to be discovered in the region and a major development for Berger and his research partner, Gonen Sharon.
Sharon, an archaeology professor at the Tel-Hai college in northern Israel, is responsible for a previous landmark discovery. Just north of the nature reserve, outside the northern Galilee Kibbutz Shamir, Sharon was hiking with his children in 2012 on a field with some 400 dolmens spread across it.
The capstone of a dolmen at Kiryat Shemona features three straight lines carved in an approximation of a human face.
Crawling into the shade of the largest monument, Sharon sat down, looked up at the huge slab roof of the dome, and said he noticed “weird shapes” that didn’t look like natural formations.
“It looked like someone made them,” he recalled.
The markings were found to be a series of man-made carvings resembling tridents.
“It turned out this was the first artwork done in the context of dolmens in the Middle East,” Sharon said. The Shamir carvings, unnoticed by generations of researchers, reinvigorated archaeological study in the area. One of the sites revisited was inside an industrial zone near Kiryat Shmona, a town northwest of Shamir, where three small megalithic structures that survived the zone’s development a few decades ago are surrounded by circles of stones.
On the relatively rounded capstone of the largest dolmen there, two sets of short parallel lines are carved into each side of the rock, with a longer line carved below creating the image of closed eyes and a grimacing mouth facing the sky.
“The grooves don’t seem to be functional,” said Sharon. “To us, they look like a face.”
The stone monuments have “altered the landscape” of northern Israel, said Berger. But their prominence has also made them targets for antiquities theft, which largely stripped remains that could provide clues to their creators.
Small pieces of ceramics, metal spearheads and daggers, bits of jewellery and beads, and some bones are found at the sites from time to time, Sharon said. “But it’s very rare to find” anything, and such finds are very scattered.
“We know very little of the actual culture of the people who built them.”
With the discovery of the art carved into the stones, “we can say something that is much more than what we knew for 200 years,” said Berger.
The rock art findings — published in a recent article by Sharon and Berger in the journal Asian Archaeology — display the animal drawings in this ancient culture for the first time and present the larger pattern of visual presentation in the region.
Berger said the drawings raise new questions about the people who created them.
“Why those animals? Why in these dolmens and not others? What made this one special?”
The slow but steady accumulation of artistic finds brings scholars “closer and closer” to the subjects of their research, “to the civilization you’re looking to know about,” Berger said.
To Sharon, “this is like a letter from the past starting to suggest what was the world of culture and symbolism beyond just building and erecting very large stones.”
Rare warrior tomb filled with bronze age wealth and weapons discovered
The tomb of the Warrior of the Bronze Age, dated back 3500 years, has been discovered by archaeologists in Greece who are packed with more than 1.400 objects, including jewels, weapons, bronze, silver and gold vessels.
This gold ring with a Cretan bull-jumping scene was one of four solid-gold rings found in the tomb. This number is more than found with any other single burial elsewhere in Greece.
The Bronze Age warrior’s tomb dating back to about 1500 BC was discovered in Pylos, Greece, by an international research team led by The University of Cincinnati (UC).
“This previously unopened shaft grave of a wealthy Mycenaean warrior, dating back 3,500 years, is one of the most magnificent displays of prehistoric wealth discovered in mainland Greece in the past 65 years,” said Shari Stocker, a senior research associate in the Department of Classics, McMicken College of Arts and Sciences.
UC’s Sharon Stocker left, and Jack Davis, right, has worked in the Pylos region of Greece for 25 years. They led a team of 45 archaeologists and experts in various specialties as well as students during this summer’s excavations. Stocker stands in the shaft tomb the team uncovered.
UC archaeologist Carl Blegen, along with Konstantinos Kourouniotis, director of the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, initially uncovered the remains of the famed Palace of Nestor in an olive grove in 1939.
Located near Pylos, the palace was a destination in Homer’s “Odyssey”, where the sacrifice was said to be offered on its beaches.
The king who ruled at the Palace of Nestor controlled a vast territory that was divided into more than 20 districts with capital towns and numerous small settlements.
“This latest find is not the grave of the legendary King Nestor, who headed a contingent of Greek forces at Troy in Homer’s ‘Iliad.’ Nor is it the grave of his father, Neleus,” Stocker said.
“This find maybe even more important because the warrior pre-dates the time of Nestor and Neleus by, perhaps, 200 or 300 years.
That means he was likely an important figure at a time when this part of Greece was being indelibly shaped by close contact with Crete, Europe’s first advanced civilization,” Stocker said.
Thus, the tomb may have held a powerful warrior or king, or even a trader or a raider, who died at about 30 to 35 years of age but who helped to lay the foundations of the Mycenaean culture that later flourished in the region.
A remarkable store of riches was deposited in the tomb with the warrior at the time of his death. The mere fact that the vessels in the tomb are of metal is a strong indication of his great wealth.
“It is truly amazing that no ceramic vessels were included among the grave gifts. All the cups, pitchers, and basins we found were of metal: bronze, silver, and gold. He clearly could afford to hold regular pots of ceramic in disdain,” according to Stocker.
The weapons of bronze found within the tomb included a meter-long slashing sword with an ivory handle covered with gold.
Among the objects found within the warrior tomb were four complete solid-gold seal rings to be worn on a human finger, two squashed gold cups and a silver cup with gold trim, and a unique necklace of square box-shaped golden wires, more than 30 inches long with two gold pendants decorated with ivy leaves.
Silver cups, bronze weapons, several pieces of carved ivory, and precious stone beads were also found in the tomb.
Lavau Celtic Prince: 2,500-year-old royal tomb starts to reveal its secrets
The eastern village of Lavau became world-renowned when archeologists found the tomb of the ancient Celtic prince from the 5th century BCE.
As it is now known, the tomb of the Prince of Lavau holds many mysteries that archaeologists have sought to uncover during the last two years. Some of the stunning artifacts recovered next to the deceased have now be sent to a French lab for analysis – and the first results are starting to emerge.
A number of objects, including the prince’s belt, appear to be extremely valuable as they are unique. Other artifacts bear witness to the cultural exchanges which took place at the time between different civilizations.
A lucky discovery
Archaeologists from the National Institute of Preventive Archaeology (INRAP) were asked to search a site on the outskirts of Lavau, in the heart of a small business industrial park, before construction works could be given the go-ahead.
After finding well-preserved Greek and Etruscan artifacts, the French state ordered a more detailed exploration of the area.
The tomb was found near the village of Lavau, France.
The archaeologists ended up discovering beautiful artifacts from the 5th century BCE, starting with a bronze cauldron ornamented with the head of the god Dionysus.
The remains of the prince were found a little later, laid out on his chariot. The skeleton was still wearing the same fine gold jewellery he was buried with.
This was considered to be the most important archaeological discovery made in France in recent decades – comparable to the 1953’s discovery of grave belonging to the so-called ‘Lady of Vix’.
Thie huge bronze cauldron is one of the most important pieces found in the tomb.
Archaeologists have started to document some of the artifacts, using X-ray radiography and tomography as well as 3D photography to gather information about their composition and morphology – and to learn more about their state of conservation.
Elaborate objects in a multicultural world
So far, X-ray radiography shows that the belt worn by the prince is decorated with threads of silver, assembled together to form Celtic motifs. This is a unique object, as none similar has ever been recovered elsewhere before.
Furthermore, an analysis of the metals in the bronze cauldron – one of the most elaborate artifacts recovered from the grave – suggests that the people who created it perfectly mastered smelting and engraving techniques.
More importantly, perhaps, 3D photography and chemical analyses of the objects reveal influences from different cultures in the way they were decorated. For instance, a large jar used to pour wine is made up of Greek-style ceramic and decorated with golden Etruscan motifs and silver Celtic designs.
This beautiful Greek vase found in the cauldron with the prince was used to pour wine.
These findings reveal that cultural and economic interactions were taking place between the Celtic and Mediterranean worlds at the time the Lavau Celtic Prince was alive.
Analyses will go on until 2020, to try and find out more about the prince’s identity and to learn more about the origins of all the objects he had taken with him in the afterlife.
Already, the researchers have solved one of the most important mysteries they had been confronted with after discovering the tomb – they showed that the deceased was indeed a prince and not a princess. While golden jewels recovered on the skeleton could have belonged to a female, the shape of the pelvic bones suggest he was a male.
The Lavau Prince rests on his chariot with gold jewels.
