Celtic shield buried with Bronze Age warrior 2,000 years ago is ‘UK’s most important find’
Archeologists uncovered an amazing Iron Age shield within a 2,200-year-old tomb together with a cart and two ponies hidden in a springing location, in what archeologists call one of the UK’s biggest discoveries.
The grave in the vicinity of Pocklington was found by a group of archeologists headed by Paula Ware of MAP Archaeological Practice Ltd.
Ware told Yorkshire, “The shield, which has a diameter of approximately 30 inches, but its true glory was only revealed recently once conservation was completed,” Ware told Yorkshire post.
It has similarities with the Wandsworth shield boss circa 350 BC 150 BC
The restoration revealed that the shield is decorated with a series of complex swirls and what looks like a sphere protruding from its center.
The grave also held the remains of a man who was in his 40s when he died. In addition to the chariot and two “leaping” ponies, the site was filled with several pig joints and a feasting fork attached to a pork rib, Ware said.
A chariot along with two ponies found in a leaping pose was buried near the remains of a man who was in his 40s when he died.
The shield when it was first unearthed
Two small brooches — one made of bronze and the other of glass — were also found in the tomb. The elaborate nature of the burial indicates that the deceased man must have been “a significant member of his society,” Ware said.
Ware agreed with what other media outlets have suggested about the significance of the find: It is one of the most important ancient discoveries ever made in the U.K. “Yes, especially as it has been excavated under modern archaeological conditions,” she told Yorkshire post.
Ancient chariots are not altogether uncommon in burials. A 2,000-year-old Thracian chariot was discovered in 2008 alongside the bones of two horses and a dog in what is now Bulgaria, Yorkshire post previously reported.
The practice of burying noblemen near chariots in Bulgaria was especially popular during the time of the Roman Empire, which lasted from about 2,100 to 1,500 years ago.
Some 2,500 years ago, a Celtic prince in what is today France was buried in a lavish tomb complete with gorgeous pottery, a gold-tipped drinking vessel and… a chariot, Yorkshire post reported.
Archaeologists announced in 2014 that they had discovered a 4,000-year-old burial chamber holding two four-wheeled chariots and plenty of treasures in the country of Georgia, in the south Caucasus.
The newfound grave and chariot were discovered when the archaeological team was excavating an area where homes were going to be built. The researchers plan to submit a paper describing the finds to a scientific publication.
Stone tables found in Chichen Itza reveal unknown information on the ancient Maya
According to a report in The Smithsonianmag, a team of archaeologists led by José Francisco Osorio León and Francisco Pérez Ruiz of Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History has found 1,000-year-old pieces of a limestone table inscribed with hieroglyphs and human figures in the so-called Temple of the Snails at Chichen Itza.
Together, the stones measure about five feet long by four and one-half feet wide. The images include possible prisoners of war tied with ropes. Osorio León said the table was carved in Chichen Itza and moved to the Temple of the Snails from another location
The stones are buried at the Snails Temple in the Chichen Viejo region, which is built-in late-terminal classics (900-1000 AD), Osorio Leon commented.
He commented on this pre-Columbian piece “was reused as a table, that is, it does not correspond to the Temple of Snails, and although it was carved in Chichen Itza, the exact place where it was placed and subsequently taken to is unknown. It is thought that the stone table served as an altar”.
López Calzada carried out the supervision of the general conservation and restoration works of the archaeological zone, in its 2019 season, which has the objective of ensuring the state of conservation of the archaeological monuments, of this important World Cultural Heritage site.
The works are carried out in the area known as Chichen Viejo, which includes monumental buildings from the Terminal Classic and Early Postclassic periods.
The official explained that “they correspond to research and rescue of sectors of Chichén Itzá that included secondary cores adjacent to the central area, including the architectural group commonly known as ‘Chichén Viejo’.
The area where INAH – Yucatán specialists currently work is located 800 meters south of the ceremonial complex of Las Monjas in Chichén Itzá, and it is connected to the main archaeological area through Sacbé 25 and Sacbé 26.
He explained that it covers an area of 150 meters north-south by 125 meters east-west, and on a walled platform there are eight main structures, three platforms, and other housing complexes. The building has six accesses, the main one in the form of a large arch with a vault and rounded walls.
The project is directed by archaeologists José Francisco Osorio León and Francisco Pérez Ruiz, researchers attached to the INAH Yucatan Center.
In addition, archaeologists Abimael Josué Cu Pérez, Alfonso Emmanuel Argueta Estrada, Cesar Antonio Torres Ochoa, Nelda Issa Marengo Camacho, among others, are also participating in this project.
More than 50 workers from San Felipe Nuevo, Pisté, and Xcalacop communities in Tinúm are contributing to return the splendor to Chichen Itza with an investment of three million pesos.
The buildings that are intervened are the “Structure of the Stucco”, the “Temple of the Sacrifices”, the “Palace of the Columns”, and “The House of the Snails”, among others that will receive cleaning and general maintenance.
López Calzada added that between January and February of next year, the 2020 Season of the Chichen Itza Archaeological Project will begin, in which more than 60 workers will be employed.
Human footprints dated to roughly 85,000 years ago revealed in Saudi Arabia
In the Tabuk province in northwestern Saudi Arabia there are human footprints dating back 85,000 years. The traces of the footprints were discovered on the bank of an ancient lake in the desert of Al-Nafud.
Tabuk, Saudi Arabia
During a tour of the display of the “Roads of Arabian — Saudi Archeological Masterpieces through the Ages,” Prince Sultan bin Salman, Chairman of the Saudi Tourism and National Heritage Commission (SATCH) at the National Museum in Tokyo, Japan, revealed the groundbreaking discovery.
Prince Sultan said that an international team of archaeologists, including Saudi experts, found traces of footprints of several adult prehistoric people scattered on the land and in an old lake.
The people may have been fishing in the lake for food, he said, adding that the findings would be studied in great detail.
Prince Sultan said that the team of researchers led by Michael Petraglia, of the Department of Human Evolution at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, presented this small piece of bone as the oldest remains of Homo sapiens discovered outside Africa and the Levant.
“This bone gives essential indications to understand the exodus of our ancestors from Africa,” he said.
Prince Sultan said that the project was part of the “Green Arabia: The Palaeodeserts Project,” a Saudi-British undertaking for survey and excavation to implement environmental and archaeological studies of historical sites in the Kingdom.
The objective is to study the likelihood of expansion or extinction of humans and animals and their adaptation to living conditions.
The project has led to many other significant discoveries of animals and mammal fossils in Saudi deserts, including a giant 300,000-year-old elephant tusk from the Nafud Desert, suggesting a greener, wetter Arabian Desert in the past.
An elephant’s carpal bone, located five meters from the tusk, was also discovered in the same sand layer at the excavation site.
The project, funded by the European Research Council, the SCTH and the Max Planck Society, examines the environmental change in the Arabian Desert over the past million years.
A multidisciplinary team of researchers is studying the effect of environmental change on early humans and animals that settled or passed through the desert and how their responses determined whether they survived or died out.
Last month, a fossil finger bone unearthed in Saudi Arabia’s Nafud Desert pointed to what scientists are calling a new understanding of how the human species came out of Africa en route to the rest of the world.
A joint scientific team discovered the first sample of ancient human remains in the northwest of Saudi Arabia.
The research team included the Saudi Geological Survey, the SCTH, King Saud University, the Max Planck Foundation for Human History, Oxford University, Cambridge University, the Australia National University and the University of New South Wales in Australia.
Researchers say the discovery shows that hunter-gatherers had reached the area 85,000 years ago. Previously discovered human fossils show an earlier human presence in Israel and possibly China.
The bone, from an adult and most likely a middle finger, was found in 2016 about 550 kilometers southeast of the Sinai Peninsula.
Michael Petraglia, of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany, said that the ancient people probably left Africa through the peninsula.
Legendary Saraswati River of Harappan Civilization Found
A recent study has shown that it is the Ghaggar River that was later identified as the legendary Saraswati with the “clear evidence” that the early Harappans built their settlements.
It has been repeated several times since the 19th Century that a modern Ghaggar-Hakra river system, which runs intermittently between Indian and Pakistan, could be the Saraswati river described in the Rig Veda.
However, with no proof of the river’s uninterrupted flow during the zenith of civilization, it has been argued that the Harappans depended on monsoonal rains.
Saraswati, goddess of knowledge, music, art, speech, wisdom, and learning.
In the study, published in the journal ‘Scientific Reports’ on November 20, scientists from the Physical Research Laboratory at Ahmedabad and the Department of Earth Sciences, IIT Bombay presented what they called was “unequivocal evidence for the Ghaggar’s perennial past by studying temporal changes of sediment provenance along a 300 km stretch of the river basin”. ‘
They argued that “this revived perennial condition of the Ghaggar, which can be correlated with the Saraswati, likely facilitated the development of the early Harappan settlements along its banks.”
Study area and subsurface stratigraphy along the Ghaggar-Hakra.
The study argues that “Harappans built their early settlements along with a stronger phase of the river Ghaggar”, during a period 9,000 to 4,500 years ago, “which would later be known as the Saraswati”, but “by the time the civilization matured, the river had already lost its glacial connection.”
The study notes that while the eventual “decline” of the “civilization” at the Ghaggar-Saraswati valley postdates “the exceptional changes to the flow of the river”, “a stronger perennial phase appears to have helped the early societies sow the seeds of the earliest known civilization of the Indian subcontinent.”
The presence of a large number of Harappan settlements along the banks of the modern-day Ghaggar Hakra stream, which had remained monsoon-fed for most of its history, has baffled archaeologists since the 1950s.
The ancient Harappan settled along the Saraswati River.
The authors noted that the observation that “Harappans in the Ghaggar valley made little effort to harvest rainwater, unlike their counterparts in the semi-arid Saurashtra and Rann of Kachchh regions” in spite of a weakening monsoon raised “serious doubt about the conclusion that the Ghaggar had a seasonal water supply.”
The researchers noted that two of its largest cities, Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa, along with smaller settlements were built along “mighty and frequently flooding Indus and Ravi, respectively.”
In spite of evidence of an increase in localized rainfall for a few centuries, during the urbanization of the period, the study notes, “The important question that needs to be asked is: what made the early settlers build their cities along a supposedly dying river instead of the well-watered plains of neighboring perennial Himalayan rivers.”
The researchers studied the temporal changes in the origin of the sediment along the 300 kilometer stretch of the river basin and established that 80,000 to 20,000 years ago, the river was receiving sediments from the Higher Himalayas and 9,000 to 4,500 years ago, from the Lesser Himalayas.
“The latter phase can be attributed to the reactivation of the river by the distributaries of the Sutlej,” it added.
The study scrutinized the dynamics of the Harappan civilization and found that “timing of the rejuvenated perennial phase of the Ghaggar”, which was between 9,000 to 4,500 years ago, “coincides with that of the flourishing of the Pre-Harappan and Early Harappan cultures along its banks.”
“Towards the end of the Mature Harappan phase (4.6-3.9 ka), there is a clear evidence of human migrations to the lower and upper reaches of the river, leaving the middle part sparsely populated…which could be attributed to the disorganization of the river as established in this work,” it said while adding that the lower reaches of the river “possibly remained perennial, through a connection from the Sutlej, supporting mature and post-urban Harappan settlements.”
A Ceramic Jar Filled with Thousand of bronze coins Unearthed at the site of a 15th-century Samurai Residents
Archaeology is like a treasure hunt where the prizes are pieces of information from the past, and Japanese archaeologists recently hit the jackpot. They discovered a jar filled with coins belonging to a medieval samurai.
The ceramic jar was found in the Saitama Prefecture north of Tokyo and is one of the largest hauls of medieval coins discovered in the country, it has been unearthed at the site of a fifteenth-century samurai’s residence.
The jar, which dates back to the first half of the 15th century, contains well over 100,000 bronze coins and measures nearly 24 inches in diameter.
According to archaeologist Yoshiyuki Takise of the Saitama Cultural Deposits Research Corporation, the coins, which were cast in China, may have been an offering to the deity of the earth, or may simply have been buried for safekeeping.
A wood tablet was discovered next to the stone lid, with the words “nihyaku rokuju” (260) written in ink. Archaeologists believe this could refer to 260 kan, or units of 1,000, placing the total at 260,000 coins in the jar.
The treasure was buried 6.5 feet (2 meters) below ground and was likely placed there to save the samurai’s riches, as it was a troubled period in Japan’s history.
Over the course of the 15th century, civil war broke out as the Muromachi shogunate was under attack.
This was a period where the Emperor was relatively weak, with military dictators known as shoguns leading the country.
The second half of the 15th century saw different families jockeying for position and power—leading to increased violence.
In a town just north of Tokyo, a ceramic jar filled with thousands of bronze coins has been unearthed at the site of a fifteenth-century samurai’s residence.
Feudal lords, known as daimyō, challenged the shogun’s authority and it was in this era that ninjas were often hired and used as secret assassins.
With that picture clear, it makes sense that a powerful samurai would want to keep his money hidden.
For now, 70 of the coins have been examined. These coins were looped on a string and include 19 different coins from China and different areas of Japan.
It’s thought that all of the coins—which have holes in the center—would have been strung together on a rope before being added to the jar.
Based on the coins looked at so far, researchers believe the jar would have been buried at some point after the second half of the 15th century.
Mysterious flooding leads to the discovery of 5,000-year-old underground city in Turkey’s Cappadocia
One of the most spectacular sights in the world is in Central Turkey – dark valleys and rock formations with homes, chapels, churches, mosques and entire underground towns, harmoniously cut into the natural landscape.
These unique underground havens have risen and fallen around cities, empires, and religions, and yet it seems they still hold a few more secrets.
Another massive underground city in Cappadocia has been uncovered by archeologists in Turkey, consisting of at least 7 km of caves, hidden churches and escape galleries, dating back some five thousand years.
Calling it the “biggest archeological finding of 2014”, Hurriyet Daily News announced that the ancient city was found beneath Nevşehir fortress and the surrounding area, during an urban transformation project carried out by Turkey’s Housing Development Administration (TOKİ).
“Some 1,500 buildings were destructed located in and around the Nevşehir fortress, and the underground city was discovered when the earthmoving to construct new buildings had started,” writes Hurriyet Daily News.
Nevşehir province in Cappadocia, Turkey
Nevşehir province is already famous for its incredible subterranean city at Derinkuyu (pictured in featured image), which was once home to as many as 20,000 residents living together underground.
It is eleven levels deep and has 600 entrances and many miles of tunnels connecting it to other underground cities. It incorporates areas for sleeping, stables for livestock, wells, water tanks, pits for cooking, ventilation shafts, communal rooms, bathrooms, and tombs.
A reconstruction of what the Derinkuyu underground city is believed to have looked like
It is hard to imagine anything surpassing the Derinkuyu underground city in both size and scope, but archaeologists are saying they have reason to believe the newly discovered subterranean city will be the largest out of all the other underground cities in Nevşehir and may even be the largest underground city in the world.
Details regarding the dating of the site and how this was carried out, have not yet been released by those involved.
However, researchers have reported retrieving more than forty artifacts from the tunnels so far, so archaeologists may have reached the estimated date of 5,000 years based on those.
Numerous other known underground sites in Cappadocia have also been dated to this era.
Despite pouring 90 million Turkish Liras into the urban transformation project so far, the TOKİ has said it will move now their project to the outskirts of the city so that the newly found city, which is now officially registered with the Cultural and National Heritage Preservation Board, can be investigated and preserved.
TOKİ Head Mehmet Ergün Turan told Hurriyet Daily News that they do not view this as a loss considering the importance of the discovery.
“Hasan Ünver, mayor of Nevşehir, said other underground cities in Nevşehir’s various districts do not even amount to the “kitchen” of this new underground city,” reports Hurriyet Daily News.
Through the ages, the Hittites, Persians, Alexander the Great, Rome, The Byzantine Empire, Ottoman Empire, and Turkey have all governed the spectacular region of Cappadocia in Central Anatolia.
One hundred square miles with more than 200 underground villages and tunnel towns complete with hidden passages, secret rooms, and ancient temples and remarkably storied history of each new civilization building on the work of the last, make Cappadocia one of the world’s most striking and largest cave-dwelling regions of the world.
Now a discovery has been made that may overshadow them all.
There are tens of billion potentially habitable planets in our Milky Way Galaxy. But we don’t know whether we are alone For now, the Planet is the only world known for its existence, so we believe that Homo sapiens is the only species to have developed advanced technology among all the living things on our earth.
But maybe that’s assuming too much.
With an insightful new paper called “The Silurian Hypothesis,” the scientists of NASA’s Goddard Research Institute and of the University of Rochester take a critical look at the scientific evidence that our civilization is the only advanced one ever on earth. In a report on the ancient brain reptiles featured in the British Science Fiction Show, “Doctor Who”
“Are we really aware that we were Earth’s first technology species?” Asks Adam Frank, a physics and astronomy professor and co-author of the article at Rochester. “Only for 300 years have we had an industrial society, but for nearly 400 million years there has been dynamic life on the ground.”
If humans went extinct today, Frank says, any future civilization that might arise on Earth millions of years hence might find it hard to recognize traces of human civilization. By the same token, if some earlier civilization existed on Earth millions of years ago, we might have trouble finding evidence of it.
In search of lizard people
The discovery of physical artifacts would certainly be the most dramatic evidence of a Silurian-style civilization on Earth, but Frank doubts we’ll ever find anything of the sort.
“Our cities cover less than one percent of the surface,” he says. Any comparable cities from an earlier civilization would be easy for modern-day paleontologists to miss. And no one should count on finding a Jurassic iPhone; it wouldn’t last millions of years, Gorilla Glass or no.
Sleestaks
Finding fossilized bones is a slightly better bet, but if another advanced species walked the Earth millions of years ago — if they walked — it would be easy to overlook their fossilized skeletons — if they had skeletons. Modern humans have been around for just 100,000 years, a thin sliver of time within the vast and spotty fossil record.
For these reasons, Frank and Gavin Schmidt, a climatologist at Goddard and the paper’s co-author, focus on the possibility of finding chemical relics of an ancient terrestrial civilization.
Using human technology as their guide, Schmidt and Frank suggest zeroing in on plastics and other long-lived synthetic molecules as well as radioactive fallout (in case factions of ancient lizard people waged atomic warfare). In our case, technological development has been accompanied by widespread extinctions and rapid environmental changes, so those are red flags as well.
After reviewing several suspiciously abrupt geologic events of the past 380 million years, the researchers conclude that none of them clearly fit a technological profile. Frank calls for more research, such as studying how modern industrial chemicals persist in ocean sediments and then seeing if we can find traces of similar chemicals in the geologic record.
He argues that a deeper understanding of the human environmental footprint will also have practical consequences, helping us recognize better ways to achieve a long-term balance with the planet so we don’t end up as tomorrow’s forgotten species.
Then again, he’s also a curious guy who’s interested in exploring more far-out ideas for finding Silurian-style signatures: “You could try looking on the moon,” he says.
Lunar archaeology
The moon is a favored target of Penn State University astronomer Jason Wright, one of a handful of other researchers now applying serious scientific thinking to the possibility of pre-human technological civilizations.
“Habitable planets like Earth are pretty good at destroying unmaintained things on their surfaces,” Wright says. So he’s been looking at the exotic possibility that such a civilization might have been a spacefaring one. If so, artifacts of their technology, or technosignatures, might be found elsewhere in the solar system.
Wright suggests looking for such artifacts not just on the lunar surface, but also on asteroids or buried on Mars — places where such objects could theoretically survive for hundreds of millions or even billions of years.
SpaceX’s recent launch of a Tesla Roadster into space offers an insight into how such a search might go. Several astronomers pointed their telescopes at the car and showed that, even if you had no idea what you were looking at, you’d still quickly pick it out as one weird-looking asteroid.
Finding technosignatures in space is an extreme long shot, but Wright argues that the effort is worthwhile. “There are lots of other reasons to find peculiar structures on Mars and the moon, and to look for weird asteroids,” he says. Such studies might reveal new details about the history and evolution of the solar system, for instance, or about resources that might be useful to future spacefarers.
Archaeologists have finally found ancient Egyptian wax head cones
Many men with cone-shaped headgear were depicted in ancient Egyptian paintings but no actual representations are identified for a long time. Now, an international team of archaeologists reports the discovery of the first actual head cones at the city of Amarna.
Pharaoh Akhenaten rendered Amarna and it was only 15 years occupied (1347 – 1332 BC). But despite this brief existence, the city contains thousands of graves, including those of many non-elites.
The Amarna Project archeologists collaborate with the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities to investigate them, shedding light on the ordinary people of ancient Egypt.
Their discovery in 2010 was unexpected: a grave with a head cone. Another was found in 2015. This finally confirmed the objects actually existed, which some researchers had been skeptical of.
Wherever the reasons are unknown, these cones are included in the burials, the Amarna cones have provided the first opportunity to investigate an important ancient Egyptian tradition that, until now, we weren’t even sure existed.
Ancient Egyptian art frequently depicted people wearing a cone-shaped headgear. For around 1,500 years (c. 1549-30 BC), paintings and carvings showed individuals wearing cones on their heads at banquets, at worship, and in the afterlife.
Despite this abundance of visual evidence, however, archaeologists had never found an actual head cone. This lack of material evidence even prompted some researchers to suggest that the cones never existed and that they were instead purely symbolic, like the halos given to religious figures in Christian art.
A selection of depictions of head cones in Ancient Egyptian art from Amarna
Now, an international team of archaeologists publishing in the latest issue of Antiquity, report the discovery of two head cones from cemeteries at the ancient Egyptian city of Amarna, confirming for the first time the physical existence of this unusual headwear.
The head cones were discovered in the cemeteries at the city of Amarna (called Akhetaten by the ancient Egyptians). This city was built by the pharaoh Akhenaten as a home for the cult of the sun god Aten, whose exclusive worship Akhenaten promoted instead of traditional Egyptian polytheism.
The city was abandoned around a decade after the pharaoh’s death, meaning the settlement was occupied for only 15 years, from 1347 to 1332 BC. Despite this short occupation, the city is extensive, spanning several square kilometers and featuring thousands of graves.
A reconstruction of a burial at the southern Amarna cemetery
The ruins of a pharaoh’s abandoned city attracted ancient looters, who ravaged all four cemeteries at the site. This left archaeologists with the difficult task of piecing together the disturbed burials.
Archaeologists from the Amarna Project, working with the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities, have been exploring this wealth of evidence since 2005. These excavations are helping to fill in gaps in knowledge created by the rapid excavations during the early days of Egyptology. The work is especially important for helping us to understand the lives of ordinary Egyptians, beyond the ruling elite.
Amongst these individuals were two people buried with head cones. One was a female, aged 20-29 years old at death, whilst the other was a 15-20-year-old of indeterminate sex.
Individual 150 in situ with a head cone
Archaeologists have long discussed the significance of head cones. Before this new discovery, some scholars argued that the cones did not exist as real objects but rather were symbols used in artistic representations. Others, however, suggested that they did exist but were made of materials that did not survive in the archaeological record. One popular hypothesis was that they were an unguent – pieces of fat or wax perfumed, perhaps with myrrh.
As the cone melted, the scent was released, with some ancient Egyptian literature suggesting that this process would purify the wearer.
The Amarna head cones were discovered in fragments, but archaeologists have been able to reconstruct their overall shape. Specialists were also able to use portable equipment to carry out several kinds of non-destructive spectroscopy on the cones.
This analysis reveals the cones were hollow and made of wax, most likely beeswax. However, contrary to expectations, there is little evidence they contained unguent.
Why the cones were included in these two burials is difficult to know. They may have been thought to purify the wearer, enhancing their spiritual powers to allow them to engage with the rituals and deities encountered in the afterlife. Another possibility is that they were connected with ideas of fertility and resurrection. Whatever their purpose and significance, the Amarna cones provide the first opportunity to investigate an important ancient Egyptian tradition that, until now, we weren’t even sure existed.
A reconstruction of the two cones, revealing they are hollow
