Archeologists find remains of an underwater hospital and cemetery
University of Miami graduate student Devon Fogarty examines the headstone of John Greer who died while working at Fort Jefferson on Nov. 5, 1861. The gravesite is now completely underwater.
Archeologists at Dry Tortugas National Park have found remains of a 19th-century quarantine hospital and cemetery on a submerged island. The National Park Service said in a news release that records indicate dozens of people, mostly U.S. soldiers stationed at Fort Jefferson, may have been buried there.
The small quarantine hospital was used to treat patients with yellow fever at the fort between 1890 and 1900, according to the NPS.
Major outbreaks of the disease killed dozens, but the quarantine hospital offered a place to isolate patients, likely saving hundreds of lives.
While most buried in the Fort Jefferson Post Cemetery were military members, several were also civilians.
During a survey of the area, researchers found John Greer’s grave, prominently marked with a large slab of greywacke carved into the shape of a headstone and inscribed with his name and date of death.
According to the NPS, Greer was employed as a laborer at the fort and died there on Nov. 5, 1861.
“This intriguing find highlights the potential for untold stories in Dry Tortugas National Park, both above and below the water,” project director Josh Marano said.
“Although much of the history of Fort Jefferson focuses on the fortification itself and some of its infamous prisoners, we are actively working to tell the stories of the enslaved people, women, children, and civilian laborers.”
Efforts to learn more about those buried in the cemetery are ongoing.
Israeli researchers create AI to translate ancient cuneiform Akkadian texts
Israeli experts have created a program to translate an ancient language that is difficult to decipher, allowing automatic and accurate translation from cuneiform characters into English.
Researchers at Tel Aviv University (TAU) and Ariel University have developed an artificial intelligence model that can automatically translate Akkadian text written in cuneiform into English.
Experts in Assyriology have spent years studying cuneiform, one of the earliest known writing systems, in order to comprehend ancient Mesopotamian texts.
Dr. Shai Gordin of Ariel University and Dr. Gai Gutherz, Dr. Jonathan Berant, and Dr. Omer Levy of TAU trained two versions of the AI model – one that translates Akkadian from representations of cuneiform signs in Latin script and another that translates from unicode representations of the signs.
With a score of 37.47 on the Best Bilingual Evaluation Understudy 4 (BLEU4), the first version—which uses Latin transliteration—produced better results in this study.
This means that the model can produce translations that are on par with those produced by an average machine translation from one modern language to another.
Given that there is a cultural gap of more than 2,000 years in translating ancient Akkadian, this is a noteworthy accomplishment.
An ancient Assyrian tablet with writing in cuneiform from the Library of Ashurbanipal.
Researchers’ findings were published in the journal PNAS Nexus.
This new technology has the potential to revolutionize the study of ancient history by making it more accessible and open to a wider audience. In 2020, the same group of researchers created an AI model called “the Babylonian Engine.” The contemporary model is supposedly a better and reworked version of it.
Historians note that hundreds of thousands of clay tablets from ancient Mesopotamia, written in cuneiform, have been found by archaeologists, far more than can be translated by the limited number of experts who can read them.
Assyria was named after the god Ashur, the highest in the Assyrian pantheon. It was located in the Mesopotamian Plain (modern-day Iraq).
Assyria conquered the northern part of what is now Israel in 721 BC, capturing the Ten Tribes. These Jewish exiles coexisted with the Assyrians and used cuneiform writing.”
Possible Greek Tomb Detected in Naples With Cosmic Rays
A 3D view of the site with the four inferred reference points of Chamber 3 shown as green spheres.
Cosmic rays and lasers have revealed that deep underneath the city streets of Naples, Italy, lie the remains of the Greeks who originally settled the area, as well as the catacombs of Christians who lived there during the Roman era nearly two millennia ago, a new study finds.
Researchers have long known that ancient Greek burials were hidden beneath the city, but weren’t able to access all of them. Now, these cutting-edge techniques have enabled researchers to peer into the earth without any digging.
Originally founded as Cumae and later renamed Neapolis (“New City”) around 650 B.C., the area now known as Naples boasted temples, a forum and numerous underground tombs. In the highly populated and picturesque modern district of Rione Sanità, tombs from multiple stages of occupation are known — from the Greek Hellenistic period (sixth to third centuries B.C.), there are burial chambers for the wealthy called hypogea, and from the later Roman period (second to fourth centuries A.D.), there are early Christian catacombs.
But the layers of contemporary buildings make it difficult to access ancient sewers, cisterns and tombs 33 feet (10 meters) underneath the streets, so a group of Italian and Japanese researchers hypothesized that they could identify previously unknown burial hypogea from the Hellenistic period using 21st-century techniques.
Their study, published April 3 in the journal Scientific Reports, details how they used muography to detect underground voids that were unknown to archaeologists.
A schematic drawing of the underground level at the depth of 33 feet (10 meters) with Greek funeral chambers numbered from 1 to 11. Chambers 2 and 3 are unknown and their existence was hinted at by the integrated site topology reconstructed with 3D surveys.
A muon is a subatomic particle similar to an electron but with a greater mass. In 1936, scientists discovered that muons are produced by cosmic rays in Earth’s atmosphere, and that these tiny particles can easily penetrate walls and rocks, scattering in open spaces.
In this study, the muons’ tracks were recorded using nuclear emulsion technology, in which extremely sensitive photographic film is used to capture and visualize the paths of the charged particles.
By measuring muon flux — how many muons arrive in a particular area over time — and direction using a particle detector, researchers can peer into volcanoes, underground cavities and even the Egyptian pyramids through muography.
However, placing the particle detectors requires some strategizing to catch the muons’ movement.
The researchers were most interested in scanning the Hellenistic necropolis, located about 33 feet under the current surface, which meant finding a stable place even deeper than that to set up the equipment, which looks a little like a flatbed scanner.
“The big general limitation for muography is that the detector has to be placed below the target level because the muons come from the sky or the upper hemisphere,” study lead author Valeri Tioukov, a physicist at Italy’s National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN), told Live Science in an email. “For archaeology, it’s applicable if there is some space for the detector placement below the target level.”
Tioukov and his colleagues placed the muon tracking devices 59 feet (18 m) underground, in a 19th-century cellar that was used for aging ham, where they recorded the muon flux for 28 days, capturing about 10 million muons.
In order to identify unknown structures, the researchers needed a 3D model of what was already known to exist underground.
The 3D laser scans of the accessible structures can then be compared with the measured muon flux. Anomalies in the muon flux images that are not visible in the 3D model can be confidently assumed to be hidden or unknown cavities.
A nuclear emulsion detector in place at 59 feet (18 meters) below the ground surface.
Muography revealed an excess of muons in the data that can be explained only by the presence of a new burial chamber.
The chamber’s area measures roughly 6.5 by 11.5 feet (2 by 3.5 m), according to the study, and its rectangular shape indicates it is human-made rather than natural.
Given the chamber’s depth, the researchers think it was a part of the Hellenistic necropolis dating to the sixth to the third centuries B.C. Likely the tomb of a wealthy individual, the hypogeum may be similar to those first discovered in the late 19th century, the Hypogeum of the Toga-wearers and the Hypogeum of the Pomegranates, both of which can be visited today as part of underground tours of Naples.
“The prospect of identifying and discovering new tomb chambers is obviously appetizing,” Rabun Taylor, a Roman archaeologist at the University of Texas at Austin who was not involved in the study, told Live Science in an email.
“Some of these Hellenistic tombs and burials on the north side of town yielded goods made of clay, bronze, and iron” when they were discovered a century ago, Taylor said, “so it would be wonderful to unearth some new chambers using modern methods.” But this would be a challenging archaeological undertaking, he pointed out, due to the expense and effort needed as well as the fact that the area is densely populated.
Muography unfortunately cannot reveal what is inside the chamber. “In this configuration, there is no way to resolve objects of less than 10 cm [4 inches] in size,” Tioukov said. “So we can potentially see the approximate shape of the room, but not small details like bones.”
The hoard of 175 silver Roman coins, worth tens of thousands of dollars in today’s money in just face value alone, was found in 2021 near Livorno in Tuscany.
A hoard of 175 silver coins unearthed in a forest in Italy may have been buried for safekeeping during a Roman civil war.
The coins seem to date from 82 B.C., the year the Roman general Lucius Cornelius Sulla fought a bloody war across Italy against his enemies among the leaders of the Roman Republic, which resulted in Sulla’s victory and his ascension as dictator of the Roman state.
The archaeologists who investigated the hoard of 175 silver Roman denarii — the equivalent of tens of thousands of dollars in today’s money — suggested it may have been buried by a Roman soldier who was then killed in battle.
Archaeologists think the coins were deliberately buried in a small terracotta pot in about 82 B.C. to keep them safe during a time of war.
But historian Federico Santangelo, a professor who heads Classics and Ancient History at Newcastle University in the United Kingdom, said it also could have been buried by a businessman who wanted to keep his money safe during turbulent times. “I don’t think we should trace this money to a soldier, although in principle it is possible,” he told Live Science. Santangelo was not involved in the discovery.
The chronologies of such coin hoards show that many were buried during wars and upheavals. “A number of people at times of crisis buried their stash of money and for whatever reason were prevented from retrieving it,” Santangelo said.
Excavations revealed no other archaeological objects at the site where the coin hoard was found, but the remains of a Roman-era farm had been found in the past about half a mile away.
Coin hoard
Researchers discovered the coin hoard buried in a terracotta pot in 2021 but kept it secret so that the site could be completely investigated.
Lorella Alderighi, an archaeologist with the provincial office for archaeology, told Live Science the coins were discovered by a member of an archaeological group in a newly-cut area of forest northeast of the city of Livorno in Tuscany.
Archaeological investigations revealed the earliest coins dated from 157 or 156 B.C., while the most recent was from 83 or 82 B.C., she said.
The area was probably forested then as it is now, on a small hill overlooking a swamp. The remains of a Roman farm had previously been found about half a mile (1 kilometer) away, she said.
“The coins have definitely been hidden — they constituted a ‘treasure’ or piggy bank,” she said. “The easiest way to hide valuables was to bury them underground, away from homes where no one could find them.”
The coins were first spotted by a member of the Livorno Palaeontological Archaeological Group walking through a new forest cutting.
But whoever buried the coins never returned to recover them, and Alderighi proposed that the owner may have been a Roman soldier caught up in the conflicts.
“These coins may have been the savings of a soldier returning home [during] military service,” she said. “He had hidden them because they constituted a useful sum, perhaps to buy and start his own farm.”
Several such coin hoards have been found in Italy; studies show many of them were buried at times of war or upheaval. Here we see over 100 found coins, all bagged and numbered.
Turbulent times
Alderighi noted that the hoard was buried during a troubled period in Italian history.
A few years earlier, Italy had been gripped by the Social War between Rome and its Italian allies, while in 82 B.C. Sulla had just returned with his legions from Asia to confront his enemies in Rome, having already attacked the city in 88 B.C. and been declared a public enemy in 87 B.C.
“It was a very turbulent historical period,” she said. “Sulla’s soldiers conquered territories as they advanced from south to north. But central Italy and Tuscany had not yet been conquered.”
Santangello added that Sulla’s victory in late 82 B.C. was almost a “blueprint” for later Roman rulers.
His victory was followed about 30 years later by a much larger Roman civil war between Julius Caesar and Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, or Pompey the Great, who rose to power as a deputy to Sulla. And Caesar’s victory in that war led directly to the rise to power of Augustus, the first Roman emperor, in 27 B.C.
“It became abundantly clear to everyone that whoever came out as the winner of the civil war would be — maybe not by law, but certainly in reality — the master of Rome,” Santangello said.
Rare, 1,000-year-old Viking Age iron hoard found in a basement in Norway
A rare stash of 1,000-year-old ironwork, which sat for 40 years in a family’s basement in Norway, is now seeing the light of day after a woman discovered the hoard during some spring cleaning.
The Viking hoard consists of 32 iron ingots, which are all pierced with a hole on one end and may have been grouped together in a bundle.
The hoard consists of 32 iron ingots that look like small spatulas and date back to the Viking Age (A.D. 793 to 1066) or the high Middle Ages (1066 to 1350). The rods are identical and weigh about 1.8 ounces (50 grams) each, prompting archeologists to think they may have been used as a form of currency and that someone probably buried them with the intention of coming back for the treasure later.
“We call it a cache find because it is clear that someone has [buried it] to hide it,” Kjetil Loftsgarden, an archeologist and associate professor at the University of Oslo and the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo, told NRK News. Each ingot is pierced with a hole on one end, which suggests the ingots could have been tied together in a bunch, experts added.
While similar ironwork already exists in the museum’s collections, this discovery is rare because construction projects often destroy or damage buried treasures, Loftsgarden said. In this case, Grete Margot Sørum, who came across the treasure trove while clearing out her parents’ basement in Valdres, central Norway, told NRK News that she remembers her father finding the stash while he dug a well by the house in the 1980s. “But then he put them away in a corner,” Sørum said.
The last time someone unearthed a hoard of iron ingots in Valdres was 100 years ago, according to NRK News.
From the late Viking Age until the high Middle Ages, independent farmers in southern Norway produced iron on a massive scale, according to a 2019 study by Loftsgarden, published in Fornvännen, the Journal of Swedish Antiquarian Research.
The region was so productive that there was a surplus of iron, which traders sold to elites in the more populated coastal regions of Norway.
Sørum’s father unearthed the ingots from a site located along the Bergen Royal Road, known as Kongevegen, which served as a trade route between Oslo and Bergen 1,000 years ago.
The area around the site was dotted with charcoal pits, which were indispensable to iron production for smelting during the Viking and Middle Ages, Loftsgarden wrote in the study.
Sørum notified the Valdres Folkemuseum in Fagernes, which then forwarded the iron collection to the Cultural Heritage section of the Innlandet county municipality. The iron hoard is now stored at the Cultural History Museum in Oslo, where archeologists will study and catalog the artifacts.
“Old finds that are handed into the archeologists provide new knowledge about the history of the Inland,” Anne Engesveen, unit leader for archeology at the Cultural Heritage section, said in a statement.
The discovery of the iron collection in the Sørum family basement is not the first Viking find from Norway in recent months. In November 2022, a metal detectorist stumbled across a Viking treasure hoard consisting of a pair of silver rings, fragments of a silver bracelet, and what look like chopped-up Arabic coins, among other buried artifacts.
DNA from a 20,000-year-old deer-tooth pendant reveals the woman who wore it
A pendant made of a deer tooth that was exposed to DNA about 20,000 years ago has yielded clues about the ancient woman who wore it.
The tooth, which was worn as a necklace bead, most likely absorbed DNA from the person’s sweat as it rubbed up against her chest and neck.
Marie Soressi and her colleagues at Leiden University in the Netherlands were able to extract that DNA without damaging the tooth using a new process that took eight years to develop.
The technique might reveal unprecedented details about the social customs and gender roles of ancient populations, says Soressi.
The pendant was unearthed in Denisova Cave in Siberia, Russia, which was occupied by various species of hominin over 300,000 years. The study was published in Nature today.
“It’s almost like you open a time travel machine,” says study co-author Elena Essel, a molecular biologist who works on ancient DNA at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. “With each sample we are able to learn a bit more and make more inferences about how these people lived.”
Previously, it was impossible to link tools and jewelry to the people who used them unless the artifact was discovered near a specific burial.
The entrance to Denisova Cave, where the pendant was discovered
Essel and her colleagues coaxed DNA from inside the pores of the ancient pendant by soaking it in increasingly warm salt solution, which they found did not alter the pendant. Once released, the small amounts of genetic material were sequenced and compared with other sets of ancient DNA.
Mitochondrial DNA — which is handed down from mother to offspring — extracted from the pendant show that the object is roughly 19,000 to 25,000 years old and that the tooth belonged to a wapiti, also known as an elk (Cervus canadensis).
Analysis of nuclear DNA from the ornament suggests that it had been made or worn by a female Homo sapiens whose genetic make-up resembles that of north Eurasian individuals who lived around the same time but were previously known only from remains found farther east in Siberia.
Study co-author Elena Zavala, a geneticist now at the University of California, Berkeley, says that the technique can connect ancient humans to “the tools that they created” — but, unlike other methods, does not destroy the artifact.
However, there are a number of drawbacks to the method. Modern DNA can easily contaminate an artifact, making analysis difficult. And even for the cleanest specimens, the DNA extraction method is time-consuming, requires sophisticated technology, and must be performed in a specialized laboratory.
Essel and her colleagues are working to streamline their process. In the meantime, archaeologists can minimize contamination by wearing gloves and a face mask, and by immediately popping specimens into a refrigerator.
Still, Ludovic Orlando, a molecular archaeologist at the University of Paul Sabatier in Toulouse, France, who was not involved in the study, was impressed by the thoughtfulness and efficiency of the team’s procedure. The technique is not “a magic bullet”, says Orlando. But it still provides “a signature from nothing, from a piece of bone or tooth”, he adds. “You see the population signature of the people who interacted with the animal.”
Rare Arabic inscription discovered during Malta housing project works
A rare Arabic inscription, possibly dating back to medieval times, was discovered at the site of a social housing project in Fgura, a town in Malta’s South Eastern Region.
The discovery is ‘very significant and rare’ according to the Superintendence for Cultural Heritage, being the second Arabic inscription found outside Rabat.
The Arabic inscription was discovered in a naturally carved well in fields adjacent to Triq id-Dejma, Triq il-Karmnu, and Triq tax-Xemx u l-Qamar, all of which have recently received Planning Authority approval for a social housing project.
SCH said that the script was discovered carved on a limestone prismatic stele and is probably Kufic, a calligraphic that is closely linked to early Quran transcription and architectural decorations. The slabs also include other markings that may represent symbols rather than writing.
An official of the Superintendence for Cultural Heritage described the historical artifact as “a limestone prismatic stele, truncated at each end, bearing Arabic script.”
The artifact is typologically similar to a number of stelae found by Sir Temi Zammit in the 20th century, who found an Arab cemetery that had been constructed on top of the Domus Romana in Mdina.
The prismatic stele carved in limestone was discovered in a natural fissure on the land that was at some point in history repurposed as a well. Photo: Superintendence of Cultural Heritage
“Apart from another example found at Savina Square in Victoria in 1901, this is the only other example known to have been found outside of Rabat, making this discovery very significant and rare, both archaeologically as well as historically,” the spokesperson said.
The discovery was made inside a natural fissure on the site that was at some point repurposed as a well with an overall depth of roughly 8.5 meters.
The SCH thinks that the artifact was probably dumped there at some point in history and is therefore unlikely to be the main context for the inscription. However, no modern material was found within the fissure, so it is still able to provide a “secure archaeological context”, they said.
The stone slab was discovered alongside pottery that predates the 13th century. Numerous silo pits and agricultural trenches were also found at the site as a result of the archaeological assessment.
An Arabic language specialist from the University of Malta is working with the Superintendence to help decipher the inscription, which is thought to be crucial for establishing the object’s original use and providing precise dating.
The discovery is being hailed as a major find that sheds light on a previously unknown period in Maltese history when a sizable portion of the population was Muslim.
Ancient coins surface with Lake Iznik’s withdrawal in Türkiye
With the withdrawal of Lake Iznik in the northwest of Türkiye, the ancient coins found at the bottom of the water began to be found by the locals.
In Iznik, the world-famous historical city of Bursa, which is on the temporary heritage list of UNESCO and expected to enter the main list this year, a couple walking on the shore of Lake Iznik found a 2,000-year-old historical coin.
Locals began discovering ancient coins after the lake dried up, possibly from the historical basilica that was once submerged beneath Lake Iznik but rose above the water in 2014.
Ismail Yıldırım, walking with his wife and children, noticed that the coins were historical as the cash had figures of Jesus and relief inscriptions.
The Yildirim couple handed over the coins to Iznik Archeology Museum.
The museum officials, who examined the coins, stated that the coin, which is the figure of Jesus Christ, belongs to the 9th century, and the other coin belongs to the Hellenistic period.
Iznik, a district of northwestern Bursa province dating back to the 4th century BC, is significant for both Muslims and Christians, with many sites from the era of Bithynian, Roman, Seljuk, and Ottoman civilizations.
According to geographer Strabo, the ancient town was founded in 316 BC by Antigonos, the commander of Alexander the Great (356-323 B.C). It is also reported that Lysimachos, another general of Alexander, took the city and renamed it after his wife Nicaea.
İznik enjoyed a period of expansion and prosperity under Roman rule.
During the Byzantine period, İznik grew in importance as a religious center, especially after Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity in 313 AD.
The first Christian Council, known as the Great Council of Nicaea, was held in 325 AD in İznik, with the participation of over three hundred bishops from various parts of the empire.
