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A diver who spotted something metallic not far from Sardinia's coast has led to the discovery of tens of thousands of ancient bronze coins.Italy's culture ministry said Saturday that the diver alerted authorities, who sent divers assigned to an art protection squad along with others from the ministry's undersea archaeology department. The ministry posted images and video of the stunning discovery.The coins dating from the first half of the fourth century were found in sea grass, not far from the northeast shore of the Mediterranean island. The ministry didn't say exactly when the first diver caught a glimpse of something...

In 1912, a farmer found an unusual, ancient-looking limestone tablet in his field. It seemed to have an exotic language, that he’d never seen before, chiseled into its surface. Over the next 50 years, he showed the stone to family, friends, and even took it to the fair, hoping to find anyone that could decipher it, but no one ever could.Fast forward to the late 1990's, and someone not only deciphered it, but tied it to the legend of Prince Madoc. As the story goes, Madoc sailed to North America from Wales, in the year 1170, 322 years before Christopher...

Mon, Sep 16 2002 12:39 AM AEST Ancient warrior grave unearthed in Lebanese port Archaeologists have unearthed several Bronze Age graves, including that of an ancient warrior interred with his axe, in the southern Lebanese port city of Sidon. Excavation team director Claude Doumet Serhal said the excavations are "among the most important archaeological projects in Lebanon as they are taking place in the centre of the city of modern Sidon." He also said the warrior's grave dated back to the Middle Bronze Age, around the second millennium BC, and included an unusually well preserved bronze duck-bill axe with a...

Wood from three different trees cut by Vikings found at L'Anse aux Meadows been precisely dated to 1021 CE - 1,000 years ago this year. The Viking settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows, located at the tip of Newfoundland's Great Northern Peninsula, was discovered in the 1960s, but has never been precisely dated. Previous estimates about when the Viking crossed the Atlantic and made their way to present day Newfoundland and Labrador have been based on Norse sagas and radiocarbon dating that typically has an error margin of about 50 years. The best estimates put their arrival at around 990 at...

Analysis of hair combs made from deer antler has shed new light on the trade routes of Vikings - revealing connections between northern Scandinavia and the edges of continental Europe.Led by researchers from the University of York, the findings provide evidence of trade connections between the town of Hedeby (modern Schleswig-Holstein, Germany), the largest urban settlement in Viking Age Europe, and upland Scandinavia, hundreds of kilometres to the north...Hedeby was a major centre of antler-working, with 288,000 antler finds recorded, most of which was waste material from the production of hair combs: a major urban craft in the Viking Age...The...

An Excavation Project, in Collaboration With Archaeologists From Södertörn University, Uppsala University's Campus Gotland, Gotland Museum, and the Swedish National Heritage Board, Has Led to the Discovery of an Iron Age Port on Gotska Sandön.Gotska Sandön is an island and national park in Sweden's Gotland County, situated 24 miles north of Faro in the Baltic Sea.Earlier in 2023, archaeologists found two 2,000-year-old Roman coins on one of the island's beaches. Both coins are made of silver, with one coin dating from AD 98-117 during the reign of Emperor Trajan, and the other coin dating from AD 138-161 during the reign...

A Customs Inscription from the Lycian civilization, located in Andriake port in the southern province of Antalya's Demre district, tells about ancient times...The Ancient City of Andriake is 5 km away from the Demre district of Antalya. It was one of the most important ports of Lycia, such as Phaselis and Patara, in ancient times. It is known as the port of the Ancient City of Myra and a settlement formed by it, rather than being a separate city.The inscription, discovered in the vicinity of the largest Granarium in the Mediterranean, named after Emperor Hadrian (Horrea Hadriani), contains information about...

Nine gold pendants with rare horse symbols, ten gold beads, and three gold rings from the 6th century were recently discovered by a metal detectorist in Southwestern Norway. Erlend Bore just wanted a hobby. So just before this summer, he bought a metal detector. To get him off his couch and go treasure hunting. He was searching around the shore of the island Rennesøy in Stavanger, in Southwestern Norway, when the metal detector started to beep. In a lump of soil, he saw something that looked like gold coins. “At first I thought I’d found chocolate money with a gold...

In an innovative endeavor to create a sensory bridge to the ancient past, a team of researchers led by Barbara Huber of the MPI of Geoanthropology has recreated one of the scents used in the mummification of an important Egyptian woman more than 3,500 years ago...The team's research centered on the mummification substances used to embalm the noble lady Senetnay in the 18th dynasty, circa 1450 BCE. The researchers utilized advanced analytical techniques—including gas chromatography-mass spectrometry, high-temperature gas chromatography-mass spectrometry, and liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry—to reconstruct the substances that helped to preserve and scent Senetnay for eternity. Their research has...

Pytheas of Massalia was the first-ever Mediterranean to reach and explore Great Britain and the Arctic Circle.He is believed to have traveled as far as Iceland, becoming the first person on record to describe the midnight sun and the first known scientific visitor to see and describe the Celtic and Germanic tribes.According to Henry Fanshawe Tozer, Pytheas' voyage to the north took place at about 330 BC, derived from three main sources. Sadly, his original writings, titled On The Ocean, did not survive, but he is quoted in the works of later geographers, such as Strabo's Geographica, Pliny's Natural History...

It’s taken 400 years of scientific discoveries to make it possible for anyone to find his location anywhere on the globe using GPS.With the letters GPS, we instantly recognize an innovation that has revolutionized our lives. The concept was born half a century ago in a sweltering room at the Pentagon over Labor Day weekend in 1973.That’s the genesis of the concept for a constellation of platforms orbiting the Earth, transmitting radio signals to determine location. Many years of calculation, experiment, and miniaturization led to the Navigation Signal Timing and Ranging (NAVSTAR) satellites that became known as the Global Positioning...

An engineer was conducting a regular survey of the Mediterranean Sea off Egypt's coast when he noticed something in the water.It turned out to be a 2,300-year-old shipwreck, according to an Aug. 5 news release from Egypt's Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities.The ancient ship was discovered less than a half-mile off the coast of El-Alamein — which was an important commercial region during the third century BC, Mostafa Waziri, secretary general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, said in the release. The find gives more insight into Egypt's role as a center for trade, economy and tourism in ancient times.Archaeologists...

Around a dozen sharks are currently regularly pinging off the coastlines of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island, according to the Ocearch Shark Tracker website. Two of these huge animals have pinged their location near Prince Edward Island in Canada in summer of 2023. Let’s introduce you to the main characters of this story. First we have a shark named Breton. Breton received his name after the beautiful people of Cape Breton, where the animal was tagged. He was the first shark to be tagged as part of OCEARCH’s Expedition Nova Scotia in 2020. The adult male shark...

...at Vinjeøra in southern Trøndelag County... The first discoveries to make it to the surface... large pieces of flint that were highly reminiscent of early, pioneer settlements...When the excavations in Vinjeøra got under way properly... the researchers found evidence from people who came to Finnmark from the east around 9000 BC.The ice remained the longest in Scandinavia compared to the rest of Europe during the last Ice Age. The Norwegian coast only became free of ice around 12,500 years ago. The first people arrived in what we now know as Norway and Sweden about 1,000 years later.Skeletal analyses have previously...

The ship was discovered by an excavator crew at the Drmno mine. It is the second such discovery in the area, which contains the Roman settlement known as Viminacium.Lead archaeologist Miomir Korac said previous findings suggest the ship may date back as far as the third or fourth century, when Viminacium was the capital of the Roman province of Moesia Superior and had a port near a tributary of the Danube River.Mladen Jovicic, who is part of the team working on the newly discovered ship, said moving the 13-meter hull without breaking it will be tough. "Our engineer friends...will prepare...

The sword was discovered in 2021 by Shlomi Katzin while conducting a study of stone and metal anchors on the seabed. The area was a natural anchorage for ships near Haifa's ancient port city that the Crusaders captured from the Arabs during the early 12th century AD.In a new study published by the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), the researchers describe how the sword was found covered in a thick marine concretion of sand and shells, making it difficult to separate the metal without causing damage. However, the concretion slowed down the oxidation process, preserving the sword which would have rusted...

In 2012, the wreck was discovered 350 meters (1150 feet) deep. The wreck was initially thought to be in French territorial waters, and the underwater archaeology department of France’s Culture Ministry conducted some preliminary surveys in 2013 and 2015. Diplomatic negotiations on where to draw the border shifted the discovery site into Italian territorial waters in 2016, and the two countries agreed to collaborate on a wreck study. The joint mission’s first campaign took place in the first week of this month...This robot, one of the smallest and lightest in its category, can reach 2500 meters and allows not only...

Archaeologists have found remnants of eight spices on a sandstone slab from an archaeological site in Vietnam, showing the early adoption of ingredients and techniques from South Asia.Unearthed in an ancient village in southern Vietnam, the cookware—roughly the size and shape of an anvil—was likely used to grind the spice and other ingredients familiar in today’s curries...An analysis of 717 grains of starch recovered from the tools revealed the presence of eight different spices: turmeric, ginger, galangal, sand ginger, fingerroot, clove, nutmeg, and cinnamon. Many of the grains also showed signs of deformation, indicating that they had been damaged during...

Explanation: No one knew that 2,000 years ago, the technology existed to build such a device. The Antikythera mechanism, pictured, is now widely regarded as the first computer. Found at the bottom of the sea aboard a decaying Greek ship, its complexity prompted decades of study, and even today some of its functions likely remain unknown. X-ray images of the device, however, have confirmed that a main function of its numerous clock-like wheels and gears is to create a portable, hand-cranked, Earth-centered, orrery of the sky, predicting future star and planet locations as well as lunar and solar eclipses. The...

Explanation: It does what? No one knew that 2,000 years ago, the technology existed to build such a device. The Antikythera mechanism, pictured, is now widely regarded as the first computer. Found at the bottom of the sea aboard a decaying Greek ship, its complexity prompted decades of study, and even today some of its functions likely remain unknown. X-ray images of the device, however, have confirmed that a main function of its numerous clock-like wheels and gears is to create a portable, hand-cranked, Earth-centered, orrery of the sky, predicting future star and planet locations as well as lunar and...