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Ancient treasures from golden age of mystery THEY may have been struck at the time of Jesus Christ, but they are scarcely marked despite the hundreds of years they spent buried in a farmer's field. The tiny gold Celtic coins are the latest in a series of finds that are becoming more common since metal detectorists and archeologists started working together. And they were used by the same tribe whose chariot burials have fascinated the public in recent months. Weeks ago archeologists revealed that they had unearthed a rare and nationally significant Iron Age burial site at Ferrybridge in West...

Celts gave Halloween its spooky start more than 2,000 years ago By CAROLINA CHACON Regardless of the phase of the moon, Oct. 31 is the darkest night of the year. Halloween is eagerly anticipated in the United States. Entire families go to great lengths to decorate their home and find the perfect costume for a bewitching good time. But these traditions have a rich history. Halloween originated more than 2,000 years ago with the Celts, tribal people who lived mainly in England, Ireland and Scotland. For them, summer was important, because of their crops, and winter was feared, because it...

History books favor stories of conquest, not of continuity, so it is perhaps not surprising that many Englishmen grow up believing they are a fighting mixture of the Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Danes, Vikings and Normans who invaded Britain. The defeated Celts, by this reckoning, left their legacy only in the hinterlands of Ireland, Scotland and Wales. A new genetic survey of Y chromosomes throughout the British Isles has revealed a very different story. The Celtic inhabitants of Britain were real survivors. Nowhere were they entirely replaced by the invaders and they survive in high proportions, often 50 percent or more, throughout...

It would be extremely beneficial at this point if we could simply produce the original autographs for examination. This would greatly simplify the operation of establishing correctly the New Testament Text. But this simply cannot happen. It has long been acknowledged by scholars that we no longer have the "originals." They have long since passed from the scene. This is due to the fact that scribes were known to destroy worn out MSS after they had copied them. Apparently the church valued the WORDS of the original more than the original itself. Therefore, the readings of the originals must be...

LONDON (Reuters) - The construction of one of Britain's most famous ancient landmarks, the towering megaliths at Stonehenge in southern England, might have been supervised by the Swiss, or maybe even the Germans. Archaeologists studying the remains of a wealthy archer found in a 4,000-year-old grave exhumed near Stonehenge last year said Monday he was originally from the Alps region, probably modern-day Switzerland, Austria or Germany. "He would have been a very important person in the Stonehenge area and it is fascinating to think that someone from abroad -- probably modern-day Switzerland -- could have played an important part in...

Was Troy a Metropolis? Homer Isn't Talking By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD new Trojan War has broken out. In the warrior roles of Achilles and Hector are two respected professors on the same German university faculty who could not differ more fully and vehemently over what to make of the ruins at the presumed site in western Turkey of the legendary siege in the 13th century B.C. immortalized by Homer. One adversary, an archaeologist who has directed excavations there since 1988, contends that he has found telling evidence of Troy as a much larger and more important city than previously thought....

Oct. 4, 2002 Celestial Bronze Age disc recovered Sensational archaeological find from eastern Germany returned to safety after three years by Heidi Sylvester Journalists last week received their first opportunity to inspect the site where an Early Bronze Age disc with gold foil ornaments - perhaps the oldest cosmological picture ever found - was abruptly ripped from the earth three years ago by local looters. The archaeological sensation was unearthed in a forest near the village of Nebra in the eastern German state of Saxony-Anhalt. The site was located after one of a band of shady treasure hunters confessed where...

The Goths and Later Germanic Invaders Little is known about the early history of the Goths before they came into contact with the Romans. What little evidence we have indicates that they probably came from Scandinavia. In the first millennium B. C., they crossed the Baltic Sea and migrated into Northeastern Europe in the area occupied by Poland today. Later, they moved again and made their home in the area north of the Black Sea. Nobody knows for sure what caused these migrations but they became known as the Wanderings of the Peoples. Anthropologists speculate that changes in climate caused...

Who were the Celts? The Celts were a group of peoples that occupied lands stretching from the British Isles to Gallatia. The Celts had many dealings with other cultures that bordered the lands occupied by these peoples, and even though there is no written record of the Celts stemming from their own documents, we can piece together a fair picture of them from archeological evidence as well as historical accounts from other cultures. The first historical recorded encounter of a people displaying the cultural traits associated with the Celts comes from northern Italy around 400 BC, when a previously unkown...

Roman villas found under playing field By Catherine Milner, Arts Correspondent (Filed: 18/08/2002) The remains of two Roman villas have been found under a football pitch in Wiltshire in what is believed to be one of the most significant archaeological discoveries since the early 1960s. The houses, which were built for Roman aristocrats in about 350AD, have 40 rooms each and feature an extensive mosaic which is thought to be one of the biggest and best-preserved Roman examples ever found in Britain. Archaeologists from Bristol and Cardiff universities, who are carrying out the excavation, have also exhumed the body of...