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Authorities announced Monday that two incredibly rare Roman cavalry swords were uncovered in the Cotswolds, England, during a metal detectorist rally.The two Roman cavalry swords were found along with their wooden scabbards and fitments, according to a press release from the Cotswold District Council. There was also a broken copper alloy bowl discovered with the weaponry.Fitments were discovered by Glenn Manning during a metal detectorist rally in the north of the Cotswolds.The swords have been appraised by Professor Simon James from Leicester University who says that these weapons are middle imperial Roman swords, which are often referred to as a...

Excavations were conducted by Cotswold Archaeology in preparation for a housing development by Taylor Wimpey at Bidwell West, located next to Houghton Regis and Dunstable.The team found a medieval timber-framed building and a series of medieval enclosure ditches, in addition to the tableman which was made from a cattle mandible.Tablemen were used to play various board games, where two players would typically roll dice and move their pieces across rows of markings. The word ‘tables’ is derived from the Latin tabula which primarily meant “board” or “plank” and was first introduced to Britain during the Roman period.One of the more...

...near the town of Buckingham in Buckinghamshire, England... the site was part of an earlier Anglo-Saxon estate that developed after the year 949.Excavations revealed that the site was first occupied during prehistory, with the discovery of a possible ring ditch and a Mesolithic mace head found in a post-medieval quarry pit. The mace head possibly originated from a truncated deposit internal to the putative ring ditch.The first depiction of a watermill can be found in 17th century historic maps, which fell in disuse by 1825 and was repurposed until eventually being demolished in the 1940's.Archaeological remains suggest that the watermill...

The time team had barely begun day one at the South Cerney site near Cirencester when a Bronze Age spearhead was uncovered in a condition they called pristine...The spear made point, there was more. Work on the site of a planned new £200,000 wildlife habitat scheme at a Thames Water sewage works has uncovered and identified finds and features from a range of periods including six Late Bronze Age to Early Iron Age timber-posted roundhouses, two Roman trackways, and a mix of pottery and animal bone.The spearhead was found in a shallow pit surrounded by a circle of stakeholes. Athough...

Archaeologists at a city dig site have uncovered a medieval tiled floor dating back to around the 13th Century. The discovery was made in Gloucestershire at the location of the new £107m development, The Forum. The floor, made of glazed white and green tiles, belonged to the cloister of the city's medieval Whitefriars Carmelite Friary and was unearthed by the Cotswold Archaeology team. Archaeologist Anthony Beechey described the find as "extra special". Mr Beechey explained that the "beautiful tiled floor is in remarkably good condition". "Most of our Whitefriars findings are fragments of the original structure while this floor is...

Most of the people buried in one of the best-preserved Neolithic tombs in Britain were from five continuous generations of a single extended family, new research involving the University of York has revealed.In a study published in Nature, researchers analysed DNA extracted from the bones and teeth of 35 individuals entombed approximately 5700 years ago at Hazleton North long cairn in the Cotswolds-Severn region. They found that 27 of them were descended from four women who all had children with the same man.KinshipThe group lived around 100 years after farming had been introduced to Britain and the authors of the...

Carmelite friars established Whitefriars in 1270, but the religious site was destroyed during the Protestant ReformationArchaeologists digging under the remains of a demolished parking garage in Gloucester, England, have found the ruins of a 13th-century monastery, BBC News reports. Established around 1270, the Carmelite friary—known as Whitefriars—was all but demolished during the 16th century. Historians had long been aware of the house of worship’s existence, but they didn’t know exactly where it was located. Researchers from the Gloucester City Council and Cotswold Archaeology took advantage of a redevelopment project in the city’s King’s Quarter neighborhood to investigate. “For around 300...

Pterosaurs may have scared frenzied tourists in 2015's "Jurassic World," but a newly classified species of the ancient reptile may have scared the wits out of its prey during the Jurassic era because of its massive fangs, a trait largely unseen in any of its relatives. Known as Klobiodon rochei (which means "cage tooth"), the species was discovered after bone fragments were taken from Stonefield Slate — an area, approximately 10 miles northwest of Oxford, described as a "rich source of Jurassic fossils." It was where the Megalosaurus, the first dinosaur discovered in Britain, was found. "Klobiodon has been known...

'The bones of Elizabeth I, Good Queen Bess, lie mingled with those of her sister, Bloody Mary, in a single tomb at Westminster Abbey. But are they really royal remains — or evidence of the greatest conspiracy in English history?. If that is not the skeleton of Elizabeth Tudor, the past four centuries of British history have been founded on a lie.'

The bones of Elizabeth I, Good Queen Bess, lie mingled with those of her sister, Bloody Mary, in a single tomb at Westminster Abbey. But are they really royal remains — or evidence of the greatest conspiracy in English history? If that is not the skeleton of Elizabeth Tudor, the past four centuries of British history have been founded on a lie. And according to a controversial new book, the lie began on an autumn morning 470 years ago, when panic swept through a little group of courtiers in a manor house in the Cotswold village of Bisley in Gloucestershire.The...

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...

Mysteries come in many forms: ancient, modern, unsolved, and unexplained. But the world's most mysterious buildings are a physical force to be reckoned with. They've become popularized on websites full of user-generated and editor-curated like Abandoned-places.com, weburbanist.com, and AtlasObscura.com, an exhaustive database of the unusual. "In an age where it sometimes seems like there's nothing left to discover, our site is for people who still believe in exploration," says AtlasObscura.com cofounder Joshua Foer. Our definition of mysterious is broad and varied. Some buildings on our list are being eaten alive by the earth, such as a lava-buried church in the...