Free Republic

Archaeologists working in China recently revealed a series of extensive underground tunnels believed to be thousands of years old. Researchers working at the ancient stone city of Houchengzui, northern China (Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region), uncovered the extensive network of tunnels thought to be at least 4,300 years old, according to Heritage Daily. The oval-shaped Neolithic city is roughly 341 acres across and home to ancient transportation and defensive networks. Only six underground tunnel passages have been discovered so far, each between 1.5 and 6 meters depth... They’re also around 1 to 2 meters high, and 1.5 meters wide. Extensive tunnel...

For thousands of years, our ancestors found solace in the winter solstice. Today, that belief is still reflected in the astonishing sight of the sun setting on Orkney's Maeshowe tomb. Located 10 miles off Scotland's north-eastern coast, the Orkney islands are a treasure trove of history, from the famous Neolithic village Skara Brae to the hauntingly beautiful Ring of Brodgar – a spellbinding stone circle that was a site of ritual and ceremony. However, when I visited another of Orkney's famous prehistoric sites, the Maeshowe tomb, my first impression was of an unremarkable green mound surrounded by a ditch. Despite...

Last year the project uncovered the remains of a large timber Royal Hall, confirming the location as a royal settlement of the East Anglian Kings.This year's excavations also uncovered evidence of metalworking associated with royal occupation, including a mould used for casting decorative horse harnesses similar to that known from the burial ground at Sutton Hoo.The royal compound was found to have been more than twice the size than previously thought at around 15 hectares, which is equivalent to the size of 20 football pitches. The compound was part of a wider settlement complex covering around 50 hectares which is...

Once mistaken for the Great Wall of China, archeologists have unearthed an ancient city complete with a 70-meter (230-foot) pyramid, decapitated heads, and a bounty of precious gems. The 4,300-year-old stone city is now named Shimao, although its ancient name is unknown. At 400 hectares... Shimao is found in a region often been described in Chinese histories as a home to "barbarians". While little is known about the ancient city, its grandeur and intricacy suggest it was once politically and economically important in the region. The buildings were quarried from nearby sandstone whose extraction, transportation, and use were labor-intensive and...

A recent discovery at a ruined city in north-west China has amazed archaeologists and other experts. Researchers at the Bronze Age archaeological site of Shimao have identified a large step pyramid. This unusual find is bound to add to our knowledge of early China and throw some light on the mysterious culture that thrived for centuries in the city of Shimao. It is also challenging notions as to when and where Chinese civilization began to develop and where it first emerged.

An Oxford University-led... research team... will be looking at a group of artefacts in excavations and museum collections that are traditionally described as ‘Celtic’ because of their use of spirals, circles, interlaced designs, or swirling representations of plants or animals. One main line of enquiry is the relationship between the central European Celts and their nomadic Eurasian neighbours (often referred to as Scythians or Sarmatians), who inhabited the European end of a grassland (steppe) corridor that stretched east towards Central Asia and China... Iron Age tombs frozen in the mountains of Siberia, Mongolia, and Kazakhstan have yielded Roman glass, Chinese...

URUMQI (China): An exhibit in the museum in Urumqui gives the government's unambiguous take on the history of this border region: "Xinjiang has been an inalienable part of the territory of China," says one prominent sign. But walk upstairs and the ancient corpses on display seem to tell a different story. One called the Loulan Beauty lies on her back with her shoulder-length hair matted down her high cheekbones and long nose the most obvious signs that she is not what one thinks of as Chinese. The Loulan Beauty is one of more than 200 remarkably well-preserved mummies discovered in...

Excavation of ancient desert tombs ends, riddles waiting to answer www.chinaview.cn 2005-03-20 15:33:59 URUMQI, March 20 (Xinhuanet) -- Chinese archaeologists finished the excavation of an ancient tomb complex in the Lop Nur Desert, northwest China, but researchers say the finds are puzzling and need more time to be understood. By mid March, archaeologists in Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region unearthed 163 tombs of the Xiaohe Tomb complex, which sprawls on a 2,500-square-meter oval-shaped dune, 174 km from the ruins of the Loulan Kingdom, an ancient civilization that vanished 1,500 years ago. The complex contains about 330 tombs, but about 160 of...

The prehistoric site is known as Tainiaro, located about 50 miles south of the Arctic Circle in the Finnish region of Lapland...Back in 1959, local workers came across stone tools in Simo, which is situated near the Baltic Sea's northern edge, just 80 kilometers to the south of the Arctic Circle. The site, named Tainiaro, underwent partial excavations in the 80s. This led to the revelation of thousands of artifacts, including pottery, stone tools, and animal bones.The archaeologists were also able to notice 127 possible pits of different sizes that could have been sediment-filled. Some had burning evidence, while others...

Located near Antequera in Malaga (Andalucia, Spain), Menga is part of a UNESCO World Heritage site consisting of three dolmens constructed between 3800 – 3600 BC. It is one of the largest megalithic structures in Europe and was built on the top of a hill with giant rocks. It is renowned for its enormous orthostats or vertical stones, one of which weighs nearly 150 tons...Using petrographic and stratigraphic analysis techniques, the researchers discovered most of the stones were calcarenites... The researchers write in their paper that moving and building a dolmen from such large, massive but fragile stones would require...

Divers off the coast of Naples, Italy have recovered a large chunk of chiseled obsidian that likely went down in a Stone Age shipwreck more than 5,000 years ago.Divers from Naples, Italy have recovered a block of obsidian from the remains of what is likely a Neolithic, or New Stone Age shipwreck near the island of Capri.The natural-glass block is about the size of a very large book and weighs almost 17.6 pounds (8 kilograms). There are visible signs of chiseling on its surface, and archaeologists think it was an obsidian "core" that would have been used to make sharp-edged...

A new study discovers that ancient headless skeletons discovered in mass graves in China are the remains of victims who were massacred around 4,100 years ago in headhunting events.In China, researchers discovered a mass grave containing 41 headless skeletons. The Honghe site grave contains the largest known Neolithic Chinese headhunting massacre. Thrity-two individuals appear to have been killed during the same event.Since its initial discovery in the 1990s, the gruesome site has been the subject of six different excavations. In the most recent, researchers discovered 68 skeletons in two houses and three tombs, including 41 without heads. The bodies are...

A re-analysis of more than 300 sets of 5,000-year-old skeletal remains excavated from a site in Spain suggests that many of the individuals may have been casualties of the earliest period of warfare in Europe, occurring over 1,000 years before the previous earliest known larger-scale conflict in the region...Teresa Fernández‑Crespo and colleagues re-examined the skeletal remains of 338 individuals for evidence of healed and unhealed injuries. All the remains were from a single mass burial site in a shallow cave in the Rioja Alavesa region of northern Spain, radiocarbon dated to between 5,400 and 5,000 years ago. 52 flint arrowheads...

Excavators at the site of Gobekli Tepe in southeastern Turkey have uncovered the life-size statue of a wild boar, carved out of limestone. According to a statement by the German Archaeological Institute, the statue dates to the early Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (c. 8700–8200 BCE)... Described as Turkey's Stonehenge, Gobekli Tepe predates that site, as well as the Egyptian pyramids and even the invention of writing, by more than 5,000 years.The boar statue was discovered within the remains of one of the site's buildings, dubbed Special Building D. Placed on top of a long and decorated bench between two pillars, the...

Archaeologists in Cyprus have discovered what they believe could be the oldest evidence yet that organized groups of ancient mariners were plying the east Mediterranean, possibly as far back as 14,000 years ago... about 30 miles away from the closest land mass, may have been gradually populated about that time, and up to 2,000 years earlier than previously thought... The discovery at a coastal site on the island's northwest has revealed chipped tools submerged in the sea and made with local stone which could be the earliest trace yet of human activity in Cyprus. U.S. and Cypriot archaeologists conducting the...

The Neolithic period of northern Arabia is known in part from the monumental stone structures and accompanying cave art, as well as the remains of hearths indicating temporary settlement. But there is much we do not know about the character and timing of settlement before the spread of animal pastoralism (c. 6000 BC).Researchers have recently discovered new, enigmatic carvings that shed light on this ancient history.Five panels totaling nine large life-size specimens have so far been identified. The camels have frequently had other camels carved over them or had their features and proportions improved, which suggests the site was used...

The development of the earliest cities in Mesopotamia and the Middle East led to a substantial increase in violence between inhabitants. Laws, centralized administration, trade and culture then caused the ratio of violent deaths to fall back again in the Early and Middle Bronze Age... This is the conclusion of an international team of researchers from the Universities of Tübingen, Barcelona and Warsaw. Their results were published in Nature Human Behaviour.The researchers examined 3,539 skeletons from the region that today covers Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Israel and Turkey for bone trauma which could only have occurred through violence. This...

Only a few miles outside of Cardiff, this impressive ancient monument is well worth a visit. Boasting the largest capstone chamber in Europe, it's not the heaviest capstone, but it is huge weighing in at 40 tonnes.Join us for a quick tour of the 6000 year old site, 1000 years older than stonehenge is estimated to be, as we explore the popular folklore.Ancient Monument in Cardiff, Wales! History & Folklore | 4:53CoralJackz | 470 subscribers | 4,964 views | August 11, 2023

Agriculture in Syria started with a bang 12,800 years ago as a fragmented comet slammed into the Earth's atmosphere. The explosion and subsequent environmental changes forced hunter-gatherers in the prehistoric settlement of Abu Hureyra to adopt agricultural practices to boost their chances for survival. That's the assertion made by an international group of scientists in one of four related research papers, all appearing in the journal Science Open: Airbursts and Cratering Impacts. The papers are the latest results in the investigation of the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, the idea that an anomalous cooling of the Earth almost 13 millennia ago...

In southern Spain’s Cave of the Bats, starting almost 10,000 years ago, people buried their dead with stunningly crafted baskets that wouldn’t shame the finest arts and crafts markets today.Armed with elaborate baskets made of the tough local grass, the first to bury their loved ones at Cueva de los Murciélagos were hunter-gatherers in the Mesolithic (at the tail end of the Ice Age). That activity then ceased for about 2,000 years, at which point a new population appeared in the cave: early farmers of the Neolithic, who interred their dead with a different type of woven-ware – and sandals...