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Swedish archaeologists in cooperation with the antiquities department have excavated two burial tombs at the site of Dromolaxia-Vyzakia that they believe belonged to two rich families judging by the nature of the finds, they said on Friday.This large Late Bronze Age city, which flourished between 1630 and 1150 BC, is situated along the shores of the Larnaca Salt Lake near the mosque of Hala Sultan Tekke.Both tombs contained material from the outgoing 15th and the 14th centuries BC, which chronologically corresponds to the Late Cypriot IIA-B period, the Late Helladic IIIA1-2 and the famous Egyptian 18th Dynasty. One of the...

3,500 years ago, the island underwent a period of significant cultural transformations, namely the adoption of a new language and economic system, and major changes in burial customs and attire.Around the same time, many important sites across the island were destroyed and warriors’ graves appeared at the famed palace of Knossos, leading scholars to long believe that these seismic changes had been the result of a Mycenaean invasion...Rather than looking at things like burial, art, or dress, practices that tend to shift with fashion, archaeologists have begun to look more closely at more mundane, everyday practices as a better insight...

The team first studied the rules that the signs followed on the clay tablets and other accounting documents. Two problems had so far complicated the decipherment of Linear A fractions. First, all documents containing sums of fractional values with a registered total were damaged or difficult to interpret, and second, they contradicted uses of certain signs, which suggest the system changed over time. Thus, the starting premise had to rely on documents concentrated to a specific period (ca. 1600-1450 BCE), when the numerical system was in coherent use across Crete. To investigate the possible values of each fractional sign, the...

Archaeologists with the University of Cincinnati have discovered two Bronze Age tombs containing a trove of engraved jewelry and artifacts that promise to unlock secrets about life in ancient Greece. The UC archaeologists announced the discovery Tuesday in Greece. Jack Davis and Sharon Stocker, archaeologists in UC's classics department, found the two beehive-shaped tombs in Pylos, Greece, last year while investigating the area around the grave of an individual they have called the "Griffin Warrior," a Greek man whose final resting place they discovered nearby in 2015. Like the Griffin Warrior's tomb, the princely tombs overlooking the Mediterranean Sea also...

More than 4,000 years ago builders carved out the entire surface of a naturally pyramid-shaped promontory on the Greek island of Keros. They shaped it into terraces covered with 1,000 tonnes of specially imported gleaming white stone to give it the appearance of a giant stepped pyramid rising from the Aegean: the most imposing manmade structure in all the Cyclades archipelago... Archaeologists from three different countries involved in an ongoing excavation have found evidence of a complex of drainage tunnels -- constructed 1,000 years before the famous indoor plumbing of the Minoan palace of Knossos on Crete -- and traces...

Unlike its larger, postcard-perfect neighbors in the Aegean Sea, Keros is a tiny rocky dump inhabited by a single goatherd... more than half of all documented Cycladic figurines in museums and collections worldwide were found on Keros. Now, excavations by a Greek-British archaeology team have unearthed a cache of prehistoric statues -- all deliberately broken -- that they hope will help solve the Keros riddle... British excavation leader Colin Renfrew now believes Keros was a hugely important religious site where the smashed artwork was ceremoniously deposited.

FULL TITLE: Sprawling Greek monuments built 4,500 years ago on 'the world's oldest maritime sanctuary' reveal the impressive engineering skills of Bronze Age islanders Excavations around Keros show the technological prowess of Bronze Age Greeks Researchers found the remains of terraced walls and giant gleaming structures The structures were built using 1,000 tons of stone dug up six miles away Together they turned a tiny islet near Keros into a single, massive monument A remote Greek island known as the 'world's oldest maritime sanctuary' was once covered in complex monuments built using stone dug up six miles (10 km) away....

A rocky islet and a nearby hillside have yielded evidence of one of Greece's oldest and most enigmatic ritual sites. Imported stones and fragmented marble statuettes show that Dhaskalio and Kavos were "a symbolic central place for the Early Bronze Age" in the Aegean, according to Professor Colin Renfrew. Kavos is a stony, scrub-covered slope on the Cycladic island of Keros. Forty-five years ago Professor Renfrew, then a PhD student at Cambridge, found extensive looting there, with fragments of marble bowls and the famous Cycladic folded-arm figurines scattered across the surface. The date of the Dhaskalio Kavos site, based on...

ATHENS, Greece - British and Greek archaeologists are preparing a major excavation on a tiny Greek island to try to explain why it produced history's largest collection of Cycladic flat-faced marble figurines. Artwork from barren Keros inspired such artists as Pablo Picasso and Henry Moore but also attracted ruthless looters. Now experts are seeking insight into the island's possible role as a major religious center of the enigmatic Cycladic civilization some 4,500 years ago. Excavations will run April through June. "Keros is one of the riddles of prehistoric archaeology," said Peggy Sotirakopoulou, curator of the Cycladic collection at the Museum...

An ancient fortress which is 3,000 - 3,200 years old and was built with the so called Cyclopean masonry has been found by archaeologists in Bulgaria's Rhodope Mountains, near the town of Zlatograd and the border with Greece, and is taken as evidence that Ancient Thrace was part of the Mycenaean Civilization. The previously undetected fortress is roughly dated to 1,200 BC, i.e. to the time of Ancient Troy and the Trojan War. It is located near Zlatograd, Bulgaria's southernmost town, near the southern slopes of the Rhodope Mountains, in an area that is only about 20 kilometers away from...

An intact tomb from the early Mycenaean era (1650-1400 BC) has been unearthed by archaeologists in the region of Nemea, southern Greece. According to the Culture Ministry, the tomb is among the largest ever found in the region and is set apart by the short yet wide path leading to its entrance along with other features that place it in the early phase of the Mycenaean civilization. It was found in a Mycenaean cemetery in Aidonia. The Mycenaean civilization, with its palatial states, urban organization, sophisticated art and writing system, flourished in Greece in the 17th-12th centuries BC.

DNA is shedding light on the people who built Greece's earliest civilizations. Researchers analysed genetic data from skeletons dating to the Bronze Age, a period marked by the emergence of writing, complex urban planning and magnificent art and architecture. These ancient Aegean people were mostly descended from farmers who had settled the region thousands of years earlier. But they showed signs of genetic - and possibly cultural - contact with people to the north and to the east. Dr Iosif Lazaridis, from Harvard Medical School in Massachusetts, and colleagues focussed on burials from the Minoan civilization, which flourished on the...

The reasons for the end of the Mycenaean culture have been hotly debated among scholars. At present, there is no satisfactory explanation for the collapse of the Mycenaean palace systems. The two most common theories are population movement and internal conflict. The first attributes the destruction of Mycenaean sites to invaders. The hypothesis of a Dorian invasion, known as such in Ancient Greek tradition, that led to the end of Mycenaean Greece, is supported by sporadic archaeological evidence such as new types of burials, in particular cist graves, and the use of a new dialect of Greek, the Doric one....

For many years, the prevailing theory on how the Mycenaean civilisation collapsed was that devastating earthquakes led to the destruction of its palaces in the Peloponnese, southern Greece around 1,200 BC. Nevertheless, new evidence suggests that some type of internal uprising or an external invasion might have brought about the downfall of the Mycenaean civilisation. From 2012, a team led by German archaeologist Joseph Maran of Heidelberg University and geophysicist Klaus-G. Hinzen has been conducting research in Tiryns and Midea. The findings of their research were published in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America. "Although some of the...

According to a recent international study, the volcano of the island Santorini, Greece, erupted in the 16th century BC and not earlier. The survey characterized a number of research studies that took place in the past and have indicated that Santorini's volcano may have erupted a century earlier, as unreliable because the method based on tree-ring measurements that they used, could not provide them with accurate results. An international team of researchers led by Paolo Cherubini from the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research (WSL) has demonstrated in the scientific journal Antiquity, that this method cannot provide...

The results of the survey are particularly encouraging, as they brought to light new facts about the Middle Helladic and Early Mycenaean background of the settlements developed on the northern margin of the lake. In addition, the finding, with stratigraphic data, that the fortified settlements in the hills of Agios Ioannis and Aghia Marina have a phase of fortification, rehousing and abandonment chronologically analogous to the acropolis of Gla, ie around the middle of the 13th century BC, a milestone of the problems of the socio-political hierarchical relations of the Mycenaean northeastern coppaid field, as well as of the Orchomenos-Glas...

For a quarter century, Greek excavation director Nicholas Stampolidis and his dedicated team have been unearthing the untold stories of the people buried some 2,800 years ago in the necropolis of Orthi Petra at Eleutherna on Crete. Until now, the site has perhaps been best known for the tomb its excavators dubbed "A1K1," an assemblage of 141 cremated individuals, all but two of whom were aristocratic men who likely fell in battle in foreign lands. Excavated between 1992 and 1996, this elaborate rock-cut tomb was brimming with fantastic burial goods that date from the ninth to the seventh century B.C.,...

Cretan excavation sheds light on Dark Ages of Greek historyFinds from ancient Eleutherna at Cycladic Museum A marble statue of Aphrodite, from a second- to first-century-BC bathhouse in Eleutherna. By Nicholas Paphitis - Kathimerini English Edition On a narrow spur under the shadow of Mount Ida in central Crete, archaeologists for the past 20 years have been excavating a town that flourished from the Dark Ages of Greece’s early history until Medieval times. The Eleutherna project, a systematic dig carried out by a three-pronged team of top archaeologists from the University of Crete, is in itself unusual in a country...

Excavator Nicholas Stampolidis said his team discovered more than 3,000 pieces of gold foil in the 7th-century B.C. twin grave near the ancient town of Eleutherna... The tiny gold ornaments, from 1 to 4 centimetres (0.4 to 1.5 inches) long, had been sewn onto a lavish robe or shroud that initially wrapped the body of a woman and has almost completely rotted away but for a few off-white threads... The woman, who presumably had a high social or religious status, was buried with a second skeleton in a large jar sealed with a stone slab weighing more than half a...

Over 100 years of excavations on Crete have exposed elegant Minoan frescoes that once adorned the walls of the island’s Bronze Age palaces. This distinctively colorful Aegean art style flourished in the Middle Bronze Age (1750-1550 B.C.). The nearby inhabitants of Akrotiri, a city on the Cycladic island of Thera (modern Santorini), painted numerous artworks in the style of the Minoan frescoes before the island was decimated by a volcanic eruption in the late 17th or 16th century B.C. Until recently, there was no archaeological evidence of Minoan frescoes beyond the islands of the Aegean. Art exhibiting Aegean characteristics has...