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The cellar was unearthed by a team from the Frankfurt Monuments Office in the Heddernheim district of northwest Frankfurt, in March of 2023. Founded as a civilian settlement attached to a series of fortresses established by Augustus during his German campaigns, modern-day Heddernheim was the ancient city of Nida. It was made the capital of the Civitas Taunensium area by the emperor Trajan in In 110 A.D. and at its peak had a population of 10,000. It was gradually abandoned starting around 260 A.D. under pressure from invading Alemanni confederation. Its ruins above ground were visible until the 15th century when they were pillaged for construction materials. Most of the underground remains were all but destroyed during real estate developments in the 20th century.
This German language video gives a great overview of the site and the additional finds made in the cellar.
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The figurine head is two inches tall. It was broken off at the neck, but would originally have had a body.
Religion was a central part of daily life in most Roman provinces, and statues as well as portable figurines of gods like the one discovered at Smallhythe were worshipped by both the Roman elite and the ordinary citizens in their homes.
Pipeclay figurines were made of clays local to central Gaul (modern-day France) and the Rhine-Moselle region and were imported, however most pipeclay figurines found in Britain are of female deities, the majority being of Venus.
This complete figurine probably would have depicted Mercury standing, either draped with a chlamys (a short cloak), or naked, holding a caduceus (a staff with two intertwined snakes).
Smallhythe today is 10 miles from the sea, but when the settlement was founded in the 1st century it was a port town. It was small compared to the major urban center of Roman Britain, but was a significant link in the chain of ports that together formed Rome’s import and export network in southern England. Timber and iron were exported out of the province to the continent and finished products were imported.
The pipeclay Mercury head and CLB tile will go on display with other artifacts recovered from the site starting February 28th at the Smallhythe Place museum.
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A rare silver brooch depicting the she-wolf suckling the infants Romulus and Remus, the founding legend of Rome, has been discovered at the Hostalot – Idlum archaeological site in Vilanova d’Alcolea, Valencia, Spain. Dating to the 2nd century A.D., the brooch is unusual for its high quality of carving and because there are few comparable examples known.
The piece is small, just four centimeters (1.6 inches) long, and while the surface is worn, details of the original fine carving like the wolf’s mane are still visible. The original pin is still attached to its hinge in the back.
The Hostalot – Idlum site was a mansio, a rest stop on the Via Augusta road. Mansios were administered by the government to host officials, messengers and traveling dignitaries. They also offered horse-changing services to mail carriers to keep the postal service speedy and efficient. The Romulus and Remus brooch was unearthed from the main mansio building.
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According to archaeologist Dr. Marcin Burghardt from the Jarosław museum, the dagger discovered in Korzenica can be dated to the second half of the third millennium BC.
“In Polish lands, this is a period of enormous changes related to, among others, with a change in the main raw materials for the production of tools. Instead of flint tools commonly used in the Stone Age, more and more metal products appear, heralding the transition to the next period – the Bronze Age,” noted Dr. Burghardt.
He added that in this new era, tools, ornaments and weapons were made of bronze, an alloy created by combining two metals: copper and tin.
However, the currently discovered dagger from Korzenica – as noted by Dr. Elżbieta Sieradzka-Burghardt, an archaeologist from the museum in Jarosław – was not cast in bronze, but made of copper. “So it predates the development of bronze metallurgy,” the archaeologist noted. “In the third millennium BC, items made of copper were extremely rare, so only those with the highest social status could afford them. There is no doubt that the dagger is not a local product,” added Dr. Burghardt-Sieradzka.
It likely originated from the Carpathian Basin or the Ukranian steppe. Archaeologists hope metallurgic analysis will pin down the dagger’s origin. The blade is now part of the permanent collection of the Orsetti House Museum in Jarosław. After conservation and further study, it will go on display in June as part of the museum’s exhibition devoted to the oldest prehistory of the Jarosław area.
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The new findings show that cereals indeed played an important dietary role and that wild plants enriched the food spectrum of the earliest farmers in the north. The barley was harvested when milky ripe and prepared in a similar way to the green spelt traditionally produced in Baden-Württemberg. The emmer was processed in a sprouted state, which gave the porridge a sweet flavour. Food in the Neolithic Age was therefore by no means bland, but rather varied. People had a highly differentiated sense of taste and attached great importance to good flavour.
So far, chemical analyses of the pottery have shown that the vessels contained dairy products. A look at the crusts burnt onto the cooking pot now shows that cereals and dairy products were probably processed into porridge for everyday use in the same vessels and formed a balanced dietary basis. “While the animal fats are absorbed into the ceramic and leave a signal there, the plant food components can only be detected in the burnt food crust,” emphasises Dr Lucy Kubiak-Martens, cooperation partner of BIAX Consult (Netherlands) and first author of the study. This shows how important a multi-method approach is for reconstructing Neolithic recipes created from a variety of ingredients. These discoveries expand our understanding of the long and complex process of transforming plants into meals during the period that followed the introduction of the agricultural way of life and cultivated plants in north-central Europe.
The study has been published in the journal PLOS ONE and can be read here.
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Tradition has it that the first San Geminiano church was built by order of the Byzantine general Narses in the mid-6th century A.D. in appreciation of Venice’s contributions to his reconquest of Ravenna. Saint Mark the Evangelist wasn’t even the patron of Venice then (Saint Theodore was), so there was no Piazza San Marco. For that matter, there weren’t even any doges until the 8th century, and it was only in the 9th century, after the relics of St. Mark were smuggled out of Abbasid-ruled Alexandria in a basket filled with pork by Venetian merchants, that Mark became the city’s new patron.
The Church of San Geminiano burned down in 976 and a new one built in the first decade of the 11th century. That one burned and collapsed after an earthquake in around 1108. The reconstructed church was then demolished in the late 12th century to accommodate the expansion of Piazza San Marco. It was relocated to another location on the newly-expanded Piazza. The 12th century church was demolished in the early 16th century and the new one relocated again. This last one would stand until 1807 when it was demolished by Napoleon to make way for a new wing of the long colonnaded buildings that embrace three sides of the piazza.
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The burials were discovered last fall by a tractor driver when he hit a limestone slab while plowing a field near Nova Varbovka. He saw the human remains but didn’t realize they were archaeological in nature, so he reported the find to the mayor who reported it to the police thinking it might be a criminal matter. When the remains were examined by archaeologists from the Veliko Tarnovo Regional Museum of History, they were found to be from the Roman era and an emergency archaeological salvage excavation was launched. The dig took place in December 2023.
Chakarov, who excavated the burials along with colleagues Nedko Elenski and Mihaela Tomanova, noted that the Caracalla medallion could point to an Asia Minor origin for the occupants of the graves, which would be consistent with the fact that Nicopolis ad Istrum was built mainly by settlers from Asia Minor. “Of course, we are searching for an opportunity to make DNA and other analyses which our museum can’t afford, to see if this hypothesis is correct,” Chakarov said.
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National Museum of Denmark curator Kirstine Pommergaard believes the quality and construction of the ring suggests there may have been an unknown noble family in the Emmerlev area with close connections to Merovingian royalty.
“The gold ring not only reveals a possible new princely family in Emmerlev, but also connects the area with one of Europe’s largest centers of power in the Iron Age. The gold ring is probably a woman’s ring and may have belonged to a prince’s daughter who was married to a prince in Emmerlev. Gold was typically reserved for diplomatic gifts, and we know that people married into alliances, just it probably happened with Thyra and Gorm the Old and in more recent times when Christian IX became known as ‘Europe’s father-in-law’ for marrying his daughters into other royal houses, ” she says.
Archaeologists do not think the ring was at that location because it was lost on the way to somewhere else. Almost a thousand ancient and medieval artifacts (gold and silver trade coins, textiles, pottery) have been found at Emmerlev, evidence that busy international trade was taking place there for centuries. The trading post of Ribe was just 30 miles north of Emmerlev, an important stop in the lucrative trade network of the Wadden Sea region.
The find was actually made in 2020, but the discovery of the ring has been kept up wraps until now to allow metal detectorists and archaeologists to explore the site without unwanted attention.The finder, Lars Nielsen, turned the ring in to the Museum Sønderjylland when he found it, and the local museum has now transferred it to the National Museum in Copenhagen.
”We’ve never seen anything like it out here. Many discoveries have been made over time that point to global trade connections at the Wadden Sea. The gold ring substantiates that there has also been an elite who have had something to do with music. Not everyone has had contact with the Merovingians, ” says Anders Hartvig, museum curator at Museum Sønderjylland.
Kirstine Pommergaard adds:
“The Merovingians were interested in entering into a network with families and individuals who could control trade and resources in an area. “Perhaps the princely family in Emmerlev had control over an area between Ribe and Hedeby and thus secured trade in the area,” she says.
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Snakes have symbolic significance in many religions around the world, including in East Asian cultures. They can represent healing, as on the caduceus of Asclepius, god of medicine, metamorphosis and rebirth due their ability to shed their skins, the circle of life, as in the ouroboros (serpent biting its tail) of ancient Egypt, as intermediaries between heaven, earth and the underworld, as in the Aztec feathered serpent Quetzalcoatl and Apollo’s python who transmitted prophecy from the underworld to earth.
“Snakes are often regarded as symbolic animals in religion, mythology and literature, and are considered to be the bridge between heaven and man,” [Hung-Lin Chiu, associate professor of the Institute of Anthropology at Tsing Hua] said.
Given their ability to shed their skin, ancient societies in the region associated these animals with the cycle of life and death, and considered them to be symbols of creation and transition.
The snake-shaped pottery handle may have come from a sacrificial vessel for shamans in ancient tribal societies to perform rituals, according to the researchers.
“This reflects that ancient societies incorporated animal images into ritual sacrificial vessels to demonstrate their beliefs and cognitive systems,” Chiu said.
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A long sequence of apotropaic sayings against snakebite from the Pyramid Texts covers the north (entrance) wall . Interestingly, the snakes mentioned in these magical texts both represented a potential danger and could serve as powerful protectors of the deceased and his mummy. “While the entrance to the nearby Menechinekon’s burial chamber was protected by the guardians of the gates of the 144th chapter of the Book of the Dead, in the case of Džehutiemhat, snakes from the Pyramid Texts play this role,” adds Renata Landgráfová, director of the Czech Institute of Egyptology at the FF UK and an expert on the ancient Egyptian language and texts. The south and west walls are covered with a sacrificial ritual and an extensive sacrificial list. On the ceiling of the burial chamber there are depictions of the sun god’s journey through the sky, first in the morning and then in the evening celestial bar. The depictions are accompanied by hymns to the rising and setting sun.
Inside the burial chamber covered with relief decoration is a large stone sarcophagus, which also bears hieroglyphic inscriptions and depictions of gods, both outside and inside. The upper side of the sarcophagus lid is decorated with three columns of hieroglyphic text with the liturgy of the 178th chapter of the Book of the Dead , which is composed of excerpts from the much older Pyramid Texts . The longer sides of the lid are decorated with the 42nd chapter of the Book of the Dead dedicated to the deification of parts of the body of the deceased, including depictions of individual deities to which the deceased is compared. The shorter walls of the lid then bear images of the goddesses Eset and Nebtheta, with accompanying texts offering protection to the deceased.
On the outer walls of the sarcophagus there are excerpts from the Coffin Texts and the Pyramid Texts , which partially repeat sayings that already appear on the walls of the burial chamber. On the bottom of the inner wall of the sarcophagus bath, the goddess of the West is depicted, and its inner sides bear the so-called canopic sayings, spoken by this goddess and the earth god Geb. “The Goddess of the West inside the sarcophagus represents the protector, guide and symbolic mother of the deceased,” explains Jiří Janák, who analyzes and interprets religious and magical texts as part of field research. All the mentioned religio-magical texts were intended to ensure the deceased a smooth entry into a blissful and well-provided eternal life in the afterlife.
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The Gdańsk Crane is scheduled to reopen April 30th, 2024. The turtle dove love token, currently undergoing cleaning and conservation, will be on display in the renovated museum space when it opens.
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There are very few Early Paleoindian beads known to survive, and most of them are not securely dated because they are made of minerals (caliche, hematite) rather than bone. The bone beads on the archaeological record were found in slightly more recent contexts than the La Prele example.
The La Prele Mammoth site was first excavated in 1987. They uncovered a Paleoindian camp where the remains of a young Columbian mammoth had been processed using chipped stone tools. Radiocarbon dates of the mammoth bones found the site was occupied around 12,940 years before the present. The bead was found in a hearth area of the site about 11 miles from the mammoth remains. Stone flake tools, bone needles and the butchered and burned remains of prehistoric bison were unearthed there, but the bead was not derived from bison bones.
Researchers employed zooarchaeology by mass spectrometry (ZooMS) to identify the animal the bone came from, and the material turned out to be lagomorph bone, most likely from a hare rather than a rabbit.
This finding represents the first secure evidence for the use of hares during the Clovis period, which refers to a prehistoric era in North America, particularly prominent about 12,000 years ago. It’s named after the Clovis archaeological site in New Mexico, where distinctive stone tools were discovered.
The bead is about 7 millimeters in length, and its internal diameter averages 1.6 millimeters. The research team considered the possibility that the bead could have been the result of carnivore consumption and digestion and not created by humans; however, carnivores were not common on this site, and the artifact was recovered 1 meter from a dense scatter of other cultural materials.
Additionally, the grooves on the outside of the bead are consistent with creation by humans, either with stones or their teeth. Beads like this one were likely used to decorate their bodies or clothing.
The findings have been published in the journal Scientific Reports and can be read in full here.
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Anna Maria Luisa was the last of her dynasty, and after her death, the enormous artistic and architectural patrimony of the Medici was inherited by Francis Stephen of Lorraine, husband of Empress Maria Teresa of Austria, who would certainly have scattered it all, taking what he wanted to Vienna, melting down objects he didn’t care to keep, busting up Anna Maria’s legendary jewelry collection to sell the stones and selling off the innumerable artworks, objects and furnishings that today draw millions of tourists to Florence to the highest bidder. It is only thanks to the Family Pact she negotiated that the cultural treasures of Florence remained intact and in Florence instead of dispersed or destroyed. She died in the Pitti Palace (one of the museums offering free admission on the 18th) and her portrait welcomes visitors at the entrance to the Uffizi Gallery, an institution she created by stipulating in the Pact that it be transformed from the private family art gallery into one of the first public museums in Europe.
With her childlessness and death at the crux of Florence’s destiny, historians have hypothesized that syphilis, contracted from her philandering but much-loved husband, was the cause of both. Her body was exhumed in late 2012 as part of a collaborative project to assess damage caused to the family burials in the Medici Chapel in the Church of San Lorenzo. Osteological examination found no evidence of syphilis, to everyone’s surprise. Even Anna Maria herself was convinced she had it.
Contemporary sources, including the British diplomat Horace Mann, chronicle that in the winter of 1741, an “ugly evil began to open itself on one side of the breast, and was examined and considered by Dr. Franchi to be unhealable.” The lesion was also described as a “deep plague under the left breast, which keeps getting deeper and wider and continuously emits an acrid, biting liquid, and sometimes a small hemorrhage of blood.”
Anna Maria thought the “ugly evil” was a syphilitic ulcer and, fearful that it would expose her beloved late husband for his many sins and posthumously destroy his reputation, refused to be seen by anyone besides Dr. Franchi and her ladies in waiting. Over the next two years, her health declined steadily as she isolated herself in her rooms. Soon she was so weak she could not get out of bed. A fervently devout woman, the Electress was unable to attend mass at her private chapel even in a wheelchair.
The morning of February 18th, 1743, she “rendered her soul to God.” It was Carnivale time, and Anna Maria’s death cast a profound pall on Florence. Horace Mann wrote: “All of our happiness is finished. The Carnivale is ruined and we must cancel all of the costume parties: The Electress died an hour ago.”
Shortly before her death, she wrote instructions on the disposition of her body. She wanted only her ladies to wash her face and hands before burial. She did not want her cadaver “uncovered or opened up,” and wanted to be buried immediately. That did not happen. The Medici had a centuries-old tradition of removing organs and embalming their dead family members, and when her body was exhumed from the crypt in the Basilica of San Lorenzo 270 years later, her viscera and lungs were found in a separate vessel.
When the exhumation took place in October of 2012, the research team took extraordinary measures to grant the Electress some measure of the dignity she had sought. For the week her coffin and its contents were examined, view of the tomb was blocked by opaque plastic sheeting. The remains were 3D scanned so they could be studied virtually while her actual bones returned to their final resting place. DNA was also taken from a bone fragment and from the organs interred separately. Breast cancer now seems the most likely cause of death, but the results of the investigation have not yet been published.
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It is composed of 1,673 individual boulders placed next to each other for 971 meters along what was the shore of a lake before rising sea levels submerged it around 8,500 years ago. The deliberate alignment of the stones, the way smaller stones were used to connect larger three-foot boulders and the length of the wall indicates this was a megastructure built by Neolithic people, not a natural development caused by movement of glaciers.
The stones were first spotted by geologists investigating natural formations of manganese crusts on the seabed of Mecklenburg Bay in 2021. They reported the find to the Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania State Office for Culture and Monument Preservation who arranged for a team of multi-disciplinary researchers to investigate the structure. They used submersibles to collected sediment samples, created a detailed 3D model of the wall from geophysical data and dove the site to explore the wall close-up.
From the sediment samples, researchers were able to date construction to around 11,000 years ago in the early Mesolithic period. It was built by hunter-gatherers who inhabited the area and was likely a drive lane (a means to control the movement of animals to force them into a restricted space or, in this case, the lake itself) used to hunt migrating Eurasian reindeer. Prehistoric stone walls like these have been found elsewhere in the world (Jordan, Canada, Saudi Arabia, Greenland, the United States) but are all but unknown in Europe. The closest comparable example was found at the bottom of Lake Huron in Michigan where a stone wall was used to hunt migrating caribou 9,000 years ago. It is much shorter a wall than the Mecklenburg megastructure — 98 feet versus 3186 feet.
The stone wall and the surrounding seabed will be investigated in more detail using side-scan sonar, sediment echo sounder and multibeam echo sounder devices. Additionally, research divers from the University of Rostock and archaeologists from the LAKD M-V are planning further diving campaigns to search the stone wall and its surroundings for archaeological finds that could help with the interpretation of the structure.
Luminescence dating, which can be used to determine when the surface of a stone was last exposed to sunlight, may help in determining a more precise date that the stone wall was constructed. Furthermore, the researchers intend to reconstruct the ancient surrounding landscape in more detail.
“We have evidence for the existence of comparable stone walls at other locations in the Mecklenburg Bight. These will be systematically investigated as well,” explains Jens Schneider von Deimling from Kiel University.
The study has been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and can be read here.
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