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Amateur archaeologist Tom Garner had time to kill and took a drive along Pensacola Bay in the Florida Panhandle. Spying a newly cleared lot, he poked about, hoping to find artifacts from the city's rich history dating back centuries to the Spanish explorers. Garner stumbled upon some shards of 16th Spanish pottery. "There it was, artifacts from the 16th century lying on the ground," said Garner, a history buff whose discovery has made him a celebrity in archaeological circles. Experts have confirmed the find as the site of the long-lost land settlement of a doomed 1559 Spanish expedition to the...

It's not the first underground city to be discovered in the region; there are some 250 known subterranean dwellings of various sizes hidden within the fantastical landscape. The two biggest are Kaymakli and Derinkuyu; the latter is estimated to have been able to house up to 20,000 people. Both cities have been known for decades. But this new underground town, hiding beneath a centuries-old castle on a hilltop right in NevÅŸehir, just might be the biggest. One early estimate by geophysicists put its area at nearly five million square feet and its depth at 371 feet. If those estimates are...

Scientists say they have uncovered the remains of the earliest known massacre victims, dating from approximately 10,000 years ago. Archaeologists believe the victims were members of an extended family group of hunter-gatherers who were slaughtered by a rival group.

Silty fen preserved burning houses and domestic objects inside them to reveal unprecedented view of life 3,000 years ago. Almost 3,000 years after being destroyed by fire, the astonishingly well preserved remains of two Bronze Age houses and their contents have been discovered at a quarry site in Peterborough. The artefacts include a collection of everyday domestic objects unprecedented from any site in Britain, including jewellery, spears, daggers, giant food storage jars and delicate drinking cups, glass beads, textiles and a copper spindle with thread still wound around it. The remains of the large wooden houses, built on stilts in...

A view of the Rio Platano biosphere reserve in Honduras, where explorers over the past century have claimed several times to have spotted the White City Honduras said Thursday it was starting a major archeological dig for a mysterious, ancient "White City" supposedly hidden in jungle in its northeast that explorers and legends have spoken of for centuries. "Today a group of archeologists and scientists is traveling to the White City to start excavations in coming days," President Juan Orlando Hernandez said in a speech to private universities. The hope is that they will uncover incontrovertible proof of the existence...

As the terrorist group ISIS is pushed out of northern Iraq, archaeologists are resuming work in the region, making new discoveries and figuring out how to conserve archaeological sites and reclaim looted antiquities. Several discoveries, including new Neanderthal skeletal remains, have been made at Shanidar Cave, a site in Iraqi Kurdistan that was inhabited by Neanderthals more than 40,000 years ago. Additionally, though ISIS did destroy and loot a great number of sites, there are several ways for archaeologists, scientific institutions, governments and law enforcement agencies in North America and Europe to help save the region's heritage, said Dlshad Marf...

Scientists have grown a tree from what may be the oldest seed ever germinated. The new sapling was sprouted from a 2,000-year-old date palm excavated in Masada, the site of a cliff-side fortress in Israel where ancient Jews are said to have killed themselves to avoid capture by Roman invaders. Dubbed the "Methuselah Tree" after the oldest person in the Bible, the new plant has been growing steadily, and after 26 months, the tree was nearly four feet (1.2 meters) tall.

The entrance to the Mary of Nazareth International Center in central Nazareth doesn't look like much. It's just a simple doorway off narrow Casa Nova Street, a few hundred yards from the Basilica of the Annunciation. Yet inside this recently built Catholic evangelism center lies an amazing discovery that has sent shockwaves through the world of Biblical archaeology: the remains of a first-century stone house reliably dated to the early Roman period in Palestine. The Nazareth excavations are the first concrete archaeological proof that Nazareth was settled in the time of Jesus - and, judging from the limestone cups found...

Tuscany's Excalibur is the real thing, say scientists Rory Carroll in Rome Sunday September 16, 2001 The Observer The sword of St Galgano, said to have been plunged into a rock by a medieval Tuscan knight, has been authenticated, bolstering Italy's version of the Excalibur legend. Galgano Guidotti, a noble from Chiusdano, near Siena, allegedly split the stone with his sword in 1180 after renouncing war to become a hermit. For centuries the sword was assumed to be a fake. but research revealed last week has dated its metal to the twelfth century. Only the hilt, wooden grip and ...

BEIT SHEMESH, Israel — The carved stone block is about the size of an occasional table. It has held its secrets for two millenniums. Whoever engraved its enigmatic symbols was apparently depicting the ancient Jewish temples. But what makes the stone such a rare find in biblical archaeology, according to scholars, is that when it was carved, the Second Temple still stood in Jerusalem for the carver to see. The stone is a kind of ancient snapshot. And it is upending some long-held scholarly assumptions about ancient synagogues and their relationship with the Temple, a center of Jewish pilgrimage and...

Land-ice Bridge, New Research Suggests -- Research by a Valparaiso University geography professor and his students on the creation of Kankakee Sand Islands of Northwest Indiana is lending support to evidence that the first humans to settle the Americas came from Europe, a discovery that overturns decades of classroom lessons that nomadic tribes from Asia crossed a Bering Strait land-ice bridge. Valparaiso is a member of the Council on Undergraduate Research. Dr. Ron Janke began studying the origins of the Kankakee Sand Islands – a series of hundreds of small, moon-shaped dunes that stretch from the southern tips of Lake...

Research Casts New Light on History of North America Research by a Valparaiso University geography professor and his students lends support to evidence the first humans to settle the Americas came from Europe, rather than crossing a Bering Strait land-ice bridge. Valparaiso’s research shows the Kankakee Sand Islands – a series of hundreds of small dunes in the Kankakee River area of Northwest Indiana and northeastern Illinois – were created 14,500 to 15,000 years ago and that the region could not have been covered by ice as previously thought. Newswise — Research by a Valparaiso University geography professor and his...

In a surprisingly under-reported story from 2007, Mark Holley, a professor of underwater archaeology at Northwestern Michigan University College, discovered a series of stones – some of them arranged in a circle and one of which seemed to show carvings of a mastodon – 40-feet beneath the surface waters of Lake Michigan. [Image: Standing stones beneath Lake Michigan? View larger]. If verified, the carvings could be as much as 10,000 years old – coincident with the post-Ice Age presence of both humans and mastodons in the upper midwest. [Image: The stones beneath Lake Michigan; view larger]. In a PDF assembled by...

The iconic Stonehenge in the UK is one of the most famous prehistoric monuments in the world, but it is not the only stone formation of its kind. Similar stone alignments have been found throughout England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales… and now, it seems, in Lake Michigan. According to BLDGBLOG, in 2007, Mark Holley, professor of underwater archeology at Northwestern Michigan College, discovered a series of stones arranged in a circle 40 feet below the surface of Lake Michigan. One stone outside the circle seems to have carvings that resemble a mastodon—an elephant-like animal that went extinct about 10,000 years...

An archaeologist says it remains a mystery how a circle of stones initially arrived at the floor of Michigan's Grand Traverse Bay. Underwater archeologist Mark Holley said while he first discovered the underwater stones in 2007, no one has been able to prove whether the rocks were placed there by nature or by mankind, the Chicago Tribune reported Sunday. "The first thing I said when I came out of the water was, 'Oh no, I wish we wouldn't have found this,'" Holley said of his discovery. "This is going to invite so much controversy that this is where we're going...

An intact Etruscan tomb, complete with sarcophagi, a full array of grave goods and a mysterious marble head, has has been brought to light in the Umbria region of Italy, in what promises to be one of the most important archaeological findings in recent history. Dated to the end of the 4th century B.C., the burial site was found by a farmer who opened a void in the earth while working with his plow in a field near Citta della Pieve, a small town some 30 miles southwest of Perugia... Dated to the end of the 4th century B.C., the...

This remarkable seal or bulla of the Judean King Hezekiah was discovered by Efrat Greenwald at the Ophel, an ancient dump beside the wall that surrounds Jerusalem's Old City. This bulla was found with 33 additional bullae, many pottery sherds and figurines in Area A of the 2009 excavation season supervised by Hagai Cohen-Klonymus of Hebrew University in Jerusalem. This is the first seal impression of an Israelite or Judean king ever exposed in situ in a scientific archaeological excavation. Initial inspection failed to recognize the seal's importance and it was put in storage. Recently the bulla was identified by...

Archaeologists digging just south of Jerusalem's Temple Mount have made a historic discovery, unearthing the first-ever seal impression of an Israelite or Judean king ever exposed in situ in a scientific archaeological excavation. The discovery, made by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Institute of Archaeology under the direction of Dr. Eilat Mazar during Ophel excavations at the foot of the southern wall of the Temple Mount, is an impression of the royal seal of the Biblical King Hezekiah, who reigned between 727–698 BCE. Measuring 9.7 X 8.6 mm, the oval impression was imprinted on a 3 mm thick soft bulla...

The discovery of the Acra last week is "a dream come true" for archaeologists, who have been speculating on the citadel's location for 100 years, the IAA said. The discovery of Acra comes at a delicate time, for it reveals the story of the Maccabees, Antiochus and the coming Antichrist. All this is understood once we connect the dots and see the parallels between the Grecian Empire at the time of the Maccabees harassing God's people and the Antichrist who is also from the same empire (Asia Minor) harassing God's people today.

Mount Sinai was volcano in Saudi Arabia, says scientist By Roger Highfield Science Editor (Filed: 13/06/2003) Mount Sinai, where Scripture says Moses received God's Law, is located in Saudi Arabia, not Egypt's Sinai Peninsula - moving a key site for Judaism into the nation where Islam was founded, according to a Cambridge professor. Science also backs traditional beliefs that the Israelites' exodus from Egypt was led by Moses, roughly the way that the Bible tells it, according to Prof Colin Humphreys of Cambridge University. Prof Humphreys, a churchgoing Baptist and materials scientist, outlines his ideas in his forthcoming book: The...