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The casting of award-winning actor Denzel Washington as the legendary ancient general Hannibal Barca in an upcoming Netflix project has reportedly outraged Tunisians who argue it is racial recasting that erases their history. Netflix touted the film in a press release, about "the Carthaginian general who famously led an army of warriors and elephants across the Alps to fight the Roman Republic during the Second Punic War." Hannibal’s home region of Carthage is now within Tunisia, the northernmost state in Africa and considered to be part of the Arabic world. According to an English translation of French-language Tunisian news outlet...

A very rich votive deposit made up of at least sixty terracotta statuettes, protomes and female busts, oil lamps and small vases, bronze fragments, mixed with a large number of bones: this is what emerged during the excavations in the Valley of the Temples, in House VII b, which forms part of the housing complex north of the temple of Juno. The campaign is entirely financed and supported by the Sicilian Region through the Archaeological Park, directed by Roberto Sciarratta, and is led by the archaeologist Maria Concetta Parello. The finds allow us to understand the dynamics of the destruction...

...The new study supports the results of an earlier chemical analysis of the soldiers' teeth. Published last year... the paper found that roughly two-thirds of soldiers who died during the 480 battle were not of Greek origin and that one-fourth of troops who died in 409 were not local to the area...That’s likely because paying soldiers to fight did not fit the prevailing narrative of "heroic Greek armies of citizens and the armored spearmen known as hoplites" rising up to defend Himera that Greek writers wanted to portray, study co-author David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard University, tells the New...

Archaeologists working at the ancient Greek city of Himera in northern Sicily have uncovered what they now believe to be the largest Greek necropolis on the island... Hundreds of graves have already been uncovered but archaeologists believe there are thousands more waiting to be found in the burial ground of the city, which rose to prominence more than 2,500 years ago. "The necropolis is of an extraordinary beauty and notable dimensions," Sicily's regional councillor for culture, Antonello Antinoro, said Tuesday. "Preliminary estimates indicate the presence of around 10,000 tombs, which gives the site a good claim to being one...

This documentary rewrites the history of South America: Did Roman slaves escape to the "New World" 2000 years ago?In 146 B.C., Rome attacked Carthage. The fate of the survivors: they became Roman slaves. This thrilling South America centric documentary poses a thought-provoking question: Could some of these Carthaginian refugees have fled their Roman captors, journeying across the Atlantic to seek refuge in the untamed landscapes of South America?Unveiling for the first time, compelling evidence that sheds new light on this hypothesis, our documentary delves into fresh archaeological findings in the lush Amazon, employs cutting-edge genetic analyses of South Americas contemporary...

History books tell us that Portuguese navigators found the Azores islands uninhabited in the middle of the Atlantic during the early 1400s. But some intriguing constructions suggest that people occupied this area long before.So, who was this civilisation, and why did they leave?Was the Azores home to an ancient civilisation? | Next Stop Stories | BBC Reel | October 28, 2022

Researchers have discovered evidence to support the idea that Vikings settled on the Azores several hundred years before the Portuguese arrived in 1427. Evidence from animal remains has led ecologist Pedro Raposeiro and his team, of the University of the Azores, to believe the Vikings were there first.... ...Evolutionary biologist Dr Jeremy Searle of Cornell University has supported the conclusions by Mr Raposeiro. He has also argued that Vikings made it to the Azores - but his work is based on the mouse as his biological source....

An international team of researchers has found evidence that people lived on islands in the Azores archipelago approximately 700 years earlier than prior evidence has shown. In their paper, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the group describes their study of sediment cores taken from lakes on some of the islands in the archipelago.Due to the absence of other evidence, historians have believed that people first arrived in the Azores in 1427, when Portuguese sailor Diogo de Silves landed on Santa Maria Island. Soon thereafter, others from Portugal arrived and made the archipelago their home. In this...

Combing through the Amazon wilderness, archeologists made an amazing discovery: artifacts of ancient seafaring people from the Iberian Peninsula. They may have fled the carnage of the Roman Empire's war on Carthage, called by some historians the Roman holocaust. This documentary investigates the claim that South America was discovered and settled by Mediterranean peoples over 2,000 years ago.The Mystery Of Carthaginians In The Americas | Lost WarriorsTimeline - World History Documentaries | October 20, 2022

The president of the Portuguese Association of Archeological Research (APIA), Nuno Ribeiro, revealed Monday having found rock art on the island of Terceira, supporting his believe that human occupation of the Azores predates the arrival of the Portuguese by many thousands of years, Lusa reported. "We have found a rock art site with representations we believe can be dated back to the Bronze Age," Ribeiro told Lusa in Ponta Delgada, at a presentation in University of the Azores on the topic of early human occupation of the Azores. The oldest cave art known in Europe is of prehistoric origin, dating...

Gibraltar finally joined the official list of British cities on Monday (Aug 29), after 180 years in which its status, granted by Queen Victoria, had been overlooked due to an administrative error. The British overseas territory bid to become a city earlier this year as part of the celebrations for Queen Elizabeth's Platinum Jubilee, but research in the National Archives established it had in fact been granted city status in 1842. "It is excellent to see official recognition given to the City of Gibraltar, a huge accolade to its rich history and dynamism," British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said in...

Artifacts from hundreds of archeological sites from southern Chad to the shores of the Atlantic Ocean in Cameroon... research was conducted between 1999 and 2004 as construction was underway on the underground petroleum pipeline... which is more than 1000 kilometers long.... 472 archeological sites along the area in both Cameroon and Chad were found .some dating back to as long ago as 100,000 years. He says, "we found sites where people had lived, where people had stored food, where people had made tools of iron. Before people in this area used iron, they made a whole variety of different...

Thanks to archaeological research undertaken in the 1950s, a great deal is already known about the ancient occupation of the island. Phoenician merchants established a trading counter there in the 7th or 6th century BC, followed later by more temporary stays on the island during the reign of the Mauretanian King Juba II. According to a statement made to the press by Abdeslem Mikdad, co-director of the current research programme, the Romans were also present on the island towards the end of the 3rd century AD. The programme also envisages prospections in the Essaouira region, in order to discover the...

UNIVERSITY COMMUNICATIONS |PH: (403) 220-3500 | FAX: (403) 282-8413 Greg Harris, Media Relations (403) 220-3506 (403) 540-7306 (cell)August 15, 2002Centuries-old African structures have never been excavated U of C-led team hopes to unlock mysteries of Cameroon’s granite strongholdsA University of Calgary archaeologist is leading the first expedition to excavate the so-called Strongholds of Cameroon, which are some of the most remarkable stone-built structures anywhere in Africa.Located in the Mandara Mountains of northern Cameroon, the strongholds range in size from small standalone structures, to complex, castle-sized fortresses with  platforms, terraces and covered passageways. The curving walls on some of the...

Republican Rome was pushed to the brink of collapse on August 2, 216 B.C., when the Carthaginian general Hannibal annihilated at least 50,000 of its legionaries at the Second Punic War’s Battle of Cannae.

As part of a DFG-funded project, a German-Tunisian team co-directed by LMU archaeologist Stefan Ritter has surveyed the ancient city of Meninx on the island of Jerba and reconstructed its trading links in antiquity. The port of Meninx was unusually situated and well protected. Incoming ships first had to negotiate a deep and broad submarine channel in the otherwise shallow bay, before approaching the city itself via another channel that ran parallel to the coast for much of its length. They then had to traverse a wide stretch of shallow water to reach the city's wooden and stone quays, which...

An Etruscan hypogeum which is 'considered exceptional within the western Mediterranean' has just been discovered within this ancient cemetery on Corsica... which is believed to date all the way back to between the 4th and 5th centuries B.C. According to Forbes, this burial ground in southern Aléria was first spotted after a new home was slated to be built. However, it was swiftly discovered that this was already the enormous home to the many people who had been buried here thousands of years ago. ...at one point in time it was much larger, with a history that stretches straight back...

Alexander Hardcastle spent a decade searching for the fabled theatre, which is said to be buried beneath the remains of Akragas, a city established by Greek colonists six centuries before Christ on the southern coast of Sicily... Hardcastle, a former soldier who had served with the Royal Engineers in the Boer War, believed that remains of the stone-built theatre had survived, despite Akragas being shaken by earthquakes, sacked by the Carthaginians and plundered for its stone. The Harrow-educated gentleman scholar, who was born in Belgravia, spent a fortune on the quest between 1920 and 1930, but lost all his money...

Archaeologists working in Sicily's Valley of the Temples have found traces of a settlement thought to pre-date the famous Greek temples built there in around 600 BC... The discovery of a structure possibly built before the Greeks arrived came during preparatory work ahead of a project to shore up the ground near the Temple of Hera. Archaeologists uncovered a mysterious walled structure on top of which ancient Greeks had apparently built a shrine and a burial ground. Until now it has been thought that Agrigento was settled by the Greeks soon after they began starting colonies in much of the...

[snip] I'm in Syracuse on Sicily's east coast, founded by the Greeks 27 centuries ago. In the city's ancient heart is the Duomo, the Cathedral of Syracuse. Today, this is a Christian church, but to walk through its doors is to take a trip back in time to 500 years before Christ was even born. The Duomo began life in 480 BC as the building project of a Greek tyrant, who having beaten the Carthaginians in battle, used the loot to build this. And these are the columns from that temple, soaring up into the sky. It was topped by...