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Boat builders of the Roskilde Viking Ship Museum will soon start a new experimental archeological project – the construction of a full-scale replica of the Viking ship Skuldelev 5.The original Skuldelev 5 ship can be seen in the museum’s Viking Ship Hall. The process of constructing the replica will last between four and five years, The Viking Herald reports...The ship was built in Denmark around ca. 1030 AD. It is 17.3 meters long and 2.5 meters wide – a long and narrow ship equipped with 26 oars and a mainsail, built for fast and efficient transport of warriors in times...

Maritime archaeologists from Bournemouth University have uncovered the remains of a medieval ship and its cargo dating back to the 13th century off the coast of Dorset. The survival of the vessel is extremely rare and there are no known wrecks of seagoing ships from the 11th to the 14th centuries in English waters. The discovery makes this the earliest English designated wreck site where hull remains can be seen.The ship was discovered in Poole Bay on the edge of the Swash Channel by local charter boat skipper Trevor Small of Rocket Charters who reported the discovery to archaeologists from...

A chance discovery is shedding new light on early Norse history, after two old school-friends, armed only with a metal detector stumbled across a gold treasure trove.More than 20 gold artefacts, weighing almost a kilo, were found buried in a field in the Danish village of Vindelev. Hidden for almost 1,500 years, the treasure includes Roman medallions and ornate pendants called 'bracteates' - some as large as a saucer.There are mysterious inscriptions and never-seen-before runes, which researchers think are some of the earliest references to Norse gods.So could Vindelev have been the seat of power for a previously unknown Iron...

Chersonesos is an ancient city on the Crimean peninsula, which was founded by Greek colonists at the end of the 6th century BC in order to supply their homeland with grain and other strategic resources. The farmland in the Greek colonies was vital to the survival of the Greek city-states. Excavations by Aarhus archaeologists are exploring the development of the rural area from its peak until its decline. One of the conclusions so far is that during a period of crisis in the early 3rd century BC a large proportion of the rural population was killed following a military invasion....

Locally sourced grapes and imported tar pitches may have been the norms for winemakers along the coast of Italy during the Roman period, according to jars recovered from the ocean near the harbor of San Felice Circeo. Three different wine jars, or amphorae, were recovered and analyzed, giving researchers a useful insight into the practices for producing wine in this particular region in 1–2 century BCE, part of the late Greco-Italic period. What makes the research particularly notable is that it combines some of the latest chemical analysis techniques with other approaches used in archaeobotany to discover more about these...

A Viking sword discovered by metal detectorists in Norway is revealing new insights into voyages in the North Sea.The sword was found in three pieces in the Jåttå/Gausel area in Stavanger, an area renowned for the grave of the “Gausel Queen” first discovered in 1883...Under Norwegian law, the sword was reported to authorities and was sent to the Museum of Archaeology at the University of Stavanger for further study and conservation work.Although the blade is missing, the hilt has unique details in gold and silver and includes gilded elements of the typical animal styles found during the Iron and Viking...

The oldest known shipwreck in the Indian Ocean has been sitting on the seafloor off the southern coast of Sri Lanka for some 2,000 years...The wreck lies 110 feet (33 meters) below the ocean's surface, just off the fishing village of Godavaya, where German archaeologists in the 1990s found a harbor that was an important port along the maritime Silk Road during the second century A.D..."Everything's pretty broken," said Deborah Carlson, president of the Institute of Nautical Archaeology at Texas A&M University, who is leading the expedition to the Godavaya wreck with colleagues from the United States, Sri Lanka and...

Archaeologists have announced the discovery of a massive marble head at the Antikythera Shipwreck in Greece, the site where the Antikythera mechanism was previously discovered in 1901. The Antikythera wreck is a Roman-era shipwreck dating from the 1st century BC. The site was discovered by sponge divers near the Greek island of Antikythera in 1900.Some scholars speculated that the ship was carrying part of the loot of the Roman General Sulla from Athens in 86 BC. A reference by the Greek writer, Lucian, to one of Sulla’s ships sinking in the Antikythera region gave which rise to this theory.Previous excavations...

Curator Irving Finkel recounts a magical adventure with The Lewis Chessmen. Content warning: wizard's chess.Irving Finkel and the Chamber of Lewis Chessmen | Curator's Corner | S 2 Ep9September 24, 2017 | The British Museum<

The Wallacean islands have always been separated from Asia and Oceania by deep-sea waters. Yet, these tropical islands were a corridor for modern humans migrating into the Pleistocene Australia-New Guinea landmass (Sahul) and have been home to modern human groups for at least 47,000 years. The archaeological record attests a major cultural transition across Wallacea that started around 3,500 years ago and is associated with the expansion of Austronesian-speaking farmers, who intermixed with local hunter-gatherer groups. However, previous genetic studies of modern-day inhabitants have yielded conflicting dates for this intermixing, ranging from 1,100 to nearly 5,000 years ago.

The new story begins in Southeast Asian rice fields. The earliest known chicken remains come from Ban Non Wat, a dry rice–farming site in central Thailand that roughly dates to between 1650 B.C. and 1250 B.C. Dry rice farmers plant the crop on upland soil soaked by seasonal rains rather than in flooded fields or paddies. That would have made rice grains at Ban Non Wat fair game for avian ancestors of chickens.These fields attracted hungry wild birds called red jungle fowl. Red jungle fowl increasingly fed on rice grains, and probably grains of another cereal crop called millet, grown...

A 65,000-year-old tool – a kind of ancient Swiss Army knife – found across southern Africa has provided scientists with proof that the ancestors of modern homo sapiens were communicating with each other.In a world first, a team of international scientists have found early humans across the continent made the stone tool in exactly the same shape, using the same template, showing that they shared knowledge with each other...These tools were produced in enormous numbers across southern Africa roughly 60-65,000 years ago.Because the people across southern Africa all chose to make the tools look the same, it indicates they must...

Excavations of a Viking-era site in Iceland has revealed a previously unknown man-made cave.Archaeologists from the Archaeological Institute of Iceland have been excavating near the small village of Oddi in Rangárvellir, Iceland.Oddi was the seat of the Oddaverjar, a powerful clan in the medieval Icelandic Commonwealth. One of the most famous clan members was Sæmundur the Learned (AD 1056-1133) who wrote the early histories of the Norwegian Kings. The settlement developed into a major centre for culture and learning, with Iceland’s patron saint, Þorlákur Þórhallsson, receiving his education at Oddi from the age of nine (AD 1142-1147).Man-made caves at Oddi...

Proteins extracted from fragments of prehistoric eggshell found in the Australian sands confirm that the continent’s earliest humans consumed the eggs of a two-metre tall bird that disappeared into extinction over 47,000 years ago.Burn marks discovered on scraps of ancient shell several years ago suggested the first Australians cooked and ate large eggs from a long-extinct bird – leading to fierce debate over the species that laid them.Now, an international team led by scientists from the universities of Cambridge and Turin have placed the animal on the evolutionary tree by comparing the protein sequences from powdered egg fossils to those...

“Genyornis was two meters tall and 200 kilos. We don’t know exactly what it would have looked like because it’s been dead for a while and there are few skeletal remains available. It was certainly a flightless bird with some characteristics shared with ostriches, like the big chest and small wings, but it would have looked more like a big goose or duck,” The evidence that humans were eating these large eggs comes from burnt eggshells found among the remains of ancient cultures. Scientists studying these sites find two different types of eggshells, one of which comes from emus and...

Archaeologists have unearthed the ancient burial of a woman lying on a bronze bed near the city of Kozani in northern Greece. It dates to the first century B.C. Depictions of mermaids decorate the posts of the bed. The bed also displays an image of a bird holding a snake in its mouth, a symbol of the ancient Greek god Apollo. The woman's head was covered with gold laurel leaves that likely were part of a wreath... The wooden portions of the bed have decomposed. Gold threads, possibly from embroidery, were found on the woman's hands, Chondrogianni-Metoki said. Additionally, four...

The discovery of pottery from the ancient Lapita culture by researchers at The Australian National University (ANU) has shed new light on how Papua New Guinea (PNG) served as a launching pad for the colonization of the Pacific—one of the greatest migrations in human history.The new study makes clear the initial expansion of the Lapita people throughout PNG was far greater than previously thought.The study... is based on the discovery of a distinctive Lapita pottery sherd, a broken piece of pottery with sharp edges, on Brooker Island (200km east of mainland PNG) in 2017 that lead researcher Dr. Ben Shaw...

The first detailed academic study of East African maritime traditions shows changes in boatbuilding techniques but the continuing use of wooden vessels by fishers.Researchers have used photogrammetry technology to document the watercraft using the Zanzibar Channel, on which so many livelihoods depend.Large local vessels—the mtepe, dau la mtepe, and even the larger jahazis—have long left the Zanzibar Channel because of the development of modern transport infrastructure, the end of the mangrove-pole trade, and the changing political economy of the wider Indian Ocean...The small-scale artisanal fishing sector is buoyant, largely reflecting population growth, leading to falling stocks and soaring catch rates...

Summary: Who helped build the first trading networks in the earliest civilization? Scholars long thought that wandering nomads moving their flocks in the Near East helped spur urban growth by bringing stone, wood, and metals to the plains of Mesopotamia. That assumption was built, in part, on studies of modern-day nomads in Anatolia, Iraq, and Iran. Thanks to recent isotopic analyses from ancient sites, that view is under siege. Archaeologists like Emily Hammer from the University of Pennsylvania suggest that pastoralists did not stray far from home until long after cities like Ur and Mari flourished around 2000 B.C.E. That...

JERUSALEM - A boat that plied the coast of the Holy Land 1,300 years ago carrying fish, carobs and olives is helping researchers better understand a little-known period in the region's history. The boat, discovered in a coastal lagoon near the northern city of Haifa, dates from the early 8th century, not long after the rise of Islam and the Arab conquest of the Middle East. The find suggests that a long tradition of sea trade was not disrupted by the arrival of new rulers from the Arabian desert.