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After two years of underwater searches around the islands, which lie west of Sicily in the Mediterranean Sea, experts last year found a bronze helmet and some amphorae from about 241 BC, the date of the decisive Roman victory over the Carthage fleet. At around the same time, a team of Italy's famed art police busted a collector who had a ship's bronze battering ram from the same period on display in his home. It turned out the relic had been illegally looted using nets from the same area... The Battle of the Aegates Islands was the final naval battle...

Archaeological excavations off the coast of Rome in the Mediterranean Sea reveal that Stone Age people living over 7,000 years ago utilized sophisticated manufacturing techniques and advanced nautical technology in the construction and operation of their seafaring vessels.According to an analysis published in the journal PLOS ONE, the ancient seafaring vessels discovered at the site are the oldest ever found in the Mediterranean, which may offer "invaluable insights" into the technological sophistication employed by Neolithic navigators...According to the researchers, they found five dugout canoes in the ancient lakeshore village of La Marmotta near the coast of Rome, Italy, dating from...

Marine archaeologists have identified 10 shipwrecks, including one from the Roman era, in the waters around a Greek island in the Mediterranean. The finds came to light during a multiyear project carried out by a team in collaboration with Greece's National Hellenic Research Foundation and the country's Ministry of Culture. The project has been surveying an area around the island of Kasos, which lies in the Aegean Sea, a portion of the Mediterranean between the Greek peninsula to the west and Turkey's Anatolia peninsula to the east. "This research was conducted to shed light on the maritime history of the...

A team of anthropologists at Université Bordeaux has found evidence of nine distinct cultures living in what is now Europe during the Gravettian period. In their study, reported in the journal Nature Human Behavior, the group analyzed personal adornments worn by people living in the region between 24,000 and 34,000 years ago...Prior research has shown that humans have been adorning themselves for thousands of years. In this new effort, the researchers looked at the types of adornments that were worn by people living in Europe during the Gravettian period—a time during the Paleolithic when a culture known as the Gravettian...

A wooden tablet discovered on Easter Island may pre-date European colonization of the region, researchers revealed in early February. Less than 30 wooden tablets containing an undeciphered script called “Rongorongo” were found on the island of Rapa Nui (Easter Island), four of which were removed in 1869 by Catholic Missionaries, according to a study published in the journal Nature. Those wooden tablets were analyzed using radiocarbon dating, and one of them was found to pre-date European settlement on the island, the study said. Easter Island was “discovered” by Europeans in the 1720s, and absolutely decimated in the years following, the...

The Buddha statue depicts Siddhartha Gautama, who lived in South Asia around 2,550 years ago. Born a prince, he would later renounce his worldly wealth and seek out enlightenment, eventually becoming the Buddha, a Sanskrit-derived word that means "the enlightened one," according to Buddhist tradition...The newfound statue dates to between A.D. 90 and 140, said Steven Sidebotham, a history professor at the University of Delaware who is co-director of the Berenike Project, told Live Science in an email.The 28-inch-tall (71 centimeters) statue shows the Buddha standing and holding parts of his robes in his left hand, representatives from the Egyptian...

Late last year, a map that could revolutionize our understanding of the origins of modern mapmaking was rediscovered. Created in the aftermath of the Black Death, this map is the fourth oldest surviving complete portolan chart of Europe.This 14th century chart was just rediscovered...it changes map making history8:51 | Geography Geek | 256K subscribers | 89,502 views | December 18, 2023

To solve the mystery of where Punt was, a team of scientists is turning to two mummified baboons in the British Museum... One was found at Thebes and the other in the Valley of the Kings. The team is conducting oxygen isotope tests on the preserved hairs of the baboons. Oxygen isotopes act as a 'signal' that can tell scientists where an animal is from... To aid in narrowing down the location of Punt the team is also performing oxygen isotope tests on samples of modern day baboons from Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia, Yemen, Uganda and Mozambique. If the oxygen isotope...

Throughout their history the ancient Egyptians recorded making voyages to a place called the 'Land of Punt'. To the Egyptians it was a far-off source of exotic animals and valuable goods. From there they brought back perfumes, panther skins, electrum, and, yes, live baboons to keep as pets. The voyages started as early as the Old Kingdom, ca. 4,500 years ago, and continued until just after the collapse of the New Kingdom 3,000 years ago. Egyptologists have long argued about the location of Punt. The presence of perfumes suggests that it was located somewhere in Arabia, such as Yemen. However...

Divers off the coast of Naples, Italy have recovered a large chunk of chiseled obsidian that likely went down in a Stone Age shipwreck more than 5,000 years ago.Divers from Naples, Italy have recovered a block of obsidian from the remains of what is likely a Neolithic, or New Stone Age shipwreck near the island of Capri.The natural-glass block is about the size of a very large book and weighs almost 17.6 pounds (8 kilograms). There are visible signs of chiseling on its surface, and archaeologists think it was an obsidian "core" that would have been used to make sharp-edged...

The mystery of how the pyramids were built may have finally been solved thanks to the discovery of an ancient branch of the Nile that once flowed through Giza. Hundreds of meters wide, the enormous waterway has long since dried up, but could have provided transportation for the colossal amounts of material and workers needed to construct the iconic landmarks thousands of years ago.

Alejandra Perotti, an invertebrate biologist at the University of Reading who specializes in lice, says the work is intriguing, but she wants to see the researchers expand and diversify their sample. For instance, only a single louse in the study came from Africa and relatively few came from South America, she notes, limiting the authors’ ability to infer how lice from around world relate to one another. She adds that sequencing the insects’ whole genomes—a project Perotti herself is working on—will offer scientists even more reliable means for pinning down the relatedness between lice groups, as well as matching those...

Researchers exploring the waters off the Greek Island of Kefallinia have unearthed one of the largest Roman-era shipwrecks ever found.As Julia Buckley reports for CNN, a team from Greece's University of Patras located the remains of the ship, as well as its cargo of 6,000 amphorae—ceramic jugs used for shipping—while conducting a sonar scan of the area. The 110-foot-long vessel, newly detailed in the Journal of Archaeological Science, was situated at a depth of 197 feet.According to the paper, the "Fiscardo" wreck (named after a nearby fishing port) was one of several identified during cultural heritage surveys undertaken in the...

A diver who spotted something metallic not far from Sardinia's coast has led to the discovery of tens of thousands of ancient bronze coins.Italy's culture ministry said Saturday that the diver alerted authorities, who sent divers assigned to an art protection squad along with others from the ministry's undersea archaeology department. The ministry posted images and video of the stunning discovery.The coins dating from the first half of the fourth century were found in sea grass, not far from the northeast shore of the Mediterranean island. The ministry didn't say exactly when the first diver caught a glimpse of something...

In 1912, a farmer found an unusual, ancient-looking limestone tablet in his field. It seemed to have an exotic language, that he’d never seen before, chiseled into its surface. Over the next 50 years, he showed the stone to family, friends, and even took it to the fair, hoping to find anyone that could decipher it, but no one ever could.Fast forward to the late 1990's, and someone not only deciphered it, but tied it to the legend of Prince Madoc. As the story goes, Madoc sailed to North America from Wales, in the year 1170, 322 years before Christopher...

Mon, Sep 16 2002 12:39 AM AEST Ancient warrior grave unearthed in Lebanese port Archaeologists have unearthed several Bronze Age graves, including that of an ancient warrior interred with his axe, in the southern Lebanese port city of Sidon. Excavation team director Claude Doumet Serhal said the excavations are "among the most important archaeological projects in Lebanon as they are taking place in the centre of the city of modern Sidon." He also said the warrior's grave dated back to the Middle Bronze Age, around the second millennium BC, and included an unusually well preserved bronze duck-bill axe with a...

Wood from three different trees cut by Vikings found at L'Anse aux Meadows been precisely dated to 1021 CE - 1,000 years ago this year. The Viking settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows, located at the tip of Newfoundland's Great Northern Peninsula, was discovered in the 1960s, but has never been precisely dated. Previous estimates about when the Viking crossed the Atlantic and made their way to present day Newfoundland and Labrador have been based on Norse sagas and radiocarbon dating that typically has an error margin of about 50 years. The best estimates put their arrival at around 990 at...

Analysis of hair combs made from deer antler has shed new light on the trade routes of Vikings - revealing connections between northern Scandinavia and the edges of continental Europe.Led by researchers from the University of York, the findings provide evidence of trade connections between the town of Hedeby (modern Schleswig-Holstein, Germany), the largest urban settlement in Viking Age Europe, and upland Scandinavia, hundreds of kilometres to the north...Hedeby was a major centre of antler-working, with 288,000 antler finds recorded, most of which was waste material from the production of hair combs: a major urban craft in the Viking Age...The...

An Excavation Project, in Collaboration With Archaeologists From Södertörn University, Uppsala University's Campus Gotland, Gotland Museum, and the Swedish National Heritage Board, Has Led to the Discovery of an Iron Age Port on Gotska Sandön.Gotska Sandön is an island and national park in Sweden's Gotland County, situated 24 miles north of Faro in the Baltic Sea.Earlier in 2023, archaeologists found two 2,000-year-old Roman coins on one of the island's beaches. Both coins are made of silver, with one coin dating from AD 98-117 during the reign of Emperor Trajan, and the other coin dating from AD 138-161 during the reign...

A Customs Inscription from the Lycian civilization, located in Andriake port in the southern province of Antalya's Demre district, tells about ancient times...The Ancient City of Andriake is 5 km away from the Demre district of Antalya. It was one of the most important ports of Lycia, such as Phaselis and Patara, in ancient times. It is known as the port of the Ancient City of Myra and a settlement formed by it, rather than being a separate city.The inscription, discovered in the vicinity of the largest Granarium in the Mediterranean, named after Emperor Hadrian (Horrea Hadriani), contains information about...