Free Republic

The Viking Ship Museum in Denmark recently announced an unprecedented discovery in the Øresund Strait: the world’s largest and most advanced medieval cargo ship ever found. Hailed as “a milestone in maritime archaeology,” the discovery occurred while divers were investigating the seabed in the Sound, in anticipation of Copenhagen’s new Lynetteholm district, and stumbled upon a record-breaking cog buried beneath centuries of sand and silt. Found approximately 43 feet deep, the precious wreckage escaped destructive forces, resulting in an extraordinary state of preservation that provided archaeologists with a rare, close-up look at never-before-seen details. “It is extraordinary to have so...

Texas researchers have now definitively dated a distinctive rock art tradition, a profound discovery shared across multiple ancient Mesoamerican cultures.For thousands of years, ancient forager societies across southwest Texas and northern Mexico painted these stunning murals, known as the "Pecos River Style," inside remote limestone rock shelters.These colossal murals stretch up to 100 feet long and soar 20 feet tall...Though the desert climate perfectly preserved these significant American works, researchers only recently attempted to date the tradition...To pinpoint the art's origin, researchers employed 57 radiocarbon dating analyses across 12 sites, utilizing plasma oxidation and accelerator mass spectrometry, which firmly placed...