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Visiting this monument on a boggy marsh at the very edge of England, I found myself wondering if it's even possible to go anywhere in this mad country where nothing happened. We're at Burgh by Sands, a tiny village in remote coastal country, but it has a big past. Once home to a Roman fort on Hadrian's Wall, centuries after that had slid out of view, the countrymen here found themselves at the centre of events, when the King of England went and croaked his last here. England is Nuts: Bonkers Monument in Middle of Nowhere | 13:41 WC21 (UK)...

The Norse lived in Greenland for five centuries before mysteriously vanishing, leaving behind the ruins of a medieval society. Today, archaeologists are still trying to uncover what happened to the Vikings who once thrived there. The medieval mystery of Greenland's vanished Vikings | BBC Global | 7:25 BBC Global | 792K subscribers | 390,471 views | August 27, 2026

In a tradition dating back more than 300 years, towering pyres have been lit every July in Northern Ireland to mark the Battle of the Boyne, which effectively cemented Protestant rule. They’re held in loyalist neighborhoods – communities that strongly support the union with the United Kingdom – and often carry a political message, with effigies of the pope, the Republic of Ireland’s flag and other symbols of Catholicism and Irish nationalism being burned in the past. But this year, in the village of Moygashel, County Tyrone, the flames found a new target. A replica mosque, with a figure holding...

Hertfordshire: A sealed cave rediscovered by accident - carved with Christian symbols, pagan marks, and apotropaic signs. This hidden chamber has been linked to Knights Templar theories, Holy Grail legends, Reformation-era secret worship, and the life of a medieval wayside hermit. Inside the chamber are carvings of knights, crucifixion scenes, protective marks, and a figure many identify as the medieval king Richard I - all cut directly into the chalk. Some theories point to Templar connections and the Holy Grail, others to hidden worship during the Reformation or a solitary hermit carving his devotion into the walls. What's certain is...

A thousand years ago, almost nobody would have bet on Europe. China was richer, more advanced and more powerful. So how did a poor, divided backwater end up dominating the world? This is the strange story of Europe's unlikely rise, and the accidental advantage that may have changed history forever... Something Went Very Wrong With Human History | 17:26 Michael Button | Patterns of History | 21.5K subscribers | 53,344 views | August 16, 2026

A Roman cavalry mask. Found on the remote Baltic island of Gotland. Altered centuries later, with its right eye deliberately removed and buried beneath a longhouse -- possibly echoing Odin's sacrifice of his eye for knowledge. But why was a Roman object, made hundreds of miles away, being ritually transformed in Scandinavia? And what does it have to do with Sutton Hoo, Anglo-Saxon England, Viking helmets and the strange movement of Roman culture across Europe? The Hellvi Mask may be one of the missing links between Rome, Scandinavia and the warrior culture of early medieval Britain. A Roman Mask BURIED...

Who were the Barbary Pirates? For over 300 years, the Barbary Pirates terrorized coastal Europe -- striking as far north as Iceland and as close to home as Ireland, England, Spain, and Italy. Men, women, and children vanished from beaches in the dead of night. Some estimates suggest more than a million Europeans were captured and sold into slavery. Yet today, few people are aware of this forgotten slave trade. In this documentary, join Kevin Hicks as he uncovers who the Barbary Pirates really were, how they built a slave-trading empire that the most powerful nations of the time struggled...

A convoy of police cars, lights flashing, tail the large yellow truck up to the back gates of London’s British Museum. It’s just before 3 a.m. on July 10, a date that has been kept under wraps for months. After the truck pulls into the museum’s loading bay, four men open its back doors to reveal a cage-like rectangular crate. Inside it is another crate, inside that crate is a metal shell, and inside that shell, folded back and forth on itself 28 times, is a precious and fragile artifact, nearly a thousand years old. The journey this truck has...

The Bayeux Tapestry has arrived in the UK, for the first time since it is believed to have been created here nearly 1,000 years ago. At 02:50 BST, chaperoned from a secret location in northern France by a police guard, it was driven into a loading bay at the British Museum, which will put it on display in September. The 70m-long 11th Century embroidery depicts in 58 scenes events leading up to the Battle of Hastings and Norman Conquest of England in 1066 - the moment that changed the country forever. The heavy-looking crate, encased in an aluminium frame, was...

Studying old paintings can give us a surprising glimpse of historic natural history. In 1611, the Flemish painter Jan Brueghel the Elder finished his epic allegorical painting Air. In it, he depicted the Muse of Astronomy, Urania, reclining on a cloud as a menagerie of feathered birds surrounds her. But while studying the animals in the picture, one researcher spotted something far more intriguing: in the top right corner, there appeared to be a bat carrying a bird in its mouth. For most people, this might not mean much. But for the ecologist Pedro Romero-Vidal it set his mind racing,...

Norway plays the Ivory Coast tomorrow afternoon in the first knockout phase of the soccer World Cup, and one suspects the New York Times will be backing the Norsemen. The Gray Lady has gone gaga for Norway’s “Viking Row,” a synchronized routine where fans mime the rowing of a Viking longboat to the bang of a drum. It’s caught on among the Norwegian players as well as politicians back in Norway, who performed the row in parliament last week. For the last two weeks the NYT has been publishing breathless pieces about the zany Norwegians and their Viking antics. “The...

The discovery of an Anglo-Saxon tool in Kent could reveal more about where Britain's "iconic archaeological treasures" were made, according to experts. A small copper-alloy die stamp was found by metal detectorist Stephen Newbury near Lynsted, which has officially been declared as treasure by a coroner for being of significant historical interest, Kent County Council (KCC) said.The sixth or seventh century item is believed to have been used to create decorative metal foils for military equipment such as helmets. It is the only confirmed example of its kind found in Britain, according to analysis from KCC and the British Museum,...

The oval-set stone, deep blue in colour, was framed by exquisite filigree: thin gold wires twisted and soldered into spirals, accented with tiny granulated beads.Although the blue "stone" is likely coloured glass rather than sapphire, such materials were prized for their symbolic power -- believed to cool inner heat, preserve chastity, and confer divine protection.With its rich decoration and small size, experts believe the ring once belonged to a woman of high status.The discovery was made during extensive excavations in the Norwegian city of Tønsberg, specifically in Prestegaten and its surrounding streets, where archaeologists from the Norwegian Institute for Cultural...

Archaeologists uncovered the earliest known evidence of cereal harvesting in the Canary Islands, according to a report in La Brújula Verde. The discovery was made at the C008 cave complex at the Roque Bentayga rock formation on Gran Canaria. The site was likely used as a granary, for plant processing, and, later, as a burial ground by the ancient Canarians, a people of Amazigh, or Berber, origin, between the tenth and the thirteenth centuries. Excavations within the caves yielded over 200 lithic artifacts. Microscopic analyses of wear patterns on some of the objects, particularly a small basalt knife, determined that...

Bits of the history of Paris are emerging from the ground beneath Notre Dame cathedral, along with pieces of a medieval mystery. The project began when Notre Dame was struck by fire in 2019, and French media are calling it the “dig of the century.” “It’s a rare opportunity for us to work on something that’s tangibly going to make a difference to the history of Paris,” Lucie Altenburg, a conservator with the Paris archaeology unit, said, per the Associated Press. A 1,700-year-old Roman coin stamped with the face of Emperor Constantine has been found, as have fragments of medieval...

According to a Gizmodo report, a new evaluation, including radiocarbon dating, of five of the 43 helmets discovered under about 20 feet of water off the northeastern coast of Spain in 1990 indicates that they were made between the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, and not during the Roman period as had been previously thought. "At the beginning, it was difficult to place them in a specific era because they featured traits that recalled both Late Roman models and potential medieval pieces inspired by classical traditions," said Manuel Frallicciardi of the University of Alicante. Political turmoil from the late...

According to a report in the , more than 3,000 artifacts were recovered during environmental work in the Nieuwe Drostendiep stream valley in the northeastern section of the Netherlands. The objects include tools from the Paleolithic period and the Bronze Age; medieval jewelry and jewelry dated to the second century B.C.; and materials from the Eighty Years' War, fought in the sixteenth century, and World War II. In particular, archaeologists found a gold ring dated to the third or fourth century A.D. and a fibula dated to the tenth or eleventh century A.D. "We are proud of the rich history...

Live Science reports that a new study of Viking coins from the Damhus hoard, a cache of 226 pennies unearthed in Denmark near the site of the Viking town of Ribe in 2018, suggests that they contain silver recycled from Islamic coins. The 1,000-year-old coins, known as pennies, bear a face on one side thought to represent the Norse god Wodan or Odin, with a stag on the reverse. Thomas Birch of the National Museum of Denmark said that each coin would have been enough to buy ale, bread, or simple tools. Analysis of the coins also shows that when...

Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story: * There are more than 1,000 moai statues on Easter Island, representing a key part of the region’s cultural and archeological past. * A new moai, smaller than most, was found in a dried-up lakebed. * The find raises the potential for additional moai finds in the future. ============================================================================== Just when experts thought they knew every moai on Rapa Nui, otherwise known as Easter Island, a dried-up lakebed kept them on their toes. These statues—largely made of a stone formed from volcanic ash and dust called tuff—pepper the island, with more...

According to a report by Arkeologerna, six shipwrecks were discovered near Varberg's original shoreline and medieval harbour defences, dating from the Middle Ages to the 17th century.Varbergsvraken (wreck) 2 is a clinker-built sailing ship constructed during the 1530's using locally sourced oak timbers. Clinker ships had overlapped planks giving the vessels a ridged or stepped appearance along the hull, one of the oldest boatbuilding techniques in northern Europe.One key feature of this wreck are the remains of a berghult, a reinforcing strip on the hull that protected the ship during docking. Traces of burning on the berghult suggest that it...