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Underground, the morphology and the organization of the mining infrastructure allow to distinguish several phases of activity. The archaeological data gathered and observed during the latest phase of the 2015 campaign: pottery, stone hammers made of a volcano-sedimentary rock quarry, point towards a high dating for the earliest phase of mining activities in the area (Late Neolithic / Early Helladic: around 3200 BC). If future research confirms this hypothesis, the chronological framework of mining in the region of Attica and the Aegean world would be profoundly modified. The Classical phase is by far the most perceptible; omnipresent, it is remarkable...

A new study of ancient Caribbean skulls suggests Christopher Columbus' accounts of fierce raiders abducting women and cannibalizing men ‘might’ be true. In 1492, under orders from King Ferdinand of Spain, famed Italian explorer Christopher Columbus ‘discovered’ the New World of the Americas while trying to find a new route to India and has been both credited and blamed for having opened up the Americas for European colonization. Columbus' accounts of the Caribbean include gory descriptions of fierce cannibals abducting and abusing women and eating men, and while most historians have regarded these stories as figments of Columbus’ imagination, a...

Hong Kong's last authentic junk boat is struggling to stay afloat due to a lack of overseas tourists. The Dukling normally takes foreign visitors on scenic trips around its bays but these have dried up due to travel restrictions. Its owner says it is fighting to survive and having to focus on local citizens during the downturn. Junk boats have a long history in the former British colony dating back to the Han Dynasty. "The Dukling is the icon of Hong Kong, I am not only running a business on it, I am trying to maintain this treasurable piece of...

More than 1,000 years ago, the Norse explorer and Viking Leif Erikson made landfall in modern-day Newfoundland, likely becoming the first European to discover the New World. Today, Leif Erikson represents over a millennium of shared history between the Nordic countries and the Americas and symbolizes the many contributions of Nordic Americans to our great Nation. Accomplished in the face of daunting danger and carried out in service of Judeo-Christian values, Leif Erikson’s story reflects the fundamental truths about the American character. On a mission to evangelize Greenland, Leif Erikson and his crew were blown off course. They had to...

Was Christopher Columbus born in Genoa, Italy? Most definitely not, say an unlikely collection of experts from European royalty, DNA science, university scholars, even Columbus's own living family. This ground breaking documentary follows a trail of proof to show he might have been much more than we know.Who Was The Real Christopher Columbus? | Secrets and Lies of Christopher Columbus | Timeline

Archaeologists have uncovered evidence of Romans transporting salt from the outskirts of Spalding... Two substantial ditches and holding tanks have been uncovered during the 16-week excavation... He said: "Nothing was expected from the site prior to evaluation. There was an aerial photograph which showed a crop mark but there was no indication of the quality of the archaeology... During the Roman period, Spalding and the surrounding area would have been creeks which would provide the ideal location for creating salt. Romans would use a hearth to evaporate tidal water intobrine to create salt. Mr McDaid said: "There are no signs...

A new study suggests the Mediterranean Sea was the warmest during the Roman Empire than any other time in the past 2,000 years The research, published in Scientific Reports, notes the Mediterranean was 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius) warmer "than average values for the late centuries for the Sicily and Western Mediterranean regions.

Excavations at Tell el-Burak, about five miles south of the Lebanese coastal city of Sidon, have revealed the well-preserved remains of a wine press used from at least the seventh century B.C. It is the earliest wine press ever found in the Phoenician homelands, which roughly corresponded to modern Lebanon. The discovery is featured in a study published Monday in the journal Antiquity. Large numbers of seeds show grapes were brought there from nearby vineyards and crushed by treading feet in a large basin of durable plaster that could hold about 1,200 gallons of raw juice... The wine press was...

...the research team extracted and analysed DNA from the remains of 442 men, women and children... from archaeological sites in Scandinavia, the U.K., Ireland, Iceland, Greenland, Estonia, Ukraine, Poland and Russia, and mostly date to the Viking Age (ca. 750-1050 AD). The team's analyses yielded a number of findings. One of the most noteworthy is that contrary to what has often been assumed, Viking identity was not limited to people of Scandinavian ancestry -- the team discovered that two skeletons from a Viking burial site in the Orkney Islands were of Scottish ancestry. They also found evidence that there was...

A SUNKEN ship has been found in almost perfect condition despite spending 400 years underwater. Divers made the mysterious discovery while exploring the Baltic Sea off the coast of Finland. The divers, from the non-profit Badewanne team, have come across shipwrecks before but never one as old and undamaged as the Dutch merchant vessel. The ship has been dated back to the 17th century. It dates back to a time when the Dutch Empire spanned five continents, becoming an economic superpower that was single-handedly responsible for half of Europe’s shipping by 1670. The ship is called a 'fluyt', a type...

On this date in 1459, the former Doge of Genoa Pietro di Campfregoso was stoned to death by his city’s enraged populace. This Pietro (English Wikipedia entry | Italian) succeeded his cousin to the merchant oligarchy’s head in 1450. Genoa resided in a crab-bucket of rival peninsular and Mediterranean powers, and Pietro was distinctly out-scuttled in the 1450s. Genoa unsuccessfully supported the Byzantine Empire when it was decisively conquered by the rising Ottomans in 1453, and the Genoans found themselves consequently rousted from a number of Aegean and Black Sea possessions. Meanwhile, fickle Italian fortune brought Neapolitan troops to the...

In 1972, in one of the early finds of marine archaeology, researchers discovered a trove of clay figurines on the seabed off the coast of Israel. The figurines -- hundreds of them, accompanied by ceramic jars -- were assumed to be the remains of a Phoenician shipwreck that had rested under the Mediterranean for 2,500 years. The artifacts were never fully analyzed in a scientific study, and were filed away and mostly forgotten for decades. But a new analysis by Meir Edrey, an archaeologist at the Leon Recanati Institute for Maritime Studies at the University of Haifa in Israel, and...

It is now generally accepted the Leif Eriksson sailed from Greenland across the Davis Strait and made landfalls on the North American continent almost a thousand years ago, but what happened in this vast area during the next five hundred years has long been a source of disagreement among scholars. Using new archeological, scientific, and documentary information (much of it in Scandinavian languages that are a bar to most Western historians), this book confronts many of the unanswered questions about early exploration and colonization along the shores of the Davis Strait. The author brings together two distinct but tangential fields...

Ancient Romans and Egyptians imported monkeys from India as household pets, Polish archaeologists have discovered. By examining the skeletons of monkeys buried in the animal cemetery in the Red Sea port of Berenice researchers found that the primates were rhesus macaques endemic to India, rather than some local species. Archaeologists from the Warsaw University's Centre of Mediterranean Archaeology were in the process of excavating a vast animal cemetery when they came across the monkey skeletons. For years they assumed they belonged to guenon species, quite common in this area. It was only by using 3D scanners and comparing the bones...

The Serce Port shipwreck, on display at the Bodrum Museum of Underwater Archaeology in southwestern Mugla province, offers a glimpse into the popular 11th-century trade route between the Middle East and Europe. Popularly called the "Glass Wreck," the exhibit hosts hundreds of items reflecting the ship's historical and archaeological importance. The ship is believed to have set sail from Lebanon's Port of Beirut... in the 11th century and sunk at a depth of 33 meters (108 feet) in Serce Port, Marmaris, in southwestern [Anatolia]... Among the artifacts exhibited along with the ship are gold Islamic and copper Byzantine coins, scales,...

We bring to light the unknown sunken port of Ancient Eretria, which is only 30 meters from the modern port, but is separated by 2,400 years from it... The ancient construction along its entire length maintains a constant width (8 meters) and is located -86 cm lower than the current sea level. The original construction dates back to the beginning of the second half of the 4th century BC with some reinforcing modifications at the beginning of the 3rd century BC. century... The city owes its great flourishing to the maritime trade during the 9th and 8th BC. century. The...

Archaeologists investigating the Tuscan island of Elba have identified the remains of the villa belonging to the real-life individual that inspired one of the principal characters in the epic tale of Ben-Hur. Overlooking Portoferraio's bay, the once magnificent 1st-century B.C. villa has long been believed to have been owned by Marcus Valerius Messalla Corvinus, portrayed as Ben-Hur in the Hollywood blockbuster starring Charlton Heston. Now in ruins, the property was known as Villa Le Grotte (the Caves) because of the shape of its vaulted facades facing the sea. While Ben-Hur was a fictional villain dreamed up in Lew Wallace's 1880...

America’s First Mass St. Brendan (Naomh Breandán) and the whale by Honorius Philoponus from "Novi Orbis Indiae Occidentalis" (1621)America’s First Mass | John Buescher | Catholic World ReportWhen was it, where was it, and who said it? When and where was the first Mass offered in America? No one living today knows the answer to this intriguing question. But we can summarize what we do know about the first Masses in various parts of the New World.Some legendary accounts of the life of St. Brendan, who was a priest, say he set off in a small boat on a...

Researchers have long clashed over the circumstances of the 1495 European syphilis epidemic. The so-called Columbian theory posits that Columbus and his crew carried the bacterium, or an earlier progenitor of it, when they returned to Europe in 1493 after their American journey. Skeletons of Native Americans who died prior to Columbus's arrival show bone lesions from Treponemal diseases, including yaws and bejel, and some researchers suspect syphilis was also present. However, other researchers believe syphilis itself circulated in Europe for centuries and became more virulent in the late 1400s. They point to a growing body of archaeological evidence: skeletal...

Ancient UAE Was Active Trading Hub© XPRESS/DANESH MOHIUDDIN Archaeologists now claim that the Arabian Peninsula was home to developed settlements during the same period. Published: August 16, 2007, 12:13 By Derek Baldwin, Staff Reporter You might want to set aside those early school lessons that taught you the dawn of Western civilisation was confined to Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq). An expert panel of archaeologists from around the world now claim the Arabian Peninsula – long thought to be a barren wasteland from around 5,000BC – was home to developed settlements during the same period. In the August 3 edition of Science...