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Archaeologists in Spain recently discovered five life-size busts of human figures... that could be the first-known human depictions of the Tartessos, a people who formed an ancient civilization that disappeared more than 2,500 years ago.The carved stone faces, which archaeologists date to the fifth century B.C., were found hidden inside a sealed pit in an adobe temple at Casas del Turuñuelo, an ancient Tartessian site in southern Spain. The pieces were scattered amongst animal bones, mostly from horses, that likely came from a mass sacrifice, according to a translated statement published April 18."The unusual thing about the new finding is...

One of the enduring consequences of the era of Phoenician influence -- which had by around 800 BC progressed from trading outposts to full-blown colonies in southern Spain -- was the adoption of alphabetic writing by the native population, first in the south-west. The number of known Tartessian inscriptions on stone is now about 90 and steadily rising with new discoveries. Concentrated densely in southern Portugal (the Algarve and Lower Alentejo), there is a wider scatter of fifteen over south-west Spain. The best exhibition of the inscriptions is on view in the new and innovative Museu da Escrita do Sudoeste,...

...a magnificent hoard of ancient gold objects discovered by Spanish construction workers near Seville in 1958... 2,700-year-old treasure... sparked speculation and debate about Tartessos, a civilization that thrived in southern Spain between the ninth and sixth centuries B.C... That wealth, and the fact that the Tartessians seemingly 'disappear' from history about 2,500 years ago... Another side of the debate held that the jewelry came with the Phoenicians – a Semitic, seafaring culture from the Near East which first arrived in the western Mediterranean in the eighth century B.C. and established a trading port at what is now modern-day Cadiz... The...

The sonar scans of manmade structures one mile below water off the southeast coast of Cyprus were presented here Thursday by Robert Sarmast, head of the Cyprus/Atlantis Expedition project for the first time. Announcing the results of last year’s expedition to find one of humankind’s greatest mysteries, the legendary Atlantis, Sarmast presented three dimension underwater side-scan sonar pictures of structures 1.5 km below sea level, 80 km off the southeast coast of Cyprus in the Eastern Mediterranean. He said it was no coincidence that his team discovered a 3km long straight wall intersected at right angles by another wall, adding...

Sacred Precincts: A Tartessian Sanctuary in Ancient Spain Sebastián Celestino and Carolina López-Ruiz When the Phoenicians arrived on the Iberian peninsula, probably at the end of the ninth century B.C., they came into contact with an indigenous people called the Tartessians. The two cultures soon fused. The hybrid culture produced by this fusion of peoples is evident in a mysterious structure at Cancho Roano, deep in the heart of south-central Spain. The structure at Cancho Roano is sometimes called a “palace-sanctuary” because of its monumentality. But it was not a palace at all; it was simply a Tartessian sanctuary, which...