A man-made cave near Oddi in South Iceland is much older and larger than archaeologists initially realized. An analysis of the layers of volcanic tephra revealed that the caves were created in the middle of the 10th century, not in the early 12th century as previously believed. The first of the caves was discovered in […]
The city of Siena has embarked on an innovative restoration program for The Allegory of Good and Bad Government, a masterpiece of 14th century Gothic fresco art by Ambrogio Lorenzetti, in the Sala dei Nove (Hall of the Nine) of the Palazza Pubblico. The scaffolding went up in March and diagnostic investigations of the frescoes […]
The burial of an elite woman has been discovered at the Archaeological Zone of Palenque, Chiapas, Mexico. It is a cist grave 7’2″ long and two feet wide, lined and covered with heavy stone slabs. The grave contains three pottery vessels (two almost complete, one in pieces) left as offerings which tentatively date the burial […]
Excavations at the fort of Vindolanda just south of Hadrian’s Wall have unearthed a stone carved with a personal insult and a large phallus dating to the 3rd century A.D. This is the 13th phallus discovered at Vindolanda in the century since excavations began, the most of any site along Hadrian’s Wall. It was discovered […]
A Mycenaean-era gold signet ring has been returned to Greece by the Nobel Foundation in Stockholm, eight decades after it was stolen. The ring depicts two sphinxes facing each other, tails raised and wings outstretched. It dates to the 3rd millennium B.C. and was found in the grave of a local nobleman in the Mycenaean […]
A funerary mosaic dedicated to a Roman couple of late Antiquity is returning to its museum home in Porto Torres, Sardegna, after more than a year of restoration. The mosaic was discovered in 1964 when road construction unearthed a complex of 11 Late Roman burials. Most of them were in rock-cut graves covered with terracotta […]
The mass burial unearthed during the excavation of the burial ground of the former Bethlehem Hospital, aka Bedlam, did not contain the remains of the victims of the 1665 Great Plague of London as initially thought. They were felled by an earlier outbreak of Bubonic Plague in the 16th century. Excavations in advance of construction […]