The wreck of a 19th sailing ship still loaded with its cargo of champagne, wine, mineral water and porcelain has been discovered in the Baltic off the Swedish island of Öland. The Baltictech diving group, a Polish association of divers dedicating to exploring shipwrecks in Baltic waters, The sonar images were unremarkable (the wreck looked … Read the full post →"Champagne galore found on Baltic shipwreck ..read more

An excavation of the Bronze Age Aççana Mound in the Old City of Alalah in Turkey’s southeastern Hatay province has uncovered an Akkadian cuneiform tablet that records a large furniture purchase. The tablet is petite at just 1.65 inches by 1.38 inches with a thickness of 0.63 inches and weighing just shy of an ounce. It dates to the 15th century B.C. and is written in Akkadian, the language spoken of Mesopotamia at that time. The first lines note a large number of wooden tables, chairs and stools, who paid for them and who received them. The mound is in the ancient city of Alalakh, the capital ..read more

For the first time in 2,000 years, human eyes have seen the contents of the sealed sarcophagus inside the Tomb of Cerberus, the vividly frescoed chamber tomb found in Giugliano, outside Naples, last year. Archaeologists threaded a microcamera into a gap in the sarcophagus to view and photograph the interior. They found an inhumed body in supine position covered by a shroud. The textile was mineralized and preserved by the unique conditions of the sealed sarcophagus and the sealed chamber tomb. Grave goods buried around the deceased include pottery vessels, unguentaria and strigils. The care ta ..read more

A small sheet of silver inscribed in Greek has been revealed to be the earliest Christian artifact ever discovered in Bulgaria. The amulet dates to the second half of the 2nd century or the beginning of the 3rd, and contains the first mention of Christ, the first sign of the cross and the first references to the archangels Gabriel and Michael. The silver sheet was unearthed in the summer of 2023 in the burial of a young man in the necropolis of the Deultum-Debelt National Archaeological Reserve, site of the ancient Roman colony of Deultum near the modern-day village of Debelt in southeastern B ..read more

A carved block that was once part of the entablature of a monumental Gallo-Roman public building has been discovered in Toul, northeastern France. It is covered with vegetal motifs in the Corinthian style, a type of decoration that was popular throughout the Empire in the 1st and 2nd centuries. This is the first time an architectural element of this imposing size, decorative carving and design style has been found in Toul. Dubbed Tullum Leucorum by the Romans, Toul was the capital of the Belgic Leuci tribe. In the Roman era, the town prospered thanks to its strategic military and commercial lo ..read more

A section of a wooden boat discovered in Oslo is much older than archaeologists thought, and indeed may be Oslo’s oldest boat part. Researchers from the Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research (NIKU) discovered on the seabed in Bjørvika, a neighborhood east of the city center of Oslo in an inlet of the fjord. It was Oslo’s harbor from the time of its founding by Norway’s last Viking king Harald Hardrada in 1048 through the 17th century. The area is rife with shipwreck remains. Most of them date to the 16th and 17th centuries; there are a number from the 14th century and only one dat ..read more

The multi-colored marble floor of a Roman luxury villa in the Submerged Archaeological Park of Baiae on the northwest shore of the Gulf of Naples is being restored underwater. The marble mosaic covered the floor of the villa’s reception room and curved front entrance porch (protiro), an area of about 2,700 square feet. The floor was crafted in the opus sectile style, a technique that uses varied colors, shapes and sizes of marble to puzzle together patterns and figures. It was more a complex approach than mosaic floors which were made with small, even square tiles, and much more expensive. The ..read more

An archaeological excavation in the Piazza San Giovanni in Laterano, the square in front of the Archbasilica of St John Lateran in Rome, has uncovered complex layers of remains from different periods, including walls dating to between the 9th and 13th centuries A.D., the period in which the basilica and palace complex was known as the Patriarchate. The Lateran archaeological area extends from just inside the Aurelian Walls near the ancient Porta Asinaria gate to the ground under the cathedral of St. John. The site is of crucial importance to the history of Rome and of Christianity. The sumptuo ..read more

Usually when exciting new finds are made in Pompeii, they’re the result of planned excavations. This time, construction of a ventilation shaft on the building of San Paolino, built in the 1840s and now the headquarters of the library of the Archaeological Park of Pompeii, accidentally exposed the tomb of an important military official who served under the emperor Augustus (r. 27 B.C. – 14 A.D.) during his last wars of conquest in Spain. The construction first exposed two ends of a semicircular tomb of a type known as a “schola” tomb. Schola tombs have been found before in Pompeii. They consist ..read more

The National Museum of Ireland received two Early Bronze Age axes in the mail last month from an anonymous sender. They are flat axeheads dating to around 2150-2000 B.C. and are highly significant artifacts from Ireland’s prehistory. The museum is asking the public for any information they might have about the location and circumstances of the axes’ discovery. The donor sent the axeheads carefully packed in styrofoam with custom cut-outs inside a box of Flahavan’s Irish Oaty Flapjacks (which are crunchy granola bar-like squares, not flapjacks in the American sense of pancakes). A letter was in ..read more