Archaeologists excavating sacrificial pit No. 8 at the Sanxingdui Bronze Age archaeological site in Guanghan City, southwest China, have unearthed the largest bronze beast yet, and the only one of its kind. The beast has a wide open mouth, tall, upright ears, a rounded body on short legs and a thick tail curling up and […]
The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles is returning one of its greatest treasures to Italy: a group of life-sized terracotta statues of a seated poet with two sirens from the 4th century B.C. The sculptural group was bought by J. Paul Getty himself and has been on display continuously since 1976. An unrelated […]
After 112 years, 36 of them spent enclosed behind a false wall, a unique mural that once decorated the Chai Adam synagogue in Burlington, Vermont, has been rescued, restored and put on display. The Chai Adam congregation commissioned Lithuanian immigrant sign-painter Ben Zion Black to create the mural in 1910. Black was paid $200 (the […]
Archaeologists have discovered a tiny votive vessel in the ancient city of Troy that dates to the Hellenistic era. Just three centimeters (1.2 inches) high, it is the smallest container ever unearthed at Troy. It dates to the Hellenistic era, around 2,300 years ago. The ancient city of Troy had already entered literary immortality centuries […]
A unique seal incised with stylized bull heads facing each other has been unearthed at the Domuztepe Mound, a Late Neolithic settlement in southeast Turkey. The button-shaped stamp seal features two animal heads mirroring each other on the surface of an oval serpentine stone. Around the edge is a border of radiating straight lines. Domuztepe […]
A bas relief of a hefty phallus more than a foot and a half long has been discovered on the wall of a Roman-era structure at the archaeological site of El Higuerón in Nueva Carteya, a town 30 miles southeast of Córdoba, Spain. The symbol, which Romans believed warded off the evil eye, was carved […]
An archaeological excavation of the Kopilo burial ground in central Bosnia has discovered new forms of jewelry in several Bronze Age graves. Kopilo is a hilltop settlement about 40 miles west of Sarajevo that was founded around 1300 B.C. It was a farming community on a plateau 2000 feet above sea level and was occupied […]
Archaeologists have identified the bones of Saint Ladislaus, 11th century King of Hungary, amidst a jumble of bones from more than 900 individuals, stored in an ossuary in Székesfehérvár, central Hungary. This makes him the only known saint to have relics that are scientifically confirmed as his osteological remains. Now on the grounds of an […]
A hiker camping in the Scandinavian Mountains of central Sweden discovered a Viking brooch from what is likely the first female burial from the Viking Age ever found in the Swedish mountains. Eskil Nyström was setting up his tent at a spot above the tree line last year when he found something sticking out of […]
The University of Cambridge has embarked on a two-year project to catalogue, digitize and conserve 180 medieval medical manuscripts in the Cambridge Libraries collection. About 8,000 medical recipes spread in manuscripts at the University Library, the Fitzwilliam Museum and in a dozen individual Cambridge colleges will be published for the first time in the Cambridge […]