While creating the next instalment of our Ancient World in London video series on ancient astronomy, we came across an odd little artefact called the Ishango Bone. Exotic-sounding, it’s little more than a knobbled baboon’s fibula, but the 25,000-year-old notches along its length are much more than a caveman’s conquests. Discovered in the then-Belgian Congo by Jean Heinzelin de Braucourt in 1960, the bone was first thought to be around 10,000 years old. Yet later tests pushed its date back another 15,000 years, around 20 millennia before the first-ever civilizations sprang from the Middle East. Today it remains on display…
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Question: What does a gladiator wear on a night out? The answer, of course, is that he puts on his glad rags! Apologies for the terrible joke, but for those who want to know what a gladiator would really have worn, not on a night out in ancient Rome, but in combat in the arena, then an exhibition inside Rome’s Colosseum has opened to show us just that. The exhibition – Gladiatores – is displaying replica gladiatorial weapons, dress and armour made authentically according to nine years of historical research by Silvano Mattesini, a trained architect and expert in ancient…
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New research has shown that the symbols used by the ancient Picts were an actual written language not symbology. The Picts lived in Scotland from AD 300-843, and were a society ruled by kings. Historians know of them through the artefacts they left behind and via the writings of the people whom they had contact with, such as the Romans. In AD 843 they became incorporated into the larger Kingdom of Alba. There are only a few hundred surviving Pictish stones. Some of them have symbols carved onto them like a relief. Christian motifs, such as a cross, can also…
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Its that time of the year again. School is almost out, archaeological field seasons are about to begin and what comes in between? Huge conferences of course! Over the next month there will be three major archaeological conferences taking place in Canada and the US. The American Research Center in Egypt (ARCE) will hold their 61st annual meeting this month in California, and the Canadian Archaeological Association’s 2010 conference will round off the month in Alberta. The first, and biggest, conference is the Society for American Archaeology (SAA) 75th Anniversary meeting in St. Louis Missouri from April 14-18. More than…
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In April 2008 visual artists Khadim Ali and Jayce Salloum travelled from Karachi Pakistan to Kabul Afghanistan, and then into Bamiyan the region famous for its giant Buddha statues that were destroyed by the Taliban in 2001. We spoke to them about their unique experiences of the site. Ali is Hazara, the same background that many of the people who live in Bamiyan are from. His parents were born just to the south of the region. The Taliban treated the Hazara brutally, killing them and burying them in mass graves. Today the Taliban wage an insurgency in the south and…
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Very unusual and very intriguing is how Nicola Terrenato from the University of Michigan describes a Roman-era lead coffin that has been uncovered in the ancient city of Gabii, 11 miles east of Rome. The professor of classical studies is the leader of an archaeological project to excavate the site. He added: It’s definitely the most unusual finding of the campaign so far. Who’s in the Lead Coffin? The lead sarcophagus, weighing about 450 kg, was found during last summer’s dig and is thought to date from the second to the fourth centuries AD. Researchers can’t be more exact about…
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Sad news today for Italy: part of the complex archaeological structure surrounding Nero’s ‘Golden House’ in Rome his extravagant palace between 64-68 AD has collapsed following heavy rain. The Domus Aurea, as it is known, is one of the treasures of the ancient Roman world. Although it has been mainly closed to the public in recent years due to efforts to fend off encroaching damp and decay, it is a unique archaeological site and an important part of Italy’s heritage. The site is structurally complex and includes important buildings from the reigns of Nero and Trajan. When Nero committed suicide…
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One of the pharaohs recorded on the Royal List of Abydos whose tomb is still unaccounted for is the mysterious Userkare. In our Heritage Key video The Hunt for the Lost Pharaoh:Userkare Dr Vasko Dobrev speculates on the possible location for the tomb of Userkare, a 6th Dynasty pharaoh who ruled shortly after Pharaoh Teti was assassinated by a priest. In this video, Dr Dobrev – Egyptologist and Archaeologist – shares that he believes Userkare to be buried at the Southern end of the Saqqara necropolis, where other 6th Dynasty kings can be found as well. The plateau that Dr…
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It could be the job of your dreams – working among the treasures of the Boy King, and helping the great unwashed explore the mysteries of Ancient Egypt. Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs is seeking positive and team-oriented individuals for its Audio Tour and Movie team. The exhibition – which promises to be a blockbuster along the lines of King Tut’s last visit to the city, more than 30 years ago – is wrapping up its American tour in New York’s new cultural institution, Discovery Times Square Exposition, for nine months beginning April 23, 2010. The job…
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A team of archaeologists has unearthed five chamber tombs in the Nemea Valley, just a few hours walk from the ancient city of Mycenae. The tombs date from ca. 1350 1200 BC, roughly the same time that Mycenae was thriving. The people buried in the tombs were likely not from the city itself, but rather from Tsoungiza, an agricultural settlement that lies next to it. The cemetery has been named Ayia Sotira. But despite a wealth of human remains, there have been no discoveries of elite burials. Are the archaeologists yet to discover the prize tombs, or could this be…