Fragments of a bronze statue of the Roman emperor Augustus on horseback only the second known equestrian statue of Augustus in existence – have been found in a river near the German town of Giessen, about 40km north of Frankfurt-am-Main. The statue is thought to date back 2,000 years and the discovery has been announced by the science ministry of Hessen state. According to a statement from the science ministry, reported in The Local, this is the most well preserved Roman artefact of quality to be found in Germany to date. The discovery took place on August 12, when a…
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Jakob Kainz, a young archaeologist working on the excavation of the Links of Noltland on the Orkney Island of Westray, has discovered what is being described as a eureka find Scotlands earliest representation of the human face. Crudely scraped into a flat piece of sandstone, and measuring just 3.5 centimetres by 3 centimetres, the so-called Orkney Venus might not look like much, but its got the phizzogs of all from leading heritage experts to the Scottish Culture Minister Mike Russell who called it a find of tremendous importance beaming from ear to ear. The tiny pendant dates from as far…
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Caistor St Edmund is a sleepy village in the Norfolk countryside with no more than 300 or so villagers. Not the kind of place you expect to find the provincial centre of some of the most aggressive and violent Celts to have fought the Romans in ancient Britain. But archaeologists are convinced that beneath the small village and its surrounding fields, to the south of Norwich, lie the ruins of the Roman town of Venta Icenorum, established in Iceni territory in the aftermath of Boudica‘s famous rebellion against the Roman governor in 60-61 AD. The Roman town was in fact…
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A pioneering Scots team could be the answers to saving some of the world’s greatest historical monuments. The six-strong group from Historic Scotland and the Glasgow School of Art are making waves across the world, as they use cutting-edge laser technology to map world heritage sites across the globe. First up on the team’s list will be Mount Rushmore, in South Dakota, USA. And the group are confident they can use their American-made CyArk 500 scanner to model the carved faces of former presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln to within 3mm. The subsequent models could…
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Subsistence Habits of Prehistoric Man A team of archaeologists is hoping to find out how prehistoric man survived in central Italy at the end of the last ice age. The researchers are about to set out on a study tour of 10 different locations throughout Italy where they hope to find clues to the lifestyles and habits of early hunter-gatherer humans between 18,000 BC and around 6,000 BC. Until now their hunting and travelling patterns have been in question with two contradictory theories about how the hunter-gatherers would have got their food in an era of extreme environmental change before…
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Having grown up in the Midlands (England), I know a thing or two about grid-based cities. Miletus, was the world’s first grid based city, designed by Hippodamus in 479BC. The city boasts your usual Ancient Greek features – arches, statues, and of course – Amphitheatres. The Miletus Amphitheatre has three layers, with the underground layers constructed in 700BC and the ground level constructed in 100AD. Sleyman Demi’s photograph is of a corridor on the ground floor of the amphitheatre. The photograph is a black and white shot which could easily be taken as a lighting study of the corridor. The…
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Travel writer and photographer Ethel Davies knows the Roman coast of North Africa better than most (see her top 10 sites here). We asked her to give us an insight into how her favourite image came about. “As a professional travel photographer, I accrued a great number of images over the course of the two years of intensive work and study for North Africa: The Roman Coast (not to mention the various trips I took before my research began),” says Ethel. “Its virtually impossible to choose a favourite, as each image represents a place, an experience and even a feeling.…
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Those of you who just can’t get enough of the Ancient Egyptians and their obsessive-compulsive burial rituals are in for a treat at the Brooklyn Museum when it opens its exhbition, Body Parts: Ancient Egyptian Fragments and Amulets, this November. The Museum announced:”Body Parts features thirty-five objects that represent individual body parts in ancient Egyptian art from the Brooklyn Museums collection, many of which will be displayed for the first time. While traditional exhibitions of ancient art focus on reconstructing damaged works, this exhibition uses fragmentary objects to illuminate the very realistic depiction of individual body parts in canonical Egyptian…
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An alien necklace in King Tut‘s tomb? Too right, and it’s no myth or quackery. A pectoral found during Howard Carter‘s 1922 expedition to the boy-king’s funerary masterpiece is thought to contain the remnants of a meteor impact in the desert, thousands of years before the first stones were laid in Saqqara. The amazing story began 77 years after Carter’s discovery, when Italian geologist noticed something odd about a yellow-green scarab in the pectoral’s centre. Subsequent tests proved the lump of glass was older than any Egyptian civilization – a lot older, in fact. After much research, experts traced the…
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Virtual reconstructions is all the new rage – just look at us! – but Antonio and Joseba Becerro Martinez laid their first virtual bricks (or meshes) as early as 2006. By now they have created a high-quality reconstruction of the entire Acropolis. The most remarkable fact though, is that they did this using only OpenSource software and that Antonia and Joseba share their work with the rest of the world under a Creative Commons license, basically allowing you to copy, distribute, commercialize and to even make derived works under the condition you give them their – deserved! – attribution. Attribution…