Archaeologists do it in holes: Tales from the stratigraphy

[Valmy]

Well preserved Byzantine mosaic found in Gaza by Palestinian farmers
Link

Wow that is beautiful, looks like it was made yesterday.

[jimmy olsen]

Nat Geo says the Hanging Gardens were really in Nineveh

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/history-magazine/article/know-where-7-wonders-ancient-world-except-one-hanging-gardens-babylon?cmpid=org=ngp::mc=social::src=instagram::cmp=editorial::add=ig20220918-hero-hedcardfreetrial7wonders&linkId=181528825

[Valmy]

In Nineveh? Didn't Xenophon indicate it was just a ruin by his time? (much less the Hellenistic period)

[viper37]

In Nineveh? Didn't Xenophon indicate it was just a ruin by his time? (much less the Hellenistic period)

I'm going by memory, having read this elsewhere a little while ago, but basically, threy didn't only misplace it geographically, but in time too, but a few hundred years.

From Wikipedia:

The Hanging Gardens are the only one of the Seven Wonders for which the location has not been definitively established.^[6] There are no extant Babylonian texts that mention the gardens, and no definitive archaeological evidence has been found in Babylon.^[7][8] Three theories have been suggested to account for this: firstly, that they were purely mythical, and the descriptions found in ancient Greek and Roman writings (including those of Strabo, Diodorus Siculus and Quintus Curtius Rufus) represented a romantic ideal of an eastern garden;^[9] secondly, that they existed in Babylon, but were destroyed sometime around the first century AD;^[10][4] and thirdly, that the legend refers to a well-documented garden that the Assyrian King Sennacherib (704–681 BC) built in his capital city of Nineveh on the River Tigris, near the modern city of Mosul.^[11][1]

Built around 704-681BC instead of 605-562.  So, 150 years earlier than what was previously assumed by historical texts.

[jimmy olsen]

In Nineveh? Didn't Xenophon indicate it was just a ruin by his time? (much less the Hellenistic period)

The article says that the Greeks mixing the two cities up was not unprecedented.

[mongers]

There's a new museum/ visitor attraction opening in Winchester soon, it's going to be called AD878, so Saxon/Viking stuff, overseen by the Hampshire Cultural Trust, who run a lot of museums across the county.

Its being set up in co-operation with ......

Ubisoft

So a heavy Assassin's Creed vibe is likely, full details here:
https://www.hampshireculture.org.uk/news/major-new-visitor-attraction-open-winchester-autumn

A major new visitor attraction recreating a key moment in Winchester's Anglo-Saxon history, brought to life using incredible visuals from the video game franchise Assassin's Creed®, is opening in the city's centre.

878 AD is a unique, interactive experience that will take visitors back to a pivotal point not only in the history of the city, but in the history of England as an emerging, unified nation: the defeat of the Vikings by Alfred the Great at the Battle of Edington in May 878. Opening at Winchester's The Brooks Shopping Centre in November, 878 AD will recreate the atmosphere of the city and the lives of the people who lived in it on the eve of the battle, as they anxiously await its outcome.

878 AD is the result of a unique collaboration between Winchester-based charity, Hampshire Cultural Trust, and Ubisoft, creator of the global best-selling gaming series Assassin's Creed and its educational experience, Discovery Tour, which is free of combat and adapted for audiences of all ages. Sugar Creative, one of the UK's leading immersive tech innovation studios, is the third partner in the collaboration. The attraction will give visitors an insight into Anglo-Saxon Winchester through live performance, immersive storytelling, innovative interpretation, contemporary Anglo-Saxon objects from Hampshire Cultural Trust's collections and interactive elements. Winchester featured heavily in the world of Assassin's Creed Valhalla, and 878 AD will draw on imagery and assets from the game to create an engaging representation of the city at the time.

Once visitors have discovered the result of the Battle of Edington at The Brooks Shopping Centre, they will be able to journey through Alfred's legacy in the second part of the 878 AD experience: 878 AD: Winchester Revealed, an app which has been specially developed by Sugar Creative. Using the power of augmented reality technology, users will visit key historical points throughout Winchester to uncover the past and bring to life Anglo-Saxon buildings and people, revealing stories and activities along the way.

Wasn't sure what thread to put this in, could have put it in the video games section!

[jimmy olsen]

Mercenaries in 5th-4th century Sicily came from as far as Ukraine and Latvia

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/04/science/greece-sicily-himera-genetics.html

[The Brain]

A sister ship of the Vasa has been found.

The discovery of the large wreck was made by naval archaeologists at the Museum of Wrecks, Wrecks, together with the navy in December 2021 in a strait in Vaxholm outside Stockholm.

The ship's sides of the wreck had partially fallen to the bottom, but otherwise the hull was preserved up to the lower gun deck. During diving, it was established that it was a warship with two gun decks, since gun ports at two different levels were found in the fallen sides.

- Then we started to get a little tingling in our stomachs, says Jim Hansson, marine archaeologist at Vrak, at a press conference.

Measurements, construction details, wood samples and archival material all pointed in the same direction. A strong beam system to cope with carrying the cannons was identical to Vasa's, which also indicated that it was the sister ship Äpplet that was found.

- There is a lot left of the ship. And that is big, says Hansson.

Wood from Mälardalen
In the spring of 2022, a second, more thorough investigation was carried out and then ship technical details that had previously only been seen on Vasa were found. There it emerged, among other things, that the oak used as timber had been cut in the Mälardalen in 1627, the same place where the wood for Vasa had been cut a few years earlier.

Measurements, construction details, wood samples and archival material all pointed in the same direction and it was clear that it was the Apple that had been found.

The find was made within the research program "The Forgotten Fleet", which is carried out in collaboration between the Center for Maritime Studies (CEMAS) at Stockholm University, the Wrecks/State Maritime and Transport History Museums (SMTM) and the National Museum of Finland.

Already in 2019, wrecks were found that were thought to be the Apple, but later investigations showed that they were instead Apollo and Maria, two medium-sized ships from 1648.

The Apple was, together with the Vasa, one of two large warships that the Swedish king Gustav II Adolf signed a contract to build in 1625. The ship was completed barely a year after the sinking of the Vasa in 1628.

- There are indications that it was at Dalarö in readiness, but it is not really clear, says Patrik Höglund, marine ecologist at Vrak.

- When Sweden enters the 30-year war in 1630 and lands in Germany, then it is Äpplet who leads the second squadron with the rear admiral on board, he says further.

However, it was not a successful ship, says Höglund. It was only used a few times and was condemned much earlier than Vasa's two other sister ships. In 1659, the Apple was deliberately sunk at Vaxholm.

The finding of the Apple, however, means new and important knowledge, according to the marine archaeologists. According to Jim Hansson, this means that one can only now really examine the differences in Vasa's and Äpplet's designs, and that it provides an important piece of the puzzle in the knowledge of the development of Swedish shipbuilding.

Colleague Patrik Höglund says that it will contribute to an understanding of how the large warships developed from the unstable Vasa to seaworthy vessels that could command the Baltic Sea, which in itself was a decisive factor for Sweden's emergence as a great power in the 17th century.

[Sheilbh]

Not really archaeology but seems related uncovering of the past:

Found: Five Boxes of New Hegel
By Justin Weinberg.   October 28, 2022 at 8:18 am 10

Five boxes of previously unknown transcriptions of lectures by G.W.F. Hegel have been found.

The materials were discovered by Klaus Vieweg (Jena) in the archives of the Archdiocese of Munich and Freising. The lectures, transcribed by Friedrich Wilhelm Carové, were delivered between 1816 and 1818 when Hegel was a professor at Heidelberg. Among them is an apparently complete lecture on aesthetics, as well as lectures on other topics.

According to Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (the following is a Google-translation):

The philosopher Klaus Vieweg from Jena found five boxes with numerous transcripts of lectures given by Georg Wilhelm Hegel in Heidelberg in the archives of the Archdiocese of Munich and Freising. Hegel taught at the university there in his first professorship from 1816 to 1818. The hitherto completely unknown transcripts are from the hand of Friedrich Wilhelm Carové.  Born in Coblenza in 1789, Carové first studied law and worked in the Prussian customs service before beginning his philosophy studies in Heidelberg in 1816. In 1818 he followed Hegel to Berlin.  Carové was one of the few Catholics to take part in the student Wartburg festival and belonged to the foreigner-friendly and non-anti-Semitic part of the German fraternity, a commitment that later cost him the opportunity to become a professor.  In 1852 he died as a publicist in Heidelberg.  His manuscripts, which have now been found, cover almost all parts of Hegel's encyclopedic system, from the Logic through several transcripts of natural philosophy, the philosophy of subjective and objective mind to the history of philosophy.  The archbishopric's boxes contained, among other things, a long-sought and probably complete lecture on aesthetics by Hegel from Heidelberg.  The manuscripts are now to be published as an annotated edition by an international team of experts at the University of Bamberg, with the participation of the philosopher Christian Illies. 

(via Jason Maurice Yonover)

[Maladict]

Major Etruscan find in Tuscany.
https://www.ansa.it/english/news/lifestyle/arts/2022/11/08/s.casciano-like-riace-24-bronzes-found-under-water_499d3aea-fdc5-439c-94d5-bf9ea8f2224a.html

[mongers]

Major Etruscan find in Tuscany.
https://www.ansa.it/english/news/lifestyle/arts/2022/11/08/s.casciano-like-riace-24-bronzes-found-under-water_499d3aea-fdc5-439c-94d5-bf9ea8f2224a.html

Yes, that's pretty damm cool.

[The Brain]

History Channel Bermuda Triangle investigators find crashed spaceship: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmlLMNpJJ9s

[mongers]

History Channel Bermuda Triangle investigators find crashed spaceship: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmlLMNpJJ9s

I was wondering where I'd left it.

[viper37]

Was the Azores home the an ancient civilisation?

4200 years old megalith found on the Azores, as well as mamy stone anchors indicating the islands were reached way before the Portuguese went there.

Still no clue as to whom it could be exactly, and how long they could have stayed.  As to why they left: every 1000 years or so, there are large volcanic eruptions in the area, enough to convince the prehistoric people living there to move elsewhere, supposedly.

[Sheilbh]

Very cool:

Hand of Irulegi: ancient Spanish artefact could help trace origins of Basque language
The Vascones, an iron age tribe from whose language modern Basque is thought to descend, previously viewed as largely illiterate

The Hand of Irulegi was discovered last year near Pamplona. Photograph: Navarra government/AFP/Getty
Sam Jones in Madrid
@swajones
Tue 15 Nov 2022 16.40 GMT
Last modified on Tue 15 Nov 2022 20.57 GMT

More than 2,000 years after it was probably hung from the door of a mud-brick house in northern Spain to bring luck, a flat, lifesize bronze hand engraved with dozens of strange symbols could help scholars trace the development of one of the world's most mysterious languages.

Although the piece – known as the Hand of Irulegi – was discovered last year by archaeologists from the Aranzadi Science Society who have been digging near the city of Pamplona since 2017, its importance has only recently become clear.

Experts studying the hand and its inscriptions now believe it to be both the oldest written example of Proto-Basque and a find that "upends" much of what was previously known about the Vascones, a late iron age tribe who inhabited parts of northern Spain before the arrival of the Romans, and whose language is thought to have been an ancestor of modern-day Basque, or euskera.

Until now, scholars had supposed the Vascones had no proper written language – save for words found on coins – and only began writing after the Romans introduced the Latin alphabet. But the five words written in 40 characters identified as Vasconic, suggest otherwise.

The first – and only word – to be identified so far is sorioneku, a forerunner of the modern Basque word zorioneko, meaning good luck or good omen.

Javier Velaza, a professor of Latin philology at the University of Barcelona and one of the experts who deciphered the hand, said the discovery had finally confirmed the existence of a written Vasconic language.

"People spoke the language of the Vascones in the area where the inscriptions were found," he said.

"We had imagined that to be the case but until now, we had hardly any texts to bear that out. Now we do – and we also know that the Vascones used writing to set down their language ... This inscription is incontrovertible; the first word of the text is patently a word that's found in modern Basque."

Velaza's colleague Joaquín Gorrochategui, a professor of Indo-European linguistics at the University of the Basque country, said the hand's secrets would change the way scholars looked at the Vascones.

"This piece upends how we'd thought about the Vascones and writing until now," he said. "We were almost convinced that the ancient Vascones were illiterate and didn't use writing except when it came to minting coins."

According to Mattin Aiestaran, the director of the Irulegi dig, the site owes its survival to the fact that the original village was burned and then abandoned during the Sertorian war between two rival Roman factions in the first century BC. The objects they left behind were buried in the ruins of their mud-brick houses.

"That's a bit of luck for archeologists and it means we have a snapshot of the moment of the attack," said Aiestaran. "That means we've been able to recover a lot of day-to-day material from people's everyday lives. It's an exceptional situation and one that has allowed us to find an exceptional piece."

Despite the excitement surrounding the deciphering of the inscription, Velaza counselled calm study rather than giddy conjecture. After all, he added, the hand hails from one particular moment in time and tells us only that the people in the area then spoke and wrote the Vasconic language.

"That doesn't mean we know how long they'd been there, nor what their future was after that moment," he said.

"It's true that this is an extraordinarily important text but I'd urge a bit of caution about using it to extrapolate too many conclusions about what happened afterwards. But linguistically speaking, it's going to provide linguists who specialise in the Vasconic language and Proto-Basque with something they haven't had until now."

He added: "I think we should be excited – but we should still be very rigorous scientifically speaking."

Not every recent Basque language discovery has lived up to its billing. Two years ago, a Spanish archaeologist was found guilty of faking finds that included pieces of third-century pottery engraved with one of the first depictions of the crucified Christ, Egyptian hieroglyphics, and Basque words that predated the earliest known written examples of the language by 600 years.

Although the archaeologist, Eliseo Gil, claimed the pieces would "rewrite the history books", an expert committee examined them and found traces of modern glue as well as references to the 17th-century French philosopher René Descartes.