A tomb containing the remains of eight individuals and offerings of 47 miniature pottery vessels has been discovered at the Ignacio Zaragoza archaeological site in Tula de Allende, Hidalgo, Mexico. The tomb is between 1,800 and 1,900 years old, and is part of a residential complex within the sphere of its economic and cultural dominance. It was about 55 miles from Teotihuacan and was occupied between 225 and 600 A.D., the apex of Teotihuacan’s power.

Archaeologists from Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) made the discovery in a salvage excavation along the route of the Mexico City-Queretaro Passenger Train. After finding scattered fragments of pottery on the surface, the team dug test pits that uncovered wall foundations. Further excavation and coupled with drone photography determined the settlement consisted of small residential structures with rooms oriented north-south and east-west, connected by central and side patios.

Inside and around the residential spaces, archaeologists found more than a dozen individual and collective burials containing complete and incomplete skeletons. Most were the long bones from the legs of adults, with a few children and adolescents. Some burials were cists on the surface, others cut into the tepetate (compressed volcanic soil). Five of the tombs were shaft burials — vertical shafts leading to small burial chambers.

Two of the shaft burials were in a single room. The one on the north side of the room had two chambers, the one of the south had one. It was inside the northern tomb that INAH archaeologists found the remains of eight people. Six of them had been arranged in a seated position with ceramic vessels at their feet.

The offering of 47 miniature vessels is especially important. Miniature ceramics in Mesoamerican funerary settings often point to ritual practice rather than daily use. Their placement near the bodies suggests that the tomb was not a simple burial space, but a carefully maintained mortuary context tied to memory, identity and household ritual.

One individual was also buried with shell ornaments, including part of a small semicircular mother-of-pearl pendant and a small plate made from the same material. In another tomb, archaeologists found engraved vessels, which were removed with surrounding soil so they could be studied through micro-excavation.

A Viking Age hoard of six solid gold bracelets has been found on the Himmerland peninsula of northeastern Jutland, Denmark. The design of the bracelets identifies them as a Scandinavian type dating to the late Viking period, ca. 900-1000 A.D., but most of the known examples are silver. Gold ones are much more rare, and with a total weight of 762.5 grams, this is the third largest Viking gold find ever made in Denmark.

The first two bracelets were discovered by accident by a local resident. They were peeking out of the soil by a field road in a wooded area near Rold. He submitted them to the archaeological department at the Museums of North Jutland for danefæ assessment, Denmark’s version of treasure trove. (All archaeological objects of historical importance found in the soil are by Danish law state property and must be declared to the authorities.)

Recognizing the objects as rare gold bangles from the Viking period, archaeologists returned to the find site to investigate further. A metal detector scan of the wider area uncovered one more gold bangle in the same spot where the first two were found, and then three more of them about 50 feet away.

“Gold in the Viking Age was concentrated among the absolute elite of society, and that is precisely why finds of this type are extremely rare. The fact that two gold bracelets are found in the upper layers of the soil and without the use of a metal detector, and that four others subsequently turn up during an archaeological survey of the area, makes the find quite extraordinary in a Danish context,” says Torben Sarauw and continues:

“The find includes gold bracelets with both twisted and smooth shapes, which together testify to a highly specialized goldsmith’s craft, which also helps to make the find something quite special.”

Three of the rings are twisted from two rods, one of which has inlaid thin gold wire and a knob-shaped closure, while the others are smooth rings made of solid rod or wire. Several are finished with characteristic wrapped closures – so-called running knots – and one ring also carries a smaller, similar ring.

One bangle is distinguished by flat-hammered, joined ends decorated with a zigzag pattern and triangles.

All six of the pieces are intact and in excellent condition. They were not just valuable in monetary terms, but also as unmistakable symbols of status and power. At the time when these bracelets were made, Denmark was beginning to unite into a single unified kingdom, as broadcast by Harald Bluetooth in runes on the Jelling Stone around 965 A.D. They may have been gifts given to reward loyalty and encourage alliances between elites. With six of them buried together, they were likely deliberately deposited for ritual purposes.

The find site is on private land and the exact location is being kept private. The archaeological examination of the place is now complete and the gold bangles are being analyzed, documented and conserved by experts. When initial cleaning and conservation is finished, the objects will be transferred to the National Museum.

A page from the Archimedes Palimpsest, one of the most important manuscripts surviving from antiquity, has been rediscovered at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Blois, central France. The page was one of three lost decades ago, and only known from photographs taken in 1906.

The Archimedes Palimpsest is a compendium of treatises by 3rd century B.C. Greek mathematician and inventor Archimedes of Syracuse. Archimedes was famous for inventions like his war machines and the screw pump that bears his name during his lifetime and throughout Late Antiquity, but his mathematical treatises were more obscure. The first compilation of them was copied by Isidore of Miletus, architect of Hagia Sophia, in Constantinople in 530 A.D. A copy of this compilation was created in Constantinople in 950 A.D. when Byzantine culture saw a renaissance of mathematical interest inspired by the former bishop of Thessaloniki, Leo the Geometer.

The 10th century copy was dispatched to a monastery in Palestine after the Sack of Constantinople in April 1204 to keep it from being destroyed by the anti-Greek zealotry of the Crusaders looting the city. Unfortunately the remote monastery was not a safe haven either. In 1229 a monk sponged the ink off the parchment with lemon juice, cut the animal hide pages in half, turned them 90 degrees and filled them with prayers and liturgical texts.

This practice of washing off and reusing parchment and vellum of older manuscripts was common in the Middle Ages because new pages made from animal skin were very expensive to produce. They were also durable enough to withstand this harsh form recycling, and even the ink turned out to be able to withstand the attempt to obliterate it. The cleaned parchment pages still contained traces of the ink under the surface, and over time, the shadow of the original writing would reappear. Texts with ghosts of previous texts are known as palimpsests.

The Archimedes Palimpsest stayed in the hands of the Greek Orthodox church for another 700 years. It was catalogued in Istanbul in the early 20th century, and was thoroughly documented and photographed by Danish historian Johan Heiberg in 1906. A great deal of the original Archimedean text was faint but visible, and could be read with a magnifying glass. Heiberg published a translation of the original texts he’d been able to decipher in 1915.

The manuscript went missing in 1922 when the Ottoman Sultanate was abolished and the Greek Orthodox library in Istanbul had to be evacuated. The year after that, it was in the hands of a Parisian businessman Marie Louis Sirieix who obtained it under very sketchy circumstances. He claimed to have bought it from a monk, but there was no proof of that. He or someone he allowed access to the manuscript added four illustrations of the Evangelists in faux Byzantine style, evidently trying to make it look like a medieval illumination.

Sirieix never did resell it, and it was stashed in his cellar until the 70s, subject to water and mold and missing three pages lost somewhere in in its vicissitudes after 1906. His daughter finally put it up for auction at Christie’s in 1998. It was bought by an anonymous collector (rumor has it the winning bidder was Jeff Bezos) who then lent it to the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore for conservation and analysis. A few years later, the manuscript, minus the three lost pages, was scanned with multispectral imaging technology revealing new original texts.

The leaf identified in Blois by Victor Gysembergh, a CNRS researcher at the Centre Léon Robin for Research on Ancient Thought (CNRS/Sorbonne University), was among these missing pages: comparison with Heiberg’s photographs, now preserved at the Royal Danish Library, made it possible to confirm without ambiguity that it was leaf number 123.

On one of its two sides, a text of prayers partially covers geometric diagrams and a passage from the treatise “On the Sphere and the Cylinder,” Book I, Propositions 39 to 41, much of which remains largely legible. The other side is covered by an illumination added in the twentieth century, depicting the Prophet Daniel surrounded by two lions, beneath which the ancient text remains to this day inaccessible using conventional methods of examination.

Now that the missing leaf has been identified, researchers hope to get permission to use the latest synchrotron-based X-ray fluorescence analysis to fully expose the original writing impressions.

A massive Roman limestone sarcophagus found still sealed in Budapest has been opened revealing the skeletal remains of a woman and dozens of valuable grave goods, including intact glass vessels, an amber gemstone and 140 coins. It dates to the 4th century, a period when people often reused old sarcophagi, but this one was made specifically for the deceased.

The sarcophagus was discovered in an excavation of the Óbuda district, the site of the ancient city of Aquincum. Founded by the Celtic Eravisci tribe in the 1st century B.C., the settlement was converted into a Roman military castrum and associated civilian city by Rome after its defeat of the Eravisci in 12 B.C. Its strategic location on the Danube limes made Aquincum a hive of military and commercial activity. It was made the capital of the imperial province of Pannonia Inferior in 103 A.D., and by the end of the 2nd century had grown to a city of 30,000 with public baths, an aqueduct, two amphitheaters, temples and sanctuaries, extensive industry (pottery making, metalwork, fabric dying, food production), the governor’s palace and other luxury domiciles for wealthy residents and city officials.

The massive size and quality of the sarcophagus and the objects it contain mark the deceased as one of those wealthy residents. It was discovered among the remains of houses abandoned in the 3rd century that were later repurposed as a burial ground. Eight other graves were found in the area, but none of them were as elaborate, richly furnished or well-preserved as the sarcophagus.

The lid was still fixed in place, clamped to the sarcophagus with iron brackets and molten lead. It must have been an intimidating prospect for looters, because the sarcophagus was never disturbed until the team of archaeologists from the Budapest History Museum and heavy machinery lifted the lid.

An initial excavation inside the coffin at the site removed 1.5 inches of clay that had seeped through the seal. Archaeologists found a bone hairpin, bronze figurines, a piece of amber, 140 coins, a light green glass vase with a matching small bowl and traces of a textile with gold thread. The size of the bones and the nature of the artifacts indicate the deceased was a young woman.

The skeletal remains and the artifacts will now be analyzed and conserved at the Budapest History Museum.

Archaeologists excavation the ancient city of Olympos on the southern coast of Antalya, Turkey, have unearthed a mosaic inscription at the entrance to a 5th century church. The Greek inscription exhorts church-goers to walk the straight and narrow. It reads: “Only those on the righteous path may enter here.”

Excavation director Associate Professor Gokcen Kurtulus Oztaskin from Pamukkale University said that Olympos continues to surprise archaeologists with its wealth of mosaics.

She noted similar discoveries had been made in 2017, 2022, and 2023. In this most recent phase, mosaics were found both in the main and annex sections of the church, featuring geometric and botanical motifs, alongside inscriptions bearing the names of patrons who supported the construction.

“These finds confirm Olympos as one of the richest ancient cities in the Lycia region in terms of mosaic flooring,” Oztaskin said.

Founded in the Hellenistic period (3rd century B.C.) on the Mediterranean coast of modern-day Turkey, Olympos was one of the six largest cities of Lycian League. It was privately ruled by Cilician pirates in the early 2nd century B.C. until the pirate king Zekenites was defeated in a series of naval battles by Roman proconsul Publius Servilius Isauricus, assisted by a 22-year-old Julius Caesar, in 78 B.C.

Under the Roman Republic and Empire, the city rose to greater prosperity. The emperor Hadrian visited it personally in 131 A.D. It became a Christian bishopric in the 3rd century and its bishops attended all the ecumenical councils and synods of the early Church.

Comprehensive excavations at the site began in 2006, and over the past four years, the digs have been ongoing year-round, uncovering numerous important structures, including Church No. 1, Church No. 3, the Bishop’s palace, monumental tombs and buildings decorated with mosaic floors.