The skeletal remains of a late medieval man with an iron prosthetic hand have been discovered in Freising, Bavaria. There are only about 50 comparable prostheses known from Central Europe in the late medieval and early modern periods. They range from immobile shaped devices to articulated ones with mechanical elements. This one is immobile.

The grave was unearthed in 2017 during pipeline work near the 17th century Baroque parish church of St. Georg in the central square of Freising’s old town. Examination of the remains at the conservation workshops of the Bavarian State Office for Monument Preservation (BLfD) found the deceased was an adult male between 30 and 50 years of age. Radiocarbon dating revealed he died between 1450 and 1620.

The corroded lump of metal at the end of the skeleton’s left arm was given a rough, preliminary cleaning and stabilized so it could be X-rayed and studied for any traces of leather or textiles. X-rays taken in 2021 revealed that the hand prosthesis was hollow with four fingers — the index, middle, ring and pinky. They were fabricated from sheet metal and are immobile. The fingers are parallel to each other and appear to be slightly curved.

A thumb bone from his left hand is inside the corroded prosthetic hand. BlfD conservators believe it was covered with leather and tied to the stump of the left hand with straps. Traces of a wrinkled, gauze-like textile inside the fingers are probably the remains of a fabric used to cushion the stump. An iron prosthetic like this, even without articulating elements, was expensive, and given how many men of soldiering age were mercenaries or pledged fighters for the endlessly squabbling aristocracy of late medieval Germany, the deceased may have lost his hand in battle. So far, researchers have not been able to determine how the wound was inflicted.

One well-known amputee with a prosthetic hand from this period was the Imperial Knight Götz von Berlichingen, also known Götz of the Iron Hand. He fought for Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I, and later sold his sword to a long list of princes, dukes and margraves in the wars of the late 15th and 16th century. He lost his right hand at the wrist in 1504 when a cannon ball struck it during the siege of Landshut, a Bavarian city just 25 miles from Freising. His first prosthetic was made by a local blacksmith out of iron. Later he upgraded to a high-tech model with fingers that could curl up, allowing him to hold reigns, weapons, even a quill pen. Both of the Götz’s iron hands are on display in his ancestral home, today the castle museum of the Götzenburg in Jagsthausen.

A colossal Mexica stone snake head sculpture unearthed in Mexico City last year is so well-preserved that almost all of its polychrome paint has survived in excellent condition. About 500 years old, the snake head still preserves the original color over 80% of its surface, making it the snake head with the greatest amount of surviving color ever discovered in ancient Tenochtitlan.

The snake head was discovered by a team from the Directorate of Archaeological Salvage (DSA) after a 7.6-magnitude earthquake struck Mexico City on September 19th, 2022. The colossal sculpture was exposed 15 feet under the east wing of the former law school of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in Mexico City’s historic downtown. The head alone is six feet long, 3.3 feet high, 2.8 feet wide and weighs an estimated 1.3 tons.

It was not in its original context, but there were other architectural elements found nearby. The ground was muddy and waterlogged, a low-oxygen environment which preserved so much of the delicate painted stucco for five centuries. Saturated remains of ocher, red, blue, black and white decorate the scales, mouth, eyes and fangs of the serpent, a color palette frequently used by the Mexica on their religious images and temples.

The National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) recovered the snake head the day after the earthquake. It is so massive and heavy it had to be raised with a crane and transported to the INAH conservation laboratory. The pigments used by the Mexica were derived from mineral and plant materials and are extremely fragile, so special measures had to be taken to protect the polychromy once the head was exposed to the air. A humidity chamber was constructed around it. The space is sealed with plastic liners that keep the relative humidity high. Sensors and data loggers monitor the levels at all times.

The moisture will gradually be reduced to allow the snake head to slowly dry. This will ensure the water that has accumulated in the pores of the rock will rise to the surface slowly, preventing fading of the color, cracks and crystallization of the mineral salts. The stabilization process is expected to take until early next year.

The sculpture’s “sheer size is impressive, as well as its artistry,” but the survival of the colors is remarkable, said Frances Berdan, a professor emeritus of anthropology at California State University, San Bernardino who was not involved with the excavation. “The survival of black, white, red, yellow, and blue paints is particularly interesting — one gains a good image of the visual impact of such sculptures as they were arrayed about the city center,” Berdan told Live Science in an email.

In addition to its preserved colors, the snakehead’s size is notable, said Bertrand Lobjois, an associate professor of humanities at the University of Monterrey in Mexico who is not involved in the excavation. The “first time I saw this serpent head, I was dazzled by its dimensions,” he said in an email.

Lobjois also praised the conservation work that allowed the colors to survive, noting that “the conservation process allows us to appreciate the naturalistic approach of figuration” the Aztec artists used.

A crusader-era sword discovered this summer in Salo-Pertteli, southwest Finland, led to the discovery of a previously unknown cemetery from the same period. The sword and has a straight crossbar hilt with a three-sided oval pommel. The type dates to ca. 1050-1150.

The sword was discovered by a local landowner in late August of this year. He spied a piece of an iron object jutting out of the soil of a geothermal pipe trench after heavy rains. When he pulled it out, he saw it was an almost complete sword. He contacted Juha Ruohose, an archaeology professor at the University of Turku who in turn alerted Sanna Saunaluoma, the archaeologist at the Turku Museum Center who is the official in charge of archaeological material for the Salo area.

Saunaluoma inspected the find site the next day, and suspected that the sword was probably not a single random object that had made its way to the pipe trench. Ruohonen and a team of students from Turku University explored the discovery site in early September to find out more about the sword’s context. They unearthed additional blade fragments, a piece of the scabbard, iron objects of yet-to-be-determined nature, and the remains of a leather belt adorned with thirty square bronze pendants decorated with rosette patterns and several cross-shaped pendants. The belt’s parts also include a buckle, end tips, animal head decorations and strap dividers. A knife hung from the belt. The knife was not found, but its leather sheath decorated with bronze rings was. Fragments of the leather from the belt managed to survive as well, as did remnants of fabric.

Buried with all these objects were human bones and pieces of wood that may have been coffin parts. The materials are all elements from a single burial. The complete belt and the textile fragments are particularly rare.

The excavation expanded outward from the sword find site to reveal a larger cemetery. Eight graves were unearthed just from the walls of the pipe trench, and archaeologists estimate the cemetery had dozens more graves, perhaps as many as 200.

Ruohonen says that the discovery can be considered very significant from a research point of view, as far fewer cemeteries containing inhumations from the time of the Crusades are known in Finland than earlier Iron Age cremation grave sites. The deceased in this newly-discovered cemetery were buried in accordance with Christian customs.

“The location of the site, in the immediate vicinity of a medieval stone church, can be considered as evidence of a much earlier church organization in the area than previously believed. It has been thought that Pertteli parish was established with the founding of the Uskela chapel in the 15th century,” Ruohonen points out.

Radiocarbon dating is being carried out on the bone recovered from the site. The belt and a knife sheath are being x-rayed, further studied and conserved.

The wooden foundations of a 15th century road have been unearthed in Lier, a city on the outskirts of Antwerp, Belgium. The wood road emerged from under a modern street during city sewer works earlier this month. The original sewers were built in the 1930s and by happy coincidence they were installed next to the medieval street instead of over it or crossing it, so the road was not exposed or damaged at that time.

The town of Lier grew around the hermitage of its most famous son, the 8th century saint Gummarus, on the banks of the Nete River. Settlements around the hermitage were destroyed in 9th century Norman raids, but the the relics and chapel of St. Gummarus made it a site of pilgrimage, drawing permanent construction and residents to the area. The earliest historical references to what would become Lier date to 970 A.D. The oldest surviving building is the Romanesque St. Peter’s Chapel, originally built in the 13th century. The medieval city center is located at the confluence of the Grote Nete (Big Nete) and Kleine Nete (Little Nete) where the two rivers come together to form the Nete. It was granted official municipal status in 1212, and by the end of that century it was a regionally important center of the textile trade.

Jan II, Duke of Brabant, gave the city the right to host a cattle market in 1309 and 30 years after that Lier was granted the right to host a cloth market as well. By the end of the 14th century, Lier’s cloth industry had expanded into an international trade. When the road was built in the 15th century, the focus of downtown Lier’s infrastructure had shifted from the earlier medieval religious structures — the hermitage, church, beguinage — to the economic and industrial — merchant halls, quays, bridges, roads.

The street was known from 16th century maps, but because in the Middle Ages the roads were made from perishable wood rather than the stone of far more ancient Roman roads, nobody expected to find any surviving remains. In this case, the wood was preserved by a thick layer of clay from alluvial deposits.

Archaeologists will now document the wooden foundations. “The new sewerage system will be installed under the road. These are not valuable objects in themselves and as soon as you start digging them up, they disintegrate,” Mayor Verwaest explained. He is keen to assure us that “everything has been inventorised, measured and photographed”.