The roof of the church of San Giuseppe dei Falegnami (Saint Joseph of the Carpenters) collapsed on Thursday afternoon, reducing to rubble one of the most beautiful original parts of the church: the wooden coffered ceiling built in the 1600s. It was the central vault which weakened and took the roof down. San Giuseppe was …
Read the full post →“Roof of Mamertine prison church collapses”
When an olive farmer in the village of Kentri near Ierapetra, southeast Crete, parked his truck in the shade of one his olive trees, the ground, oversaturated by a leaky irrigation pipe, retreated under its tires. Don’t worry. No harm came to the truck. A four-foot pit opened up underneath it is all, and when …
An excavation at the ruins of Dunyvaig Castle on Islay, in Argyll, Scotland, has unearthed a rare 17th century artifact: the seal of Sir John Campbell of Cawdor. The lead seal bears the Cawdor coat of arms with a stag head and a galley on the obverse, and is inscribed “IOANNIS CAMPBELL DE CALDER.” On …
Read the full post →“Rare clan seal found in Scottish castle dig”
The rare cartoon of the Boston Tea Party printed by engraver and soon-to-be convicted counterfeiter Henry Dawkins sold at auction on Saturday for $37,500. One of only seven known copies, “Liberty Triumphant or the Downfall of Oppression” was published in the immediate wake of the act of rebellion which saw members of the secret organization …
Read the full post →“Boston Tea Party cartoon sells for $37,500”
The remains of an eerily intact foal has been discovered in the melting permafrost of Siberia. Preserved in the ice for tens of thousands of years, the baby horse was found by paleontologists from Yakutian North-Eastern Federal University in the Batagaika crater in Yakutia, Russia. Scientists identified the foal as a Lena Horse, a species …
Read the full post →“Perfectly preserved Ice Age foal found in Siberia”
Archaeologists have discovered a stucco mask believed to depict Maya ruler Pakal the Great at the ancient site of Palenque in southern Mexico. It is a human visage, not a fantastical creature or deity. The face are those of an older man and there are no previously known images of Pakal as a senior, the …
Egypt’s hot, dry desert climate preserved dead bodies long before the advent of artificial mummification. It was long believed that predynastic mummies curled in their characteristic fetal position, were all the product of natural causes, desiccated by the hot sands in which they were buried. A new study has found that a predynastic mummy of …
Read the full post →“Mummification 1,500 years older than previously thought”
A rare stone carved with Pictish symbols has been discovered in the River Don in Dyce, Aberdeen, thanks to an extended period of unseasonable heat and a keen-eyed local fisherman. The hot, dry weather this summer dropped the water level of the Don to the lowest it has been in decades, exposing the stone on …
Read the full post →“Fisherman finds Pictish symbol stone in river”
An excavation of the Kaliakra Fortress on the coast of the Black Sea in northern Bulgaria has unearthed a small clay pot full of coins, jewelry and other valuables hidden under a floor in the Middle Ages. A team of archaeologists headed by Bonnie Petrunova, director of the National History Museum (NHM) in Sofia, discovered …
Read the full post →“14th c. hoard found in clay pot in Bulgaria”
You may have noticed there was a bit of technology hiccup earlier today which disabled the site for a few hours. It was an IP address problem which has now been corrected. Regular programming will resume tomorrow. Because I hate to leave y’all jonesing for your daily history fix, here’s a quick shot in the …
