The Antikythera Mechanism, the oldest analog computer in the world, was a mind-bogglingly intricate mechanism of interlocked gears which could calculate the date of eclipses, Olympic games, positions of astronomical bodies and more. Found fused in a lump that looked like a rock with some bronze flecks in it, years would pass before researchers understood that the lump was actually 87 parts of a mechanical computer corroded together. When all the pieces were puzzled together, they were found to total up to around 50% of the original device.

The mechanism was found in 1901 at the site of a 1st century B.C. shipwreck off the coast of the island of Antikythera. It didn’t stand out at the time because in the year since the wreck had been discovered, divers had collected an astonishing number and quality of marble and bronze art works, jewelry, glassware and other artifacts, likely destined for the Roman market. They ranged widely in date. The mechanism dates to the second half of the 2nd century B.C., so it could have been as much as a 100 years old when it was loaded onto the doomed ship.

Between the passage of time, the action of salt, currents, traffic, earthquakes etc., the remains of the wreck scattered and decayed. The flashiest, most obviously finds were collected in 1900-1901. In 1976, Jacques Cousteau and his crew spent two days diving the site. And that was it until 2012 when divers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and the Hellenic Ephorate of Underwater Antiquities used the latest technology to survey the wreck site. Because of the wreck’s dangerous position 200 feet under the surface of the Aegean at the bottom of a steep slope, the Return to Antikythera project is the first scientific study of the site since it was discovered by sponge divers in 1900.

The 2017 expedition picked up where the team left off in 2016, the trench where the partial human skeletal was found. Other ship gear was discovered there in 2016 — lead pipes, counterweights, tools — as well as many pottery fragments from different types of vessels. Several significant finds were recovered the next year, including a bronze arm from a life-sized statue and a marble leg on a plinth, believed to have been part of a male nude.

Among the smaller pieces and fragments was a disc thick with corrosion products and concretions. The tell-tale green of corroded metal was visible through the rock-like encrustations. The disc is about three inches in diameter and has four short protrusions at each of the corners. The object was X-rayed and holes were found in the protrusions. The X-ray also revealed a bull engraved on the surface.

Further study is needed to identify it as one of the missing pieces of the Antikythera Mechanism. All we know for sure right now is that it was mounted on something, hence the little arms with pinholes, but it could have been a decorative mount for furniture, for example. If it was part of a geared mechanism, it doesn’t follow that it was THE mechanism discovered in 1901. There’s a chance there could have been a similar device on board. The ship was absolutely heaving with very high-end goods. However that is a very slim chance indeed because nothing even remotely like the Antikythera Mechanism has been found before or since. Mechanisms of comparable complexity wouldn’t appear again until the Middle Ages.

Based on the evidence so far, it looks exactly like other parts of the Mechanism, which had clearly been found incomplete. Based on the etching of the bull that can be seen with scanning, it may well be the gear that predicted the position of the zodiac constellation of Taurus.

A Roman intaglio gemstone depicting a rare chariot racing scene has been discovered near Demre in the Antalya Province of southwestern Turkey. Archaeologists discovered the piece in an excavation of the ancient Greek town of Myra, one of the leading cities of the Lycian league in the 1st century B.C. Just one centimeter in diameter, the red Jasper stone is engraved with tiny detailed scenes of horse racing in a stadium. The work is of unusual high quality for the area, the epitome of craftsmanship available in Lycia when it was made 1,800 years ago.

A team from Akdeniz University has been excavating Myra for nine seasons in a row. This season’s exploration of a Roman-era necropolis unearthed a number of graves with significant funerary artifacts. The gemstone, originally part of a ring, was found in one of those graves.

The engraving depicts quadrigas, chariots drawn by four horses, racing in a hippodrome complete with monuments. The chariots race in the bottom half of the stone, while the top half is engraved with the architecture of the hippodrome itself. The two sections are divided by a horizontal bar representing the spina, the strip down the center of a circus which during the empire was adorned with elaborate architecture — columns, obelisks, monumental water basins or fountains, statues, lap counters, even whole temples.

[Akdeniz University archaeology professor Nevzat] Çevik said the finding was an unprecedented one, with a ring depicting a horse race scene being seen for the first time in excavations at the Lycian Union site. “We have never seen such a thing before. This ring stone is the culmination of a fine art. It is not just a random figure but it is the whole scene fitted in a one-centimeter stone. This is really fascinating,” he added.

Çevik said the ring’s stone was found among many pieces in the grave. “We think that the ring’s stone belongs to a high-status figure from what is called Demre today. It most probably belonged to a jockey or a racehorse raiser, because there are figures of horses on it.”

There is visible wear and tear around the entire oval of the gemstone that has resulted in loss of some of the details of the quadrigas and stadium architecture. The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore has a very similar piece that is just a hair larger and in impeccable condition so you can get a sense of what the Myra intaglio looked like before the wear on the edges. It too features a quadriga race in a hippodrome engraved on red Jasper. There is no find spot recorded (it was acquired in 1942 when “Roman Empire” was deemed sufficient information) but the Walters’ intaglio dates to around the same time, 2nd-4th century.

A set of 28 tiny footprints have been found on a boulder in the Grand Canyon. They were left by a reptile-like animal 310 million years ago, making them the oldest known footprints ever discovered at the Grand Canyon National Park. They are among the oldest tracks discovered on earth, period, impressed on the rock when the supercontinent Pangaea was still in the process of forming.

They were found in spring of 2016 by a paleontologist and a group of students who were hiking up the the Bright Angel Trail. The boulder had been part of a cliff above the trail. When the cliff collapsed, the boulder fell onto the trail and cracked open. It broke apart along an inner seam revealing a naturally molded trackway more than three feet long.

The paleontologist alerted park officials and his friend and colleague University of Nevada, Las Vegas geologist Steve Rowland. Park crews moved the rock to the side of the trail where Rowland first checked it out a year later. In March of this year, he returned with San Diego State University geologist Mario Caputo to study the footprints in more depth.

“My first impression was that it looked very bizarre because of the sideways motion,” Rowland said. “It appeared that two animals were walking side-by-side. But you wouldn’t expect two lizard-like animals to be walking side-by-side. It didn’t make any sense.”

When he arrived home, he made detailed drawings and began hypothesizing about the “peculiar, line-dancing gait” left behind by the creature.

“One reason I’ve proposed is that the animal was walking in a very strong wind, and the wind was blowing it sideways,” he said.

Another possibility is that the slope was too steep, and the animal sidestepped as it climbed the sand dune. Or, Rowland said, the animal was fighting with another creature, or engaged in a mating ritual.

Caputo and Rowland continue to study the trackway and hope to learn more about the animal. Caputo is focusing on the sandstone itself in the hopes of discovering the topography of the sand dune that captured the prints and became a boulder. It’s possible the rock will have indications of whether it was the crest of a dune or a valley between them, information that would be key to understanding the reptile’s gait.

It’s also possible that the creature who left the tracks is a previously undiscovered reptilian species. At this time, the tracks cannot be identified as belonging to a specific animal.

The boulder is still on the trail. Rowland, who will publish the find in January 2019, hopes the trackway will be removed to the protection of the geology museum at the Grand Canyon National Park where it will be kept safe from the elements and predatory humans as well as be easily accessible to researchers.

More than 200 mummies of cats and another 200-plus mummies of scarabs have been discovered in tombs at the King Userkaf pyramid complex in the necropolis of Saqqara. An Egyptian archaeological mission has been excavating the site at the stony edge of the pyramid since April of this year and has unearthed three New Kingdom and four Old Kingdom tombs. The New Kingdom tombs had been reused in the Late Period as a burial ground for the plethora of cats and scarabs and for several cobras and alligators as well.

The eastern area of the site was previously excavated by a French archaeological mission and they too found Old and New Kingdom tombs with the latter having been recycled in the Late Period to inter cat mummies. That excavation project ended in 2008 and never reached the ramp area. The earlier discoveries spurred this year’s team. The prospect of discovering Old Kingdom tombs is what drew the team to excavate that area around the ramp of the Userkaf pyramid complex, as the location had a high probability of having been used during the Old Kingdom as a prestigious site for the tombs of important individuals.

Indeed, the four tombs found belonged to elite people. Decorated stone reliefs and the remains of false doors were discovered in the tomb of Ankh Mahur, an Old Kingdom vizier. The names of two women were found carved on other false doors: Subek Sekt and Mafy. The most archaeologically significant of the four was the tomb of Khufu-Imhat, overseer of buildings in the royal palace. Khufu-Imhat’s tomb dates to the late Fifth Dynasty (2,500-2,350 B.C.). It is so important because it is still sealed, its false doors intact. The team do plan to open it in the future and hope to find undisturbed contents.

The scarab mummies in the New Kingdom tombs are the first to be discovered at Saqqara. Two large specimens were found inside a rectangular limestone sarcophagus with a vaulted lid. Three scarabs were painted in black on the lid. They were wrapped in linen and are in excellent condition. A second, smaller limestone sarcophagus decorated with a single scarab painted in black on the side was found to contain hundreds of scarab mummies.

The cat mummies were linen-wrapped, some of them with surviving paint depicting the features of the cats. Small painted wood sarcophagi decorated with coiled cobras on the lid contained cobra mummies, and crocodile-shaped sarcophagi contained, you guessed it, crocodiles. In the tombs with the animal mummies archaeologists also unearthed more than 100 gilded wood statues of cats and a bronze one of the cat goddess Bastet. Other gilded wood statues found include a lion, cow and a falcon.

The tombs were filled with soil and debris. More than 12,000 cubic feet of soil had to be removed and sifted through. The mission painstakingly unearthed about 1,000 faience amulets depicting many of the deities in the traditional Egyptian pantheon — Horus, Isis, Anubis, the Apis bull — plus icons like the Udjat eye, the white and red crowns of Upper and Lower Egypt, and the Wadjat column. Also found in the fill were three alabaster canopic jars, ink pots, pens and papyri written in Demotic and Heretic. Other archaeological treasures include a collection of papyrus baskets and ropes in exceptional condition, 30 clay pots and, inside a wood sarcophagus, an alabaster head rest and bronze jars.