An intact tusk of a Columbian mammoth has been discovered in Madison County, Mississippi. It is the first complete mammoth tusk discovered in the state and dates to the last Ice Age (between 10,000 and 20,000 years ago) when the 15-foot-tall Proboscideans roamed the Mississippi prairie.

Mastodon remains are fairly common in Mississippi, as they were widespread across the territory. They were browsers (like deer) and were able to find food in all kinds of environments. Mammoths, on the other hand, strictly grazed on open grassland so they stuck to the Jackson Prairie of central Mississippi. Mammoth teeth have been found there, marking the grounds they used to roam, but their massive tusks have proved elusive.

Finder Eddie Templeton, an avid fossil and artifact collector, spotted the tusk in the bank of a small creek. He immediately notified the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality’s Office of Geology and the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science who went to the find site that same day. The tusk was partially exposed above the water, and in danger of drying out in the blazing afternoon sun if the team didn’t excavate and remove it promptly.

With Eddie’s help, the team removed the clay-heavy sand from around and under the tusk, exposing its full seven foot length. Most of the mastodon tusks that have been found were just fragments, making this deposit extremely rare. The tusk was photographed and covered with aluminum foil to protect and prepare the surface for plastering. The tusk was then covered in burlap strips soaked in wet plaster to encase the heavy fossil before transport.

While the plaster jacket cured and dried, the team studied the details of the depositional environment recorded within the sediments exposed at the outcrop that the mammoth’s tusk was deposited in. The base of the massive tusk was lying almost upright and at an angle in the stream alluvium with a portion of it lying directly on top of the underlying marine Eocene sediments of the Yazoo Formation, just as it came to rest before burial. Our field scientists interpreted the mammoth tusk specimen to be leaning up against the edge of an ancient sandbar of a stream while a portion of it rest on the floor of stream channel. This would have been just before it was completely covered with alluvium entombing the fossil, possibly the result of a storm resulting in a major flooding event. The animal likely had died nearby, and its remains were then carried along the stream’s channel.

Studying the nature of the sediments exposed at the outcrop also gave our team of scientists some interesting information. The channel gravels preserved in the basal part of the alluvium is dominated by the mineral quartz with a minor amount of chert clasts. The fossil is located within the watershed of the Big Black River, and Quartz gravels like that are more reminiscent of the alluvium of the Pearl River as it crosses the Jackson Prairie region. The thick alluvial plane sediments deposited above the fossil are loess-derived silt. Loess is a wind-blown glacial silt that forms thick deposits across much of the upland terrain in western Madison County.

Once the plaster jacket containing the fossil tusk dried, it was carefully lifted onto a makeshift gurney fashioned from an ATV ramp. The fossil specimen in the jacket weighed about 600 pounds. It was then slowly maneuvered up a 50 foot, nearly vertical, bluff and onto a truck where it was delivered to the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science for further curation and careful study.

The tusk is now in the care of paleontologist George Phillips who has removed the plaster jacket to allow the tusk to dry. It will then be stabilized and preserved by injecting an adhesive into the mineralized ivory. The process is a slow and painstaking one, but when it is complete, the mammoth tusk will go on display at the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science.

A team of archaeologists and volunteers excavating Wroxeter Roman City near Shrewsbury in Shropshire have unearthed a beautifully preserved mosaic floor of fish and dolphins at swim.

Established as a civilian settlement of a legionary fort around 90 A.D., Viroconium Cornoviorum grew into one of the largest cities in Roman Britain. At its peak, it had more than 200 houses, a public bath, a forum, basilica (in the sense of a government building/city hall and courthouse, not church). Only parts of the bathhouse and of the town’s defensive wall (the largest surviving section of Roman wall in Britain) are visible above ground today while the rest of the site remains unexplored. It hasn’t been overbuilt, thankfully, which gives archaeologists the opportunity to excavate previously unexplored areas unencumbered by modern construction.

Earlier this year, the archaeological team excavated one of the previously unexplored areas. Geophysical surveys had detected the presence of a large building, which archaeologists hypothesized might be the city’s main civic temple, and the team dug several trenches hoping to uncover its remains. They found a large monumental building — 165 feet long and 26 feet wide — with thick buttresses supporting its back wall. They also found a small square shrine or mausoleum with painted plaster walls on the exterior.

A third structure unearthed in the survey is a townhouse. It was in one of its rooms that the mosaic was discovered. It dates to the early 2nd century, shortly after the founding of the city, so it is about 2,000 years old. It survives in such good condition because the building was remodeled in the 3rd or 4th century and the room was filled with rubble to raise the level of the floor to match current street level.

“Our excavations were in hope of discovering the walls of [the civic temple] building, but we never suspected we would find a beautiful and intact mosaic, which had lain hidden for thousands of years,” said Win Scutt, from English Heritage.

“It’s always an astonishing moment when you uncover a fragment of beauty hiding just below the ground,” he added.

The team also found coins and pottery and a painted plaster wall on one side of the mosaic, which experts said would help date the phases of the city, and the activities that took place there.

The mosaic and other remains have been reburied for the protection, but the mosaic floor and frescoed walls have been scanned and a 3D model created for people to explore virtually.

A Byzantine-era floor mosaic has been discovered at the St Constantine and Helena Monastery Church in Ordu on the Black Sea coast of Turkey. The style and motifs dates it to the 5th or 6th century A.D. It is the first in-situ ancient floor mosaic found in the Ordu area.

The surviving mosaic consists of geometric and botanical designs created with white, black and red tesserae. The main image features two chevrons (probably a rhombus before their meeting points were damaged by later construction) flanked by pairs of labryses, the double-headed axe that was an important symbol of deities and religious rituals in the ancient Near East. The botanical elements include leafy plants, the spikey acanthus that was the Byzantine version of the more familiar rounded Greco-Roman leaf and pears.

The labrys, which has been a religion symbol going back as far as the Neolithic proto-city of Çatalhöyük (7500 B.C. – 6400 B.C.), strikes me as an unexpected decorative element for the floor of a Christian monastery church. I can’t think of another instance of it in my admittedly limited knowledge of the topic. Byzantine mosaicists borrowed heavily from classical Greek and Rome, however, and the labrys made frequent appearances in representations of storm gods Zeus and Teshub. There are Biblical references to the axe as an instrument of God’s power and judgment, and while it’s not double-headed, it wouldn’t be the only ancient symbol to have been ported into the new religion.

It could also have been a recycled element. The mosaic in the overhead view of the whole floor looks a little variegated — the chevrons are intersected by a diagonal border, the center right has a leafy plant that cuts in and to the right of that what looks like opus sectile (marble inlay) rather than the tesselated style of the rest of the floor. Then again, there may be different levels of flooring that you can’t see in the flat overhead shot, and that at least part of it pre-dates the church. I dunno. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The Byzantine abbey was discovered in 2023 during an excavation of a site where eight tombs dating to the Roman Empire were found in 2021. The 2023 excavation uncovered the remains of a later structure in the tombs and identified it as a monastery church dedicated to the Roman Emperor Constantine and his mother Helena, both venerated as saints in Eastern Christianity. Helena (who famously went on a pilgrimage to Palestine and Syria and left with armfuls of ostensible relics of Christ, including his cross, his tunic, the crucifixion nails and the rope that bound him to the cross) is considered a saint in Roman Catholicism, Orthodox, Anglican and Lutheran denominations too.