An archaeological excavation on the outskirts of Poole Harbour in Dorset, southern England, has unearthed a spade that is one of the oldest and most complete wooden tools ever discovered in Britain. Radiocarbon dating of the wood found it was made in the Middle Bronze Age, about 3,500-3,400 years ago. Only one tool comparable to this one in age and function is known in Britain: the Brynlow Shovel, which was found by miners in an old shaft of the Alderley Edge copper mines in Cheshire in 1875. It is slightly older, dating to around 1750 B.C.

A team from Wessex Archaeology has been surveying the Moors at Arne site as part of a wetland habitat creation project. When the handle of the spade first emerged from the soil, archaeologists thought it might be a tree root. The outline of the spade was soon revealed, marking it as a worked wood tool. The soil at the coastal site is waterlogged and the anaerobic environment preserved the spade for thousands of years. To ensure its preservation after recovery, the spade was quickly transported to a Wessex Archaeology laboratory where it was cleaned and stabilized.

Analysis of small samples from the spade identified the wood as oak harvested from the center of the tree. This is a very hard, dense wood, making the spade a powerful tool.

The spade has been hewn from one solid piece of wood and would have required many hours of manual work to create, making it a precious tool to its prehistoric owner. It could easily have been reused and refashioned for other purposes if broken or damaged, making the incredible survival of this piece even more fascinating.

By the Middle Bronze Age, people across the country were settled into rural agricultural lifestyles that we might recognise today, with farmsteads, villages and extensive field systems. However, there is little evidence to suggest that there was a permanent domestic settlement where the spade was uncovered. Instead, archaeologists are exploring the idea that people were visiting this site seasonally.

During this period, the Arne Moors would have been prone to flooding in the winter months, and then drying out over summer. This would have provided the opportunity for past populations to make use of its rich natural resources. It could have been used as a place to cut and dry peat, as pasture for grazing animals or for hunting, fishing, gathering rushes for thatch and basket weaving and perhaps cultivating crops. The spade was found in a circular ditch that could have served several functions, including as a means of drying or protecting those useful resources.

The spade is currently undergoing conservation to ensure that it can be studied further without damaging the prehistoric wood. Meanwhile, Wessex Archaeology has scanned the spade and created a 3D model so it can be examined in close detail virtually.

The excavation of the insula (block) along the main street of Pompeii has uncovered the remains of a house that it small in size but as opulent in decoration as much larger, luxurious villas on the block like its immediate neighbor, the House of the Painters at Work, and the House of the Chaste Lovers. One of the vivid frescoes depicts the myth of Hippolytus and Phaedra, so archaeologists have dubbed it the House of Phaedra.

In the 1st century A.D., the design of the Roman villa had been unchanged for six hundred years or so. The model domus was centered around the atrium. It had a pool (impluvium) in the middle and small rooms (alae and cubicula) on the sides. The triclinium (banquet hall) was used as the receiving room where clients during the day, and the tabulina (a room across the atrium from the entrance that opened onto a back peristyle garden) is where the portraits of the family’s ancestors and booty won in wars by the masters of the house were displayed. By the 2nd century, the atrium would be replaced by a central peristyle courtyard that public and private rooms opened onto.

The first signs of this architectural transformation can be seen in some of the homes trapped in time by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 A.D. Of the 1076 habitations excavated at Pompeii, 20% of them had an atrium. The vast majority of the rest were storefronts with living quarters behind or apartments above. A small but significant number of homes have the ornate, high-quality decorations of the grand villas, but forgo the traditional atrium. It’s not because the homes lacked the square footage to accommodate an atrium. There are homes of the same dimensions that squeezed atria in, albeit restricted in size. The House of Phaedra is one those ultra-modern, atriumless houses.

The two rooms currently being investigated are located in the rear part of the house. In the first, in addition to the mythological painting with Hippolytus and Phaedra , the splendidly decorated walls in the 4th style show other scenes taken from the repertoire of classical myths: a representation of a symplegma (embrace) between a satyr and a nymph , a painting with a divine couple, perhaps Venus and Adonis, as well as a scene, unfortunately damaged by the Bourbon explorations, in which one can probably recognize a Judgement of Paris.

A window, next to the small painting with Hippolytus and Phaedra , opens onto a small courtyard, where building work was in progress at the time of the eruption, characterised at the entrance by the presence of a small lararium (domestic altar) with a rich painted decoration with plant and animal motifs on a white background .

The courtyard has a covered area preceding a large pool with red painted walls. A small channel ran around it, allowing rainwater to be conveyed to the mouth of a well connected to a cistern below.
In the decoration of the lararium, a bird of prey in flight stands out in the upper part, probably an eagle, holding a palm branch in its talons, and in the lower part the main scene composed of two facing snakes, framing an altar with a circular and grooved shaft on which the offerings are placed. From the left, we can recognize: the pine cone, a raised element supporting an egg, what appear to be a fig and a date. Filling the background of the scene are two shrubs with lanceolate leaves and yellow and red berries on which three sparrows are moving.

The actual lararium altar mirrors the offerings depicted in the fresco. Archaeologists found the last offering still in the niche when Vesuvius buried the city. An incense burner and lamp bear traces of burning, and behind them were the remains of twigs from aromatic plants and a dried fig. Strips of colored marble and a small relief of a Dionysian figure, likely Silenus, were also found on the altar’s surface. A molded marble base and an iron knife were on the front part of the altar.

The excavation of the House of Phaedra is ongoing, but it provides archaeologists with the opportunity to study the transition the villas with atria to homes with luxurious appointments but a much smaller footprint and an architecture that broke from six hundreds years of the past.

The atrium was an architectural expression of Roman societal hierarchy. It’s where clients of powerful men came to petition their patrons and fulfill their obligations to them in the morning salutatio. The nobility of the family, their ancestry, war trophies, currently wealth, their position in the social and political structure was telegraphed throughout the atrium. The change in the architecture reflected a transformation in Roman society of the imperial age. The ancient traditions that made the atrium a direct representation of the owner’s dignitas (history/reputation/standing) no longer held in a newly upwardly-mobile era where freedmen and merchants who had no ancestor portraits or great-great-grandpa’s Punic War booty to display could rise to the top rungs of the socio-political ladder. They had other, more individualized ways of displaying rank, like wearing trendy clothing and jewelry, which were also portable in an era of increasingly widespread travel in an expanding empire.

A Late Bronze Age glassmaking furnace and thousands of vibrant, multi-colored beads have been unearthed at the site of Frattesina in northern Italy. The remains of a clay furnace, glassworking tools and glass objects date to 3,000 years ago, making this the earliest known glassmaking site in Europe.

The earliest known glass dates to around the 24th century B.C. and is believed to have originated in Syria. The first large-scale production of glass was in Amarna, Egypt, during the reign of
18th Dynasty Pharaoh Akhenaten (1352-1336 B.C.). The composition of this ancient glass was soda-
lime-silica made with an alkali that was likely plant ash. The plant ash resulted in high levels of potassium and magnesium oxides in the composition of the ancient glass. Chemical analysis of 2nd millennium B.C. glass from Mesopotamia and Mycenaean Greece has the same composition. The Frattesina glass is different. It is low in soda, calcium oxide and magnesium oxides, high in potassium oxide. They must have used a different alkali source.

The Frattesina settlement was founded on the southern bank of the river Po about 25 miles from the Adriatic coast in the 12th century B.C. This location made it a major commercial hub of land, river and sea trade routes connecting transalpine Europe with the Mediterranean. A profusion of archaeological materials — imported goods (Alpine copper, Cornish tin, Baltic amber, north African elephant ivory, ostrich eggshells), evidence of large-scale craft production (bronze casting, antler/bone objects, ceramics, glass, products made from the imported raw materials), remains of cultivated plants and domesticated animals — attest to the rich diversity of its economy. From its founding until the early Iron Age (9th century B.C.), Frattesina received raw materials in trade, manufactured them into finished products and exported them over long-distance trade routes to central Europe, the Aegean and the eastern Mediterranean. This is unusual for the period, when workshops operated on a smaller scale and were dedicated to producing goods for local consumption.

Interestingly, the business of Frattesina appears to have been business. There were houses where people lived, spun thread/yarn, made clothes, cooked, processed and preserved food. There are two cemeteries were in use for centuries, and the town itself was clearly planned, but there are no defensive walls typical of urban centers of its Greek, Etruscan and Italic contemporaries and the population was modest. Other settlements in the area were much larger in population and area even though none of them had so many workshops manufacturing such a variety of products.

The remains of Frattesina were discovered in 1967, and the site has been excavated and investigated ever since. Evidence of glass working was first published in 1983 and later excavations discovered more glass. In 2022, an archaeological mission of Rome’s La Sapienza university undertook a new excavation in an area of Frattesina where evidence of glass production had previously been found.

[The excavation uncovered] thousands of multicoloured glass beads have been brought to light, together with other glass objects, testifying to an extraordinary production activity destined for the national and international market. Compositional analyses documented that the production technique was different from that used in the eastern Mediterranean, thus demonstrating the ability of the artisans of Frattesina to rework complex technologies in an original way. The excavation has also uncovered a furnace that was most probably used for glass production and therefore, together with other finds (crucibles, glass ingots), testify to the great importance of this craft production. The furnace for glass production is to date the oldest known in Europe.

In addition to the excavations, geophysical surveys (a technique that allows information to be obtained on the environment and on objects placed at a distance through a sensor) conducted by Wieke de Neef of the University of Bamberg and remote sensing surveys have clearly defined the extension, shape and internal organisation of the large village: the settlement of Frattesina extended over more than 25 hectares and occupied the right bank of a branch of the Po no longer existing (Po di Adria) with an organisation by blocks originally delimited by orthogonal canals. Within these blocks, hundreds of dwellings and production facilities were arranged in a very regular manner and with an equally regular orientation.

An excavation near Riedlingen, southwestern Germany, has unearthed a completely preserved early Celtic wooden burial chamber. It is only the second completely preserved Celtic burial chamber tomb ever found in Germany, and that other one was discovered in 1890 so it was poorly documented, poorly excavated and only parts of it survive today.

The chamber was the found in the center of a huge burial mound more than 200 feet in diameter. Today it is 6.5 feet high, but originally the mound was more than 20 feet high. These dimensions classify it as a rare princely burial mound, built between 620 and 450 B.C. by the early Celts for people of the highest societal rank. The mound had been tunneled into by looters in antiquity. All princely graves from the period loomed so large on the landscape that thieves targeted them almost as soon as the deceased was buried, and so far none of them have been found intact.

Usually the same goes for the burial chambers themselves, which, as solidly built as they were, decomposed over time, all the more rapidly after the tunnelers damaged the wood structure and exposed the interior of the mound to air. The exceptional preservation of this chamber tomb is due to the anaerobic, waterlogged soil of Riedlingen which is in the Danube plain.

The chamber is made of solid oak timbers and is 11 feet wide and 13 feet long. It is complete with strong plank flooring, walls consisting of three upright planks that interlock at the corners. The long walls have crossbeams inserted at the midpoint to support the weight of the ceiling. Four wooden posts were driven into the soil through recesses in the upper ceiling beams. The ceiling was very heavy, built in two layers of split oak planks. Some of the planks were wider than the burial chamber itself. Two more split timbers were placed on the middle top of the ceiling, forming a roof ridge. The massive ceiling collapsed at some point, pushed down by the weight of the mounded soil on top of it.

The timbers are currently undergoing dendrochronological testing which will allow researchers to pinpoint the precise age the oaks used to make the chamber were cut down. A wooden artifact that looks like a cricket bat that was left behind by the builders of the tomb has been dated, however, and the oak tree used to make it was cut down in 585 B.C. This date likely applies to the chamber tomb as well, which would make it only two years older than the tomb of the Celtic princess from Bettelbühl discovered a few years ago at the foot of the Heuneburg Celtic hillfort.

The looters cleared out everything they could get in a systematic fashion, but archaeologists did discover decorative bronze nails and some iron nails believed to have come from a four-wheeled cart that was included in other princely graves from the period. Skeletal remains in good condition were identified as belonged to a male between 15 and 20 years of age and 63-66 inches tall.

A secondary grave was found close to the surface of the ground at the edge of the mound. It contained the skeleton of a 25-35 year old man. The looters must have missed it because his grave contained two bronze garment clasps and a rock crystal that may have been worn as an amulet around his neck. A few feet away were two clay vessels containing cinerary remains. They are a little older than the wooden chamber, dating to around 600 B.C., so shortly before construction of the mound began.

The excavations will continue in the coming weeks and are due to be completed this year. Excavation and analysis will be carried out using the latest excavation, documentation and restoration technology and in close cooperation between archaeologists, restorers and natural scientists. Dr. Roberto Tarpini (LAD), who is scientifically leading the excavations on site, emphasized: “The investigations and analyses that will be carried out after the excavations have been completed will lead to further important findings, particularly on the question of who this monumental burial mound was built for.”

The President of the LAD, Prof. Dr. Claus Wolf, concluded: “All of the wood from the burial chamber will be carefully recovered and conserved and restored in the workshops of the State Office for Monument Preservation over the next few years in order to be able to present the completely reconstructed chamber to a broad public as a museum exhibit.”