A 1,400-year-old Christian cross has been found on Sir Bani Yas Island in Abu Dhabi. The cross is about a foot long and seven inches wide and was molded on a plaque of stucco plaster. The cross plaque is intricately designed and in excellent condition, cracked but complete. It is an eight-point cross with four small eight-point crosses inside circles embedded into the four Vs of the ends and in the center where the arms intersect. It stands on a stepped base that represents the hill of Calvary

These iconographic elements — the stepped base, the leaves, the pointed ends, the complexity of the abstract tableau — are characteristic of Christian crosses in the Middle and Near East.

“Visually, every element of the plaster cross incorporates regional motifs,” Maria Gajewska, an archaeologist who leads the team on the island, told The National. “The stepped pyramid at the bottom, representing the Golgotha; the leaves sprouting from the base; the shape of the cross arms; the dots at the ends and the setting within a niche all find regional parallels in the Gulf and Mesopotamia.”

Archaeologists with the Department of Culture and Tourism discovered the plaster cross in the courtyard of an ancient house. It was face down in the soil and a fingerprint on the back of the plaque caught the eye of archaeologist Hager Al Menhali. The team turned the stucco plaque over and were stunned to see an the intricate cross.

Today Sir Bani Yas island is wildlife reserve home to oryx, gazelles and cheetahs as well as an open archaeological park, but in Late Antiquity is was home to a thriving early Christian community. A church and monastery dating to the 7th and 8th centuries A.D. were discovered there in the 1990s, identified by another cross plaque, albeit a much smaller and less elaborate one. A group of nine courtyard houses were unearthed nearby, but it was not clear whether they were associated with the monastery. The discovery of this cross confirms that the housing was indeed connected to its monastic neighbor.

It is thought senior monks may have lived in solitude in the courtyard buildings and walked across to the church for mass or other services, before returning. Another theory is that the buildings could have functioned as an ancient retreat for wealthy Christians to get away from the world – living and praying by lamplight. Ms Gajewska said blackened earth found on the ground in the buildings could indicate places where residents had lamps.

One large stone building examined this season was built using limestone and coral from the island. Ms Gajewska said the buildings were unusual because they are extremely well made, featuring thick walls to tackle the heat and cisterns for water. That is an indication of a more comfortable existence than simple hermit life.

“They could have been places where senior monks who prayed at the church lived permanently, or else where people retreated to for periods of seclusion, perhaps during Christian Lent,” she said.

The fate of the community is not known. Christian denominations in the region were riven by schisms and philosophical disputes, and their demise was accelerated with the arrival of Islam. Christian and Islamic communities did co-exist in the transitional period, and there is no evidence at the Sir Bani Yas site of a catastrophic event or conflict. The buildings were clean and tidy, not damaged or derelict. There was no rubble or decay indicative of a slow decline. It seems the residents intended to return.

Archaeologists plan to return to continue the excavation of the courtyard houses and hope to answer some questions about how the community lived and died. They will also be added to the visitor trail that marks the archaeological sites of the island.

An exceptional mausoleum modeled on the monumental tomb of Augustus in Rome has been unearthed in Saint-Romain-en-Gal, near Lyon. The structure is the only one of the 18 tumulus-style mausoleums found in France that is well-preserved enough to confirm that it was circular in design, like Augustus’ tomb.

Built around 50 AD, with an internal diameter of 15 m [50 feet], it had to be more than 6 m [20 feet] high to be visible to all those passing through or arriving in the Roman colony of Vienne, particularly from the Rhône River.

This shows the importance of the person whose burial place it was, “who, even in death, must still have been present in the world of the living. Most certainly a person belonging to the aristocratic elite, with an important political role and linked to imperial power,” explains Giulia Ciucci, archaeologist and scientific director of the [Gallo-Roman Museum’s] archaeological sites. The mausoleum of Saint-Romain-en-Gal was in fact built on the model of that of Augustus in Rome (27 BC-14 AD), the first Roman emperor.

The Roman city of Vienne (Colonia Julia Viennensis) was founded  in 47 B.C. by Julius Caesar, converting the Gallic oppidum into a colony for the veterans who had conquered Gaul. It was one of the earliest cities to integrate Roman military retirees and Gallic elites, and became an early example of the Romanization of Gaul. It covered an area that today comprises three adjacent towns — Vienne, Sainte-Colombe and Saint-Romainen-Gal — but all of the remains of the Roman city’s major structures, including the temple of Augustus and Livia, the odeon, the circus, public baths and the theater, are in the modern city of Vienne. Saint-Romain-en-Gal had no remains of monumental public buildings, and it wasn’t until the the 19th century that great mosaic floors emerged.

The area where the tomb was found was being excavated because the exceptional Rustic Calendar Mosaic, now on permanently display at the Gallo-Roman Museum, was discovered there in 1891. The mosaic is one of the largest and most complete depictions of agricultural labor to have survived from ancient Rome. Only two other large-scale agricultural calendar mosaics comparable to this one are known, one in El-Jem, Tunisia, the other in Zliten, Libya, and the Saint-Romain-en-Gal mosaic has the greatest number of surviving panels.

Twenty-seven of the original 40 figural panels remain, arranged in a grid-like arrangement within outer borders of black and white tiles, plant arabesques and guilloche knots outlining each of the panels. They are centered around four panels representing the seasons, with the agricultural activities grouped around the panel of the season in which they take place. This complex masterpiece adorned the floor of a luxurious domus built on the banks of the Rhone in the first quarter of the 3rd century.

The goal of this summer’s excavation was to uncover more of the mosaic’s original context which had never been documented with modern archaeological methods and technology. A team of professional archaeologists and students dug test pits and investigated the area in public view. They found the foundations of a 19th century house built on top of the semi-circular cells that surrounded the central burial chamber.

This summer’s excavation ended before the burial chamber was excavated. Work will resume next summer, and archaeologists hope they will find references to the eminent personage who had the wealth and political power to emulate the emperor himself in his funerary grandeur.

A man out for a walk with his family discovered a Bronze Age dagger near the village of Gudersleben in Thuringia, central Germany. It is a plate-tanged dagger from the Bronze Age and is approximately 3,500 years old.

Plate-tanged daggers are characterized by their flat tangs that widen at the top. They have two rivet holes piercing the shoulders of the tang where the handle was mounted. Handles were made of organic materials like bone, antler or wood, which is why only the blades typically survive.

Ancient dagger blades like this one don’t often emerge on their own for random passersby to find, especially in such good condition. Archaeologists speculate that heavy rains in recent days dislodged the soil that covered it and washed the dagger to the surface. Finder Maik Böhner did not attempt to recover it himself, even though it was simply sitting on top of some leaves. He reported it to the mayor and the local monuments preservation officials who then relayed the news to the Thuringian State Office for Monument Preservation and Archaeology in Weimar.

The dagger is now at the restoration workshop of the State Office in Weimar where it will be cleaned, conserved and analyzed. When conservation is complete, the artifact will go on display at the Ellrich Local History Museum.