The History Blog

The Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) has discovered a burial urn containing a gold diadem and numerous iron objects at the Adichanallur archaeological site in Tamil Nadu, India. The diadem was found in a massive earthenware urn eight feet in diameter. The urn was filled with soil, and the diadem was at the bottom of the urn along with a complete skeleton and other grave goods.

[T]he urn contained a number of objects that were made of gold, bronze or iron. As many as 20 iron objects — two inside and 18 outside the urn burial — were unearthed. On the outside, it contained 11 arrow heads, two spear heads, one hanger, an iron plate, a chisel and a long spear of 1.75 metre with a decorated handle.

The bronze objects included a circular sieve, a cup with a stand, and two bowls. Interestingly, the cup had a moulded decoration. The urn also had a number of pots, and red and black earthen wares of varying sizes. As per the ASI expert, the urn also contained paddy husks.

Clay jar burials were first encountered at Adichanallur in 2004. So far 169 urns containing human skeletal remains and rich grave goods have been unearthed at the site. Radiocarbon dating of the human remains revealed that they were buried between 905 and 696 B.C.

Scottish archaeologist Alexander Rea, the first Superintendent of Archaeological Survey of Southern India, found numerous gold artifacts, including 20 diadems, in his excavations of Adichanallur between 1899 and 1905. He documented the find site of the diadems with meticulous detail in his 1902 excavation report.

This year the ASI surveyed the area pinpointed by Rea in the 1902 report with satellite mapping before excavating in the hope they might expand on Rea’s exploration and find any archaeological treasures he missed. The burial urn containing the diadem was discovered 27 days after digging commenced.

The diadem doesn’t look like one anymore. It has been repeatedly folded up leaving it just 3.5 cm (1.4 inches) long. This was done deliberately, a ritual destruction of the diadem after the death of the wearer so that nobody would be able to wear it after him.

The remains of a well-preserved medieval kitchen fully stocked with clean cookware have been discovered in the town of Nový Jičín, northern Moravia, Czech Republic. The kitchen was found under a private home adjacent to the northern side of the town’s historic walls in an archaeological survey before renovation. It dates to the early 15th century.

Based on its location, [Pavel Stabrava from the local Novojičín Museum] believes that the house would most likely have belonged to a burgher family, a social class equivalent to the medieval bourgeoisie.

“Since the house was located near the town walls, this would have been a less wealthy burgher family. The richest burghers would have lived in so-called ‘beer court’ houses around the town square.”

The stone foundations of a log house were uncovered beneath the paved courtyard of the Renaissance-era floor in the back of the house.  Within the area bounded by the foundations were the charred remains of a wooden floor. In one corner of the room was a brick oven with a raised hearth. On the hearth was a full set of cookware, complete with lids, and a wooden spatula. The dishes had been washed and put up to dry on the hearth. On the wooden floor near the furnace, archaeologists also found an iron grate, deformed by a much hotter fire than the kind food was cooked over, plus hundreds of glass beads from a necklace, a padlock, a three-tined pitchfork and a spearhead.

The find is exceptionally rare, because city houses were renovated and rebuilt many times over the centuries, and the construction of modern utility infrastructure typically destroyed any remains of earlier townhomes under the ground. It’s a total fluke that this one kitchen survived at all, let alone in virtually untouched condition.

The charred wood floor remains are evidence that the original medieval house was destroyed by fire, possibly in 1427 when the city was burned by Hussite forces in the Fourth Crusade of the Hussite Wars. The Hussites besieged Nový Jičín and overran it, burning the wooden buildings and massacring civilians. The kitchen and its clean cookware were probably hastily abandoned by the homeowners fleeing for their lives.

The artefacts are now in the process of conservation, after which they will be stored in the depositories of the Novojičín Museum. Pavel Stabrava hopes that further planned excavations around the exterior of the house will reveal more about the medieval town and its inhabitants.

An inscription bearing the name of the Phrygian capital of Gordion has been discovered in the remains of the ancient city about 40 miles southwest of Turkey’s capital, Ankara. The name is known from ancient sources, but this is the first inscription ever found to mention the name “Gordion.”

Gordion was the capital of the kingdom of Phrygia which ruled Western Anatolia area from the 12th century B.C. until the Persian conquest in the 7th century B.C. According to legends cited by ancient historians like Herodotus and Arrian, Gordion was founded by Gordios, maker of the intractable knot that Alexander the Great “untied” so handily by slicing through it. Gordios’ son and successor was the King Midas who turned everything he touched into gold. They were already legendary figures by the time of Homer, but the archaeology of the site indicates it was part of the Hittite Empire in the Bronze Age, not an independent kingdom.

A historical King Gordios succeeded by his son King Midas do make an appearance in the 8th century. The historical Midas built what would become known as the Midas Mound Tumulus in around 740 B.C. for his father Gordios. At 180 feet high and almost 1,000 feet in diameter, it is the second-largest burial mound in Turkey. It was excavated in the 1950s and its double-layer wood and limestone funerary chamber was found with rich furnishings and food offerings still intact. (A few years back, a rather tasty mead-beer hybrid was recreated from a chemical analysis of the residue inside one of the cauldrons found in the chamber.)

Gordion faded in the Hellenistic period but was still populated during the Roman period when its location on a major road lent it significance. After the 4th century, there is little evidence of occupation except for limited habitation of the citadel mound in the 13th and 14th centuries. A small village west of the citadel was the only settlement in the 19th and 20th centuries.

The ancient city was rediscovered during construction of the Berlin-Istanbul-Baghdad railroad in 1893. Archaeologists Alfred and Gustav Körte who excavated the site in 1900 were convinced it was Gordion but they never found any conclusive archaeological evidence to prove it. Subsequent archaeological explorations also came up empty-handed. Until now.

The team found a Phrygian stone inscription in the area called “the outer city” in Gordion this year. The inscription, dated to the years when Greek King Antiochus I (281-261 B.C.) reigned in the Hellenistic Period, is the first and only inscription in which the name Gordion is mentioned.

The inscription, which is thought to be related to a tumulus tomb, is also notable for being the longest inscription ever found in Gordion. It features a Persian male name, as well.

The stone is now being conserved and the inscription fully translated before publication.

The large Roman complex with a unique never-seen-before layout unearthed in Scarborough, North Yorkshire, last year has been reburied for its own protection. It was discovered in an archaeological survey at the site of a new housing development. The complex includes a circular central room with four rectangular rooms leading off it in a rough cross shape. There are also a bath house and other outbuildings. It may have been a villa or a religious building, or both at different times, but whatever its purpose, the quality of design and construction are so high it could only have been the handiwork of the top architects and craftsmen in Northern Europe.

When the find was first revealed, housing developers Keepmoat had already redesigned the project to move a planned open greenspace to the archaeological site. That way construction could continue around it without disturbing the Roman remains. Keepmoat was in discussions with Historic England about how best to manage the site for the long term as well. They planned to apply for designation as a national historic monument and to integrate it into the public open space of the development in such a way as to protect it while still making it accessible to the public.

Unfortunately time was not on their side. As soon as the find was announced, the remains proved vulnerable to predators. The fenced-in site was broken into by “nighthawks” (illegal metal detectorists who operate under cover of darkness) literally hours after the story hit the press on April 14th. Thankfully the damage was mostly to the fence and land around it, not to the ancient structures, and Keepmoat increased security in response.

More than a year has passed since then, and following Historic England’s recommendation, Keepmoat has now reburied the archaeological remains. They do plan to do something on the greenspace to explain the ancient treasure beneath its topsoil.

A Keepmoat spokesperson said: “To inform visitors of the significance of the findings, we have submitted a landscaping design to the Local Planning Authority which will incorporate an interpretive depiction of the remains.”

A marble block carved with a relief of Actaeon being devoured by his hunting dogs has been unearthed at the Roman theater in the ancient city of Prusias ad Hypium in modern-day Konuralp, northwestern Turkey. The Actaeon block was discovered in the orchestra of the ancient theater along with many other highly decorated architectural fragments such as entablatures that were once part of the stage structure.

In the myth Artemis transforms Actaeon into a stag to punish him for having seen her bathing naked. She sets his pack of 50 loyal dogs on him and no longer able to recognize him as their master, they tear him apart. The relief depicts Actaeon still in human form being devoured by three dogs. Acanthus leaves decorate the scene which is surrounded by an egg-and-dart border.

Other remarkable finds are the superstructure blocks belonging to the stage building with tragedy, comedy, and drama masks, similar to which have been found in the same area before, and the structure blocks with floral decorations.

The pieces are similar is some detail, particularly border motifs, to a large block found at the theater in 2020 whose central relief is a head of the gorgon Medusa.

Prusias ad Hypium was founded as “Hypios” in the 4th century B.C. by settlers from Heraclea Pontica, a prosperous center of trade on the coast of Bithynia. It was conquered by King Prusias I of Bithynia in the early 3rd century B.C. and renamed the city after itself. The first theater was built around this time. The city was part of the great bequest of the entire kingdom of Bithynia by Nicomedes IV to the Roman Republic in 74 B.C. Rome added the “ad Hypium” to the name and over the next two centuries Prusias ad Hypium grew in population and wealth. It was granted the right to mint coins and no fewer than three Roman emperors, (Hadrian, Caracalla and Elagabalus) visited it in person in the 2nd and 3rd centuries.

Archaeologists have begun cleaning and conserving the newly-discovered blocks from the orchestra section of the theater. Some of the blocks awaiting treatment will be kept in the archaeological park for visitors to see.

The latest discoveries in the excavation of Pompeii’s Regio V neighborhood are fully furnished utility spaces, of great archaeological significance for the details they preserve of a common domestic context in the 1st century Roman town.

The room was found in the House of the Enchanted Garden, a beautifully frescoed home with a lararium (a shrine to the household gods) that is one of the largest ever discovered in Pompeii. In 2021, archaeologists undertook an excavation and restoration of rooms on the ground floor in front of the lararium and the stories above it. They uncovered four rooms, two on the ground floor and two above, that were furnished. One was unfinished, with unplastered walls and an earthen floor, a jarring contrast in a house so decorated with such fine frescoes. The unfinished room was used for storage.

Archaeologists were able to make casts of the furnishings in the room which left a cavity in the hardened ash that could be filled with plaster. One room contained a bed frame and a pillow. The texture of the fabric was imprinted in the ash and is visible on the plaster cast. It is a very simple cot with ropes strung across the sides. There isn’t even a mattress, let along any decoration. Next to the bed was a wooden trunk divided into two compartments. The lid was open, but broken when the beams and floorboards of the story above collapsed in the eruption. Inside the trunk, archaeologists found a terra sigillata saucer and a double-spouted oil lamp depicting Zeus in the act of transforming into an eagle. Next to the trunk was a circular three-legged table with a shallow ceramic bowl containing two small glass bottles, a blue glass saucer and a terra sigillata bowl.

In the storage room, archaeologists were able to make two casts: a shelf and a group of wooden planks in different sizes, cuts and finishes, tied together. This was probably a collection of raw materials for assorted home maintenance projects from furniture patching to roof repair. Outside the room in a small hallway another utilitarian treasure was found: a tall wooden cabinet with at least four doors and five internal shelves. The top of the wardrobe and the front doors were damaged when the floor above the room collapsed. The remains of jugs, amphorae, bowls and plates were found on the damaged top shelf.

The excavation of the upper rooms revealed materials that were in the process of collapsing onto the rooms below. Of enormous archaeological value is a unique group of wax writing tablets. The group consists of seven triptychs tied both vertically and horizontally by a cord. A large cupboard, collapsed in the eruption, was also excavated. It contained different types of common use ceramics for kitchen and dining, as well as fine terra sigillata ceramics and glass. There was also a set of small bronze vessels, including a basin with palm leaf-shaped handles and a small jug decorated with a sphinx and lion’s head. Another special treasure is an incense burner shaped like a cradle with a male figure at one end. The polychrome paint coloring the figure and decorating the cradle with geometric designs is perfectly preserved.

The excavation overlapped onto a residential property behind the House of the Enchanted Garden, and there the plaster cast technique revealed the imprint of cane lathing in the mortar of a collapsed false ceiling. The cast shows the guts of Pompeiian construction: bundles of caning tied together by a thin cord and covered by a gauze-like fabric to separate the lathing from the wet mortar. Casts were also obtained of what appears to be wood paneling on the north, east and south walls of the room. Some are carved with coffered decoration; others are inlaid with delicate bone elements.

Elizabeth Johnson Jr., convicted of witchcraft in Salem in 1693, has been officially exonerated by the Massachusetts Senate, the last Salem conviction to be reversed. The reversal was the handiwork of an eighth-grade civics class in North Andover middle school. Starting in 2020, students under the guidance of teacher Carrie LaPierre researched Elizabeth Johnson’s case and undertook the legal process to secure a formal pardon for her.

The frenzy of paranoia, delusion and religious fervor that saw hundreds of people accused of consorting with Satan and 20 of them executed began in January 1692 with a sick girl whose doctor could not heal her. He declared her bewitched instead. That sparked a raging brushfire of accusations, trials and 19 hangings. One accused witch, 71-year-old Giles Corey, refused to plead and stood mute in court to keep his estate from being confiscated and his family left destitute. He never made it to trial. He was pressed to death by heavy stones, an illegal punishment.

Just 22 years old when she was accused of witchcraft in August of 1692,  Elizabeth Johnson was manipulated into a false confession. (Accused witches who “confessed” often had their lives spared in exchange for snitching on other witches.) She told the magistrates she had renounced Christ and been rebaptized by the Devil, largely under the coercive influence of Martha Carrier, described by the Puritan Reverend Cotton Mather as the “Queen of Hell.”  (Martha Carrier was hanged for a witch on August 19, 1692.) Elizabeth confessed she had scratched her mark on the demonic Bible, consorted with Satan in the form of a black cat and “afflicted” several people by pinching them or effigies (“poppets”) she’d made of them.

She was imprisoned for six months, finally coming to trial in January 1693. Despite her confession, she still pled not guilty, but a jury of her peers convicted her on both counts of her indictment: convenanting with the Devil and witchcraft. She was sentenced to death by hanging, but managed to dodge the noose just long enough for the mass hysteria to subside. She and the two others convicted with her were reprieved by order of Massachusetts Bay Governor William Phips.

She wasn’t exonerated, however. Even as the colony repented of the rush to accusation, use of spectral (ie, dream) evidence and general all-around bullshittery of the judicial response, everyone else, dead or living, would eventually be legally cleared of wrongdoing but her. In 1710, Elizabeth’s brother Francis petitioned on her behalf for Reversal of Attainder and for restitution of the moneys he spent provisioning her during her six months in jail. In 1711, Elizabeth herself petitioned for Reversal of Attainder, pointing out that she had been inexplicably left off the list of 22 people named in the legislation overturning the witchcraft convictions.

Her petition went nowhere. When she died in 1747 at the age of 77, she still had a felony witchcraft conviction on her jacket. She was buried in an unmarked grave in the Old Burying Ground in North Andover. Elizabeth Johnson Jr. continued to fall through the cracks centuries after her death. She was not named in a 1957 bill passed by the Massachusetts legislature exonerating more of the accused and convicted witches. That law was amended in 2001, and again Elizabeth Johnson Jr. was left off the list.

It’s not clear why she kept getting overlooked. It might have been simply administrative error. Her mother, Elizabeth Johnson Sr., was also swept up in the madness. She was accused and brought to trial on witchcraft charges on January 6, 1693. She pled not guilty and was acquitted. Authorities could well have overlooked the convicted Junior because she had the same name as the acquitted Senior. There may also have been social prejudices at play: Elizabeth never married or had children, and according to her grandfather, among others, she was “simplish at the best.” With no husband or children to advocate for her and limited cognitive abilities, she was in a highly ignorable category.

The excavation of the ancient sacred baths at San Casciano dei Bagni near Siena in Tuscany has unearthed a treasury of votive objects including an extremely rare bronze uterus and more than 3,000 freshly minted coins.

Votive offerings made to sacred sites associated with healing were often shaped like the body parts that were afflicted with illness or pain. The bronze uterus was likely a fertility offering. It dates to the period between the violent demise of the Roman Republic and the establishment of the Roman Empire. Terracotta uteri are relatively frequent finds in Etruscan and Roman temples dedicated to fertility gods, but bronze examples are vanishingly rare.

Other bronze votive body parts found in this year’s excavation include a leg from the knee down, a bronze penis, a realistic bronze ear and a more stylized, roughly designed ear that is exceptional because of its inscription. It records the name of Aulus Nonnius, the man who dedicated the ear to the sanctuary in the first years of the Roman Empires.

This summer is the sixth season of digs at the baths, and the area under excavation has been enlarged to cover previously unexplored sections of the complex, revealing for the first time the full dimensions of the sanctuary and shedding new light on the many phases of its history.

Evidence was unearthed of a major collapse in the Great Bath area in the late 3rd century. A sinkhole seven feet deep opened in the ground, causing the surrounding structures — bathing basins, colonnades, buildings — to collapse. This natural disaster was considered a prodigy (an omen heralding an impending calamity) by the Romans, and they quickly moved to appease the disgruntled deities by raising a new altar inside the sinkhole itself. They then built a new, smaller basin over the rubble with a set of stairs leading into the bath.

This season’s excavation reached over a mile away from the core of the ancient sanctuary to unearth the remains of a portico built in the 16th century when the Medici dynasty ruled Tuscany. People seeking healing still sought out the ancient sacred spring, although I’m not sure the Archbishop of Milan, Cardinal Federico Borromeo, would have visited the bath repeatedly in 1600-1 to cure his persistent “cheek ache” had he known he’d was keeping company with votive penises and uteri.

But the real surprise, revealed to ANSA by archaeologist Jacopo Tabolli with a sneak preview, has arrived over the last few weeks with the discovery of the real size of the sanctuary here that belonged to the Etruscans and was renovated by the ancient Romans in the early centuries of the Empire to make it more lavish and monumental.

It was such an exceptional place that the [Rome] mint was ordered to produce a trove of shiny coins made of silver, orichalcum and bronze, perhaps for the emperor’s own offerings to honour the gods tasked with watching over his health and that of the many noble Romans ready to travel to this sacred site.

“It’s a site without equal in Italy or in the ancient Mediterranean,” said Tabolli with visible excitement. […]

“It’s an exceptional discovery because of the size of the area of the sanctuary, which is much larger than we could have imagined, with several holy buildings, altars, pools,” he explained.

Archaeologists have unearthed the richly furnished grave of a young high-status woman in a small Bronze Age cemetery near the town of Mány in northern Hungary. It was one of several graves discovered at the site in a preventative archaeological exploration along the route of planned highway construction. The team of archaeologists from the Szent István Király Museum discovered eight burials from the Middle Bronze Age Tumulus culture which dominated Central Europe between 1600 and 1200 B.C. 

The grave of the young woman was unique for its luxurious contents. She was buried with 38 objects — mostly jewelry and garment fittings — made of bronze and precious metal. She wore a ring on every finger, bangles on both wrists, bronze spirals and a gold spiral ring found near her skull that was likely a hair tie. Also found buried with her was the bronze blade of a dagger with three rivets that attached the blade to the now-missing handle (likely an organic material like wood that has decomposed). Two long, serpentine bronze pins with broad circular terminals were found at her shoulders, likely part of her clothing. While no textile remains have been identified so far, the metal adornments are so copious that archaeologists believe they can reconstruct the garment she was buried in. Several small pieces of pottery typical of Tumulus culture graves were unearthed as well. 

There were no raised tumuli or other markers of the graves. The area has been thoroughly cultivated over the centuries, flattening the mounds over the burials. The remains were found less than 12 inches under the topsoil, so it was only fortunate happenstance that any graves could be found with contents undisturbed, especially since the other seven burials only contain fragile pottery grave goods.

In addition to the burial ground, archaeologists also discovered remains of a Bronze Age settlement at the site, as well as traces of Iron Age Celtic occupation.

This video is in Hungarian and has no captions (translated or otherwise), but you can see the full complement of recovered artifacts from the grave bagged and tagged in the laboratory.

Last year, a cycle of 14th century frescoes in eight different buildings in the ancient northern Italian city of Padua were added to the UNESCO World Heritage List. The frescoes cover 40,000 square feet of walls and ceilings painted by six artists over 95 years in both secular and religious buildings. What unifies them is their visual style that marks a turning point in the understanding of spatial relations and optics in European painting. These frescoes incarnate the shift from the abstract formality of Byzantine style to the naturalism and perspective of Renaissance painting.

The most famous of the sites is the Scrovegni Chapel, frescoed by Gothic master Giotto di Bondone. This is considered the greatest surviving example of his work, and not just in the sense that it is in vividly brilliant condition, but because in this pictorial cycle he introduced realistic portrayals of human emotion, spatial perspective and trompe l’oeil architectural effects. It would become a model for his contemporaries and the artists that followed him.

In just two years between 1303 and 1305, Giotto covered the entire internal surface of the chapel with 39 scenes from the Life of the Virgin and the Life of Christ divided into three rows and six columns of panels, plus the arched space of the eastern wall above the altar. The first six are scenes from the lives of Joachim and Anne, Mary’s parents, who actually aren’t in the canonical Bible, only in the apocrypha. In an art historical first, Giotto painted them kissing.

The fourth row on the bottoms of the nave walls feature smaller panels depicting the Seven Vices and Seven Virtues in a faux marble stone finish. As with the Sistine Chapel, the long view of the nave culminates in a floor-to-ceiling fresco of The Last Judgement on the entire western wall. The ceiling is a deep blue firmament dotted with gold stars and roundel portraits of the Apostles, prophets, saints, Jesus and Madonna and Child.

The context behind the art is also of great historical significance. Giotto was commissioned to paint this chapel by a banker, Enrico Scrovegni. Patrons of art on this scale were typically high clergy or royalty and aristocracy. The Scrovegni Chapel commission marked a significant shift in the social and economic status of burghers, one made explicit by Giotto’s including of the banker kneeling at the foot of Christ in The Last Judgement, firmly on the side of the Heaven-bound. He holds a model of the chapel itself, making an offering of it to God. With this, the patron was no longer a king or Pope, and he was no longer an extra making a cameo appearance in a devotional scene. He was a central figure in the very thick of the action.

Another one of the eight buildings is even more spectacular an architectural survival as it is a masterpiece of frescoing. The Palace of Reason served as Padua’s marketplace, town hall and civil court. The ground floor was completed in 1219 and is the oldest covered market in Europe, still used as such today. Two loggias were added on top of the ground floor between 1306 and 1309, and a large wooden roof shaped like the overturned hull of a ship. It was built with trusses, liberating the interior from cumbersome central columns. Originally divided into three chambers, the great hall (known as the Salone) became a single wide-open space 267 feet long when the partitions were removed after a devastating fire in 1420.

The original frescoes painted by Giotto on the vault of the Salone depicting astrological motifs, allegorical figures and religious scenes were destroyed in the fire. The room was repainted by Nicolà Miretto and Stefano da Ferrara based on the visible traces of Giotto’s originals. More than 300 panels depict the stars, their effect on human character and events, religious subjects, animals and the civic magistrates — judges, notaries — who worked in that space.

In pride of place inside the Salone is a black porphyry drum on a stepped square base. This is the infamous Pietra del Vituperio (Stone of Vituperation) where insolvent debtors were forced to sit, garbed only in their underwear, and repeat three times “Cedo Bonis” (I give up my goods). He was then relieved of his burden of debt, but had to leave the city immediately. If he returned without permission from his creditors, he would be put back on the Stone of Vituperation and dowsed with three buckets of cold water.

This was the merciful approach bankruptcy; previously debtors in Padua had been imprisoned for life. It was Saint Anthony who successfully pleaded with municipal authorities to stop giving life sentences for debt just before his death in 1231. After the good friar died, however, the city added the Pietra del Vituperio to the bankruptcy process. The stone has been in the Salone ever since, although it hasn’t been used for its original purpose in a long time.

The city has created a single-ticket track with accompanying app dubbed Padova Urbis Picta (Padua Painted City) for visitors to experience all eight of the frescoed sites in the World Heritage list.  You can take virtual guided tour of the extraordinary frescoes by Giotto in the Scrovegni Chapel in this digital replica with ultra-high resolution photographs. I highly recommend zooming in on the bottom right of the Last Judgement to get a closer look at the rich details of Hell and its many kinds of sinners.