The History Blog

Eight loaves of bread that were baked 5,000 years ago found at Seyitömer Mound in Turkey’s northwestern province of Kütahya have gone on display to the public for the first time. The bread barely even looks stale, preserved in excellent condition from have been carbonized by the fire that ravaged the settlement in the Early Bronze Age.

The loaves were discovered last year in a room with a furnace and the remains of shelves on its walls. Eight bread loaves were found between the shelf supports. Raw materials — the remains of wheat and lentils — were also present. This suggests the shelf collapsed under pressure from the fire, dumping the bread and what had been sacks of wheat and lentil, which then opened, spilling the contents and allowing them to mix together.

Seyitömer Mound is 85 feet high today, 460 feet wide and 490 feet long. It lies within the operating area of Çelikler Seyitömer Electricity Generation Inc. who mine the lignite deep underneath it. Rescue excavations have been ongoing at the mound since 1989. More than 17,000 artifacts have been recovered. A selection of the finds is on display at the Kütahya Archaeology and Mining Museum. The loaves, wheat and lentils have now joined the exhibits from the mound at the museum.

Noting that the artifacts are among the most popular finds in the museum, [lead archaeologist Sevgi] Gurdal said Seyitomer Mound “actually makes up a large part of the artifacts exhibited in our museums.”

She added: “The Seyitomer Mound artifacts offer various data on the daily and social life, artistic understanding and eating habits of their period.”

A 5th century funerary complex featuring rich warrior and equine burials has been discovered in Horbourg-Wihr, near Colmar, in Alsace.

France’s National Institute for Preventative Archaeology (INRAP) has been excavating the site on the right bank of the Ill river in anticipation of new housing construction. This area was the center of a Gallo-Roman civilian settlement a short distance from the Rhine limes (the ancient Roman boundary line). The excavation found remains of dwellings and roads attesting to a continuous occupation from the 1st to the 3rd century.

After sporadic occupation in the 4th century, part of the site was converted into a burial complex in the second half of the 5th century. Two of them stand out for the high quality of grave goods, which include a scramasax sword, a shield and an angon (a type of javelin typically used by Germanic peoples in the early Middle Ages).

Decorative elements of clothing and weaponry, crafted in gold and silver cloisonné with garnets, confirm the privileged status of these deceased. Two other burials are distinguished by grave goods of a female nature. These include pairs of silver-gilt looped brooches, silver bird-shaped brooches, glass bead necklaces, belt buckles, and a bone comb. The equines, along with their harnesses, were buried within the burial complex itself.

These fine funerary furnishings accompanied evidence of wear and tear on the bones from poor health and injuries from sharp blades, indicating warrior deaths, as do the burial of two horses.

While this archaeological excavation enhances our understanding of the development and organization of the Gallo-Roman vicus in the northwest sector of Horbourg-Wihr, its primary significance lies in the discovery of a unique burial complex linked to the Migration Period. The exceptional nature of this find stems particularly from the scarcity of sites documenting Germanic settlement during this chronological period in the region. This new data will undoubtedly revitalize research on the dynamics of settlement in the region and the upheavals that marked this territory in the second half of the 5th century .

A unique gold bear ornament has been discovered in a burial mound in Almaty, Kazakhstan, from the Saka period, dating back to the 4th or 3rd centuries B.C.

“The sculptural bear figurine is unique in the context of Kazakhstan. No comparable artefacts have previously been discovered. This find makes it possible to trace cultural parallels across the Eurasian region, stretching from the Black Sea region to the Altai,” said Lyazzat Sagyndykova, Director of the Almaty City Museums Association.

The little bear is made of cast gold and stands on his hind legs, holding a vessel in both front paws. He is mounted on a plate with perforations on each corner suggesting it was originally attached to something. Archaeologists hypothesize that it was sewn into a headdress.

Comparable gold animal figurines have been found on ceremonial headdresses of the Saka culture, nomadic peoples who inhabited the Eurasian Steppe from the 9th century BC to the 5th century AD.. A gold argali (a wild sheep) was sewn to the headdress of the Golden Warrior, a Saka royal buried in ceremonial armor in the Issyk Kurgan 30 miles east of Almaty. A gold snow leopard found at the Kok-Kainar burial site in 2014 also decorated a headdress.

The tumulus where the bear was found is in the Karagayly burial ground. It is about 25-26 meters in diameter and is currently 2.5 meters high at the highest point, but would originally have been larger. It was looted in antiquity, leaving behind a crater three meters wide, but the thieves missed the little gold ursine treasure.

An unusually large number of human remains were found in the kurgan. Typically a tumulus this side would have contained the remains of one or two people at most, but bones from at least four adults and three children have come to light, and the excavation isn’t over yet. Archaeologists also found fragments of Saka-era pottery. The remains and objects were scattered around the burial site, presumably by the looters.

When the excavation is complete and all the artifacts documented, cleaned and conserved, a selection of the most significant objects discovered in the kurgan will go on display at the Almaty Museum.