A Gothic cemetery has been unearthed in the Wda Landscape Park in northern Poland. Fifty cremation burials have been excavated so far, and they’ve barely scratched the surface of this large cemetery believed to occupy about a hectare. Grave goods of pottery, brooches, amber beads, glass beads, and everyday utilitarian objects like spindle whorls and a bone comb have been found in two types of burials: pit graves and urn burials. They date to the 4th century A.D.

While no architectural remains have been found, the park was home to an Iron Age settlement of a Wielbark-adjacent Gothic culture. They had access to local metals and the metallurgical know-how to make use of them. They extracted metals from glacial erratics (boulders deposited by flowing glaciers during the Ice Age), a highly specialized skill that required locating, preparing, crushing and roasting large stones in specialized furnaces. Several rounds of cooking were necessary before the ore could be separated from the stone sediment. Interestingly, while they buried many metal objects in their graves, they did not bury any weapons.

Archaeologist Olaf Popkiewicz made the first discovery while walking on the banks of the Wda River. He spotted silver artifacts and called in a team to excavate the find site. They unearthed a set of two silver necklaces, two silver fibulae and pieces of a silver bead necklace, all in outstanding condition. The high quality of the silver and the style of the fibulae are characteristic of the Chernyakhov culture, a Gothic people who migrated from Pomerania to the Black Sea, settling in what is now Ukraine. The fibulae date to the 5th century A.D. The necklaces were also imported. They were made in Scandinavia in the 4th century A.D. The group of silver objects therefore include pieces that range from Scandinavia in the north to the Black Sea in the southeast.

The condition of the open necropolis is rapidly deteriorating. Archaeologists will continue to excavate the site to salvage any remains and artifacts they can.

The remains of one of the world’s oldest known synagogues have been unearthed in the ancient Greek city of Phanagoria near Kuban on the Black Sea coast of southern Russia. The foundations and bases of the walls were discovered by archaeologists of the Phanagoria Archaeological Expedition. Marble menorahs and fragments of steles inscribed “synagogue” in Hebrew and Greek, identified the building.

The synagogue was a rectangular structure 70 feet long by 20 feet wide. It was divided into two large rooms, each more than 645 square feet in area. It was richly decorated with marble columns and liturgical tables. The walls were vividly painted. The roof was tiled. The marble menorahs found inside the building have unique decorations not found in Middle Eastern synagogues.

The colony of Phanagoria was founded by Ionians from Teos fleeing the forces of Cyrus the Great of Persia in the 6th century B.C. By the 1st century A.D., it was home to a large, well-established Jewish community. Both the 8th century Byzantine historian Theophanes and the 9th century Persian geographer and postmaster Ibn Khordadbeh, described Phanagoria as a largely Jewish city. Theophanes mentions Bulgar tribes moving in the direction of “Phanagoria and of the Jews that live there” in his Chronologia for the year 678/9.

The synagogue was in use from the 1st century until the middle of the 6th century when the city was razed by invading Huns. It was founded in the late Second Temple period (516 B.C. – 70 A.D.) when Solomon’s Temple, destroyed in the Neo-Babylonian Empire’s siege of Jerusalem in 587 B.C., was rebuilt after the Jewish return from the Babylonian captivity. The existence of a synagogue as a Jewish house of communal worship, study and prayer dates to this period. Diaspora Jews living and dying far from Jerusalem were able to build their own consecrated spaces for religious services and ceremonies that had previously been the exclusive province of the hereditary priesthood of the direct descendants of Aaron (Moses’ brother) in the Temple in Jerusalem.

The earliest known synagogues date to the 3rd century B.C. and only a dozen or so are known in Israel and the Greco-Roman world from the Second Temple period. Phanagoria’s synagogue first appears on the archaeological record in an inscription recording the manumission of two slaves on the condition that they show “devotion and diligence” toward the synagogue. The inscription dates to 16 A.D. It is incomplete, but a later inscription from 51 A.D. includes the same terms and establishes the connection between manumission records and the synagogue. It reads:

Under the reign of King Cotys, in the year 348 on the first of the month of Xandikos: Sogos (and) Anos, sons of Psycharios (state that) Karsandanos and Karagos and Metroteimos were released in the synagogue, and are unassailable and cannot be hindered except that they show diligence and devotion toward the synagogue, under the joint guardianship of the congregation of the Jews.

The Phanagoria synagogue is therefore one of the oldest in the world, built hundreds of years before synagogue construction began to flourish in the 3rd century A.D.

“The significance of this discovery is manifold. Firstly, it unequivocally places Phanagoria, an ancient Greek polis, within the annals of Jewish history. It also indicates that Phanagoria likely served as a gateway for world religions to enter the territory of modern-day Russia,” says Bunyatyan. “A similar revelation occurred a few years ago, demonstrating that Phanagoria housed the oldest Christian diocese in what is now Russia. It is probable that religions primarily spread by sea before establishing their presence along the shores of the Kerch strait and subsequently moving inland.”

The earliest urban water drainage system in China has been discovered in the ancient city of Pingliangtai in the Huaiyang District of Zhoukou City, central China. The ceramic water pipes are 4,000 years old, dating to the Chinese Neolithic Longshan period.

The Neolithic settlement of Pingliangtai had a population of about 500 people and was enclosed by earthen walls surrounded by a moat. It was on a river plain and subject to seasonal monsoons that flooded the city in a flash. Figuring out how to drain accumulated water outside the walls was essential to the city’s survival. The excavation has revealed an extensive and well-designed urban drainage system running along roads, through the earthen walls and city gates.

To help mitigate the excessive rainwater during the rainy seasons, the people of Pingliangtai built and operated a two-tier drainage system that was unlike any other seen at the time. They built simple but coordinated lines of drainage ditches that ran parallel to their rows of houses in order to divert water from the residential area to a series of ceramic water pipes that carried the water into the surrounding moat, and away from the village.

One set of pottery pipes in excellent condition were found under the pavement in the guardhouse of the South Gate, passing through the city walls. They were set in a ditch dug at a slight incline (high inside the city walls, low outside), wide at the top and narrow at the bottom. Two pottery water pipes of the same dimensions and diameter were laid side-by-side at the bottom of the ditch. They were then buried and paved over by the road leading in and out of the gate.

Another set of pipes were found to have been installed through a break in the city wall. This was likely an emergency measure to drain the city after a flood event. After the water was drained, the gaps in the city wall were repaired and the pipes laid in ditches for permanent drainage.

The ceramic pipes are straight tubes in segments about 14-18 inches long. The sections interconnected to extend the length of the pipes and transport the water over long distances. The thickness of the pipe walls are consistent, as is the pattern on the surface, indicating they were a standardized product built specifically for the municipal drainage system. It could not have been ad hoc, laid down by neighborhoods or individual property owners; this was a designed and executed example of urban planning by the community, not a powerful central state authority.

What’s surprising to researchers is that the settlement of Pingliangtai shows little evidence of social hierarchy. Its houses were uniformly small and show no signs of social stratification or significant inequality among the population. Excavations at the town’s cemetery likewise found no evidence of a social hierarchy in burials, a marked difference from excavations at other nearby towns of the same era.

But, despite the apparent lack of a centralized authority, the town’s population came together and undertook the careful coordination needed to produce the ceramic pipes, plan their layout, install and maintain them, a project which likely took a great deal of effort from much of the community.

The level of complexity associated with these pipes refutes an earlier understanding in archaeological fields that holds that only a centralized state power with governing elites would be able to muster the organization and resources to build a complex water management system.

A group of 15 Iron Age gold coins discovered by metal detectorists on the Isle of Anglesey is the first Iron Age gold coin hoard ever found in Wales.

The coins were found scattered in a field in Llangoed between July 2021 and March 2022 by metal detectorists Lloyd Roberts, Peter Cockton and Tim Watson. Roberts found the first one which he immediately recognized as one of his bucket list dream coins, an Iron Age gold stater. He also found the second one. His friend Peter Watson found the next three. The coins were in such condition they still shone even fresh out of the earth. Tim Watson found the remaining 10 coins scanning the same field.

All 15 staters were struck between 60 and 20 B.C. at three mints in Lincolnshire by the Corieltavi, a Celtic tribe who inhabited the East Midlands area. They were mostly farmers and had no single ruler. They began producing coins in the beginning of the 1st century, and the names of multiple people — believed to have been rulers and subordinate rulers — are inscribed on them.

The design of each of the coins is very stylised, derived from Macedonian gold coins of Phillip II, which show the bust of Apollo on the obverse (heads side) and a two-horsed chariot and charioteer on the reverse (tails side).

The obverse of the staters shows Apollo’s wreath and hair, while the reverse shows a stylised triangular-headed horse with various symbols surrounding it. The symbols are the key distinguishing features for separating the coins into their different types.

The Iron Age tribes inhabiting modern Wales did not make their own coins and rarely used other tribes’ coins, so coin finds are rare in Wales from this period. Iron Age coins are rarely found on pre-Roman settlement sites in Britain.

The coins were probably not used for everyday transactions in the way that we use coins today. Instead, they are thought to have been used as gifts between elites to secure alliances or loyalty or as offerings to the gods, although in some cases they may have been used for high value purchases.

Commerce, politics and religion were inextricably linked. This hoard may therefore have been buried for one or multiple reasons. Pagan priests known as druids feature in Roman sources referring to Anglesey, and archaeological finds, such as the votive deposit at Llyn Cerrig Bach, indicate that the island was an important religious centre during the 1st centuries BC and AD. The apparent holy nature of the island is likely to have played a role in the deposition. Additionally, Parys Mountain on Anglesey and the nearby Great Orme were sources of copper, so these coins may have formed part of an exchange of by the Corieltavi in exchange for copper.

The finds were reported to the Portable Antiquities Scheme. With such a notable discovery of gold staters at one location, the Gwynedd Archaeological Trust surveyed the find site, guided by Peter Watson and landowner Gwyn Jones, in September 2021. The field had been long dedicated to pasture, and was last ploughed 15 years ago. The investigation of the find site did not reveal any information about the hoard, where it was originally buried, in what container, etc.

The 15 coins have now been officially declared treasure at a coroner’s inquest. The Oriel Môn museum on Anglesey hopes to acquire them for public display.

Archaeologists working to restore damage wrought by the massive earthquakes that struck southern Turkey earlier this year have unearthed a 3,800-year-old cuneiform clay tablet at the Bronze Age site of Tell Atchana. The inscription is in Akkadian and is a contract for the acquisition of another city by the king of the ancient city of Alalakh.

Alalakh was the largest city in the region during the Middle and Late Bronze Age (2200-1300 BC) and was capital of the Mukish Kingdom in the 2nd millennium B.C. It was endowed with fertile farmland and rich mines, and its location on trade routes connecting Anatolia, Mesopotamia, Egypt and the Mediterranean gave it access to goods imported from great distances.

The remains of two palaces made of sun-baked mud brick with timber supports and faced with squared stone blocks from Alalakh’s survive today. The first was built around 2000 B.C., the second around 1735 B.C. The city was burned by Hittites in the 16th century B.C. and again in the mid-14th century B.C. The population abandoned the city in the 13th century B.C., never to return.

Millennia of occupation, destruction, rebuilding and ultimate abandonment created a large mound 22 hectares in area and 30 feet high. British archaeologist Leonard Woolley was the first to systematically excavate the mound, now known as Tell Atchana, in the 1930s. He discovered the magnificent statue of Idrimi, covered head to toe in an Akkadian cuneiform inscription describing his reign. After a long gap, archaeologists returned to the excavate the site in the 2000, and excavations have continued regularly since then.

Alalakh suffered significant damage in the earthquake that struck the region on February 6th. Turkey’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism is overseeing a program of restoration and conservation to repair the palace walls damaged in the quake. The cuneiform tablet was discovered when the team removed rubble from a collapsed wall.

The first examination of the tablet in Akkadian language revealed information containing an agreement made by Yarim-Lim, the first known king of Alalakh, to purchase another city.

[Archaeology professor Murat] Akar said the tablet is not damaged and the finding was “so exciting.”

“It proves us that those kings had the economic power and potential to buy another city in those times.

“There is also the name of the important people of the city who witnessed this sale on the tablet, most likely,” he added.

“The work came out as an extremely unique example, especially to decipher the economic structure of that period, the relationship between cities, the economic and political model,” Akar said.

The tablet will be transferred to a museum after the examinations, said the restoration team head.