Archaeologists excavating the site of a comprehensive housing and green space development in Nijmegen’s Winkelsteeg area have unearthed a spectacular Roman blue glass bowl that is in flawless condition. It is at least 1,800 years old, and there is not a chip or crack on it.

Such dishes were made by allowing molten glass to cool and harden over a mold. The stripe pattern was drawn in when the glass mixture was still liquid. Metal oxide causes the blue color.

This bowl was once a showpiece for early Nijmegen residents. [Lead archaeologist Pepijn] Van de Geer thinks it is a masterpiece that deserves to be displayed in a museum. “I have seen similar glassware in Italian museums.”

Nijmegen was founded as a Roman military camp in the 1st century B.C., and a civilian settlement of the local Batavi peoples formed next to it. By 98, the settlement of Nijmegen was the first city in what is today the Netherlands to receive the designation of municipium (Roman city rights) making its residents Roman citizens.

The bowl was not of local manufacture. It was produced in a workshop of fine glasswares in a large Roman city. The Roman city of Vetera (modern-day Xanten), just over the border in Germania, was known for its glass production, and it too was in Batavi territory so there would have been established lines for the exchange of goods. It is of such high quality, however, that it could well have originated in Italy and been traded north, or have been acquired by a Batavian legionary who brought it home with him when he retired from the Roman army.

The Winkelsteeg excavation has also unearthed graves from the Roman settlement and a smattering of grave goods, including vessels, cups and jewelry. Remains of dwellings are sparse — mostly traces of wood construction — but archaeologists are documenting residues and soil discoloration to draw up a map of the neighborhood’s houses.

Archaeologists have discovered a Roman nude female statue believed to be of the goddess Venus at the site of future hotel construction in Zadar, Croatia. It is incomplete; a section three feet high from the knees to waist survives out of what was likely a larger-than-life-sized statue more than six feet high. Preliminary analysis indicates it dates to the 2nd century.

The right knee is bent and the leg slightly forward. Fragments of a hand are on the left thigh, and there are fragmentary traces near the groin and waist as well. Archaeologists believe there was likely a second figure in the group, perhaps the god Mercury. The pose of the legs and the hand on the thigh are similar to a headless and armless statue of Venus that is now in the Split Archaeological Museum. That Venus Victrix with Erote was unearthed in the 18th century in the ruins of the palace of Emperor Diocletian in Solin, ancient Salona which was the capital of the Roman province of Dalmatia and Diocletian’s birthplace as well as his retirement home.

Zadar, 100 miles north of Salona, was also a prosperous city under the Roman Empire. The statue was found six feet below the surface in the remains of an urban villa, an elegant home with luxury features that would have belonged to one of the wealthy residents of Zadar. The Venus statue was probably one of several that decorated the atrium of the villa.

The excavation thus far has revealed a marble slab floor of about 850 square feet. It extends past the excavation area on three sides, so it could be much larger. Archaeologists also unearthed a wall lines with grey marble tile and a surviving section of mosaic floor about 40 square feet in area. The mosaic is geometric, with two black stripes against a field of white tesserae.

They also found a hole in the floor with a broken marble surround that led to drainage canal 36 feet long. The drainage canal contained a number of pottery fragments and even more tubules, hollow ceramic bricks used as heating pipes in the walls of Roman villas.

The location of the villa and the details of the mosaic coincided with the results of research by Professor Boris Ilakovac 60 years ago. Before constructing the neighboring building of Božidar Rašica, he researched the foundations of buildings demolished during and after the Second World War.

Professor Ilakovac found two villas in a row there; they touched each other’s outer walls and had an identical mosaic decoration in the atrium. All this tells us that here, a hundred meters from the ancient Forum, several representative residential buildings were later, possibly in the early Middle Ages, demolished and only now being revealed in their full beauty.

The statue of Venus has been transported to the Homeland Museum in Biograd where it will be conserved and studied in detail.

The skeletal remains of a richly adorned woman and a young child have been discovered in a burial mound in the Chinge-Tey archaeological site of Siberia. Grave goods found include gold earrings, an iron knife, an engraved wooden comb connected by a leather loop to a bronze mirror and a rare gold pectoral piece in a crescent shape. The burial dates to the 6th century B.C. when the valley was occupied by the Scythian Alda-Bielsko culture.

The mound is no longer a mound today, damaged to the point of being almost leveled, and was only detected thanks to aerial laser scanning that spotted the circular structure more than 80 feet in diameter. Archaeologists excavated the former mound and discovered a wooden burial chamber in the center. The heavy, elaborate chamber was built on a framework of interlocking beams with a wooden floorboards and topped with three layers of beams to form a roof. The skeletons of a woman aged around 50 years old and a child two or three years old were inside the chamber.

The Chinge-Tey site is in the Turano-Ujukska Valley which has been ycleped the “Siberian Valley of the Kings” because of the proliferation of large burial mounds packed with rich grave goods that have been discovered there.

“A particularly interesting monument was the golden pectoral, a crescent or moon-shaped ornament hanging at the neck” – noted in an interview with PAP the head of the Polish part of the expedition, Dr. Łukasz Oleszczak from the Jagiellonian University in Krakow. He emphasized that such objects, known from burial mounds in southern Siberia, have so far been found almost exclusively in men’s graves.

“They were considered a symbol of belonging to some social group, caste, perhaps warriors – men at least. Placing him in a woman’s grave is a very interesting departure from this custom. It certainly proves the unique role of the deceased in the community of inhabitants of the Valley of the Kings” — believes the archaeologist.

At the same time, he pointed out that the woman was buried in the central part of the tomb located in the immediate vicinity of the great mound belonging to – as researchers believe – the prince of nomads. “It seems that, like the other dead buried in this mound, she belonged to the princely retinue,” said Oleszczak.

There are traces of even more grave goods, bronze objects buried around the mound. A few pieces have been found — a bronze ice ax, animal-shaped figurines — using a metal detector, but archaeologists believe there were many more than were scattered during agricultural work at the site in the 20th century.