A 6th century mosaic floor featuring peacocks and an Greek inscription has been discovered in Arsuz, a town in Hatay Province, southern Turkey. The floor was part of the Church of the Holy Apostles, a Byzantine-era basilica, and was commissioned by a freed slave who thanked God for his manumission in the inscription.

The remains of the Church of the Holy Apostles first emerged in 2007 when landowner Mehmet Keleş was planting saplings in his orange grove. Subsequent excavations revealed a three-aisled basilica church with mosaic floors, stone graves and human remains. A mosaic inscription identified the site as an ancient church dedicated to the apostles. There is evidence it was in use through the 12th century.

Located on the Gulf Issus 70 miles from the great city of Antioch, Arsuz was founded during the Hellenistic era and by the 1st century B.C. when it was annexed by Rome, it was an important port city on the Mediterranean coast of what is today Turkey. It became a regionally significant religious center in late antiquity, the seat of a bishopric and home to a monastery founded in the mountains outside the city by the ascetic hermit Theodosius of Antioch.

The mosaic with peacocks and the inscription were discovered in the most recent dig season and the excavation is ongoing. Eventually, the Hatay regional government plans to build a roof over the remains and open it to visitors as an open-air museum.

The archaeological program surveying the site of the HS2 high speed rail construction have unearthed another rare artifact: an early Roman carved wooden figure. It was discovered in July 2021 at Three Bridge Mill in Twyford, Buckinghamshire. It was in a water-logged ditch from the early Roman era, preserved from decomposition by the anaerobic clay fill of the ditch.

When it first emerged from the excavation trench, archaeologists thought it was just a random piece of wood. As they painstakingly removed the soil, they realized it was a carved anthropomorphic figurine. It was carved from a single piece of wood as is more than 26 inches high (67 cm) and seven inches wide. Today the arms below the elbows and the feet have decayed, but much of the carved detail survives on the head, the tunic that gathers at the waist and the shaped calves.

The style of carving and the figure’s tunic-like garment suggested it was made in the early Roman period. Shards of pottery from the ditch confirmed that assessment when they were radiocarbon dated to between 43 and 70 A.D.

The occurrence of carved, wooden, figures in British prehistory and the Romano-British period is extremely rare.  In 2019 a wooden limb, thought to be a Roman votive offering, was found at the bottom of a well in Northampton. Examples of full Roman carved figures have been recovered in Dijon and Chamalières in France. A wooden carving, the ‘Dagenham Idol’, was recovered from the north bank of the Thames is 1922 and has been dated back to the Neolithic period and an early Iron Age carved figure was recovered from the banks of the River Teign, Kingsteignton in 1866.

Jim Williams, Senior Science Advisor for Historic England, said:

“This is a truly remarkable find which brings us face to face with our past. The quality of the carving is exquisite and the figure is all the more exciting because organic objects from this period rarely survive. This discovery helps us to imagine what other wooden, plant or animal-based art and sculpture may have been created at this time. Further analysis has the potential to reveal more detail, perhaps even providing clues about where it was made.”

The figurine is now being examined and conserved in York Archaeology’s conservation laboratory. A small fragment of the figurine that was found broken off next to it will be radiocarbon dated and subjected to stable isotope analysis to determine, if possible, its place of origin.

A group of 41 Celtic gold cup-shaped coins have been discovered near the village of Baitz in Brandenburg, northeastern Germany. These are the first and only Celtic gold coins ever discovered in Brandenburg.

Rainbow cups are bowl-shaped coins made of precious metals that are found in the territory of the Celtic La Tène culture of central Europe. (They received their moniker because they were often discovered by farmers when ploughing their fields after heavy rain, so a folk legend sprang up that gold cups would be found wherever a rainbow had touched the ground.) They are often decorated with Celtic iconography. The ones discovered in Baitz are smooth, with no decoration on the surface. It is the second largest hoard of smooth rainbow cups ever found.

There was no Celtic population in Brandenburg — a settlement from the early Germanic Jastorf culture occupied the site — so these precious objects likely reached the settlement over Iron Age trade networks.

They were discovered by Wolfgang Herkt, an officially appointed volunteer archaeologist trained and overseen by the Brandenburg State Office for the Preservation of Monuments and Archaeological State Museum (BLDAM). He first came across a group of 11 coins, and a follow-up excavation turned up another 30 for a total of 41 gold coins. There are also silver and copper cups. The bronzes may have been counterfeits; bronze coated in a thin layer of gold have been found before in cup hoards, a deliberate deception to pass off false coinage as the genuine article.

The rainbow cups are scheduled to go on display at the Brandenburg State Archaeological Museum in the spring.