A section of mosaic flooring from the 5th century palace of Ostrogoth king Theodoric has been discovered in Verona. The mosaic was found during installation of new gas pipes in the Montorio hamlet less than four miles from Verona’s historic town center.

Remains of an enormous country villa more than five acres in surface area have been turning up in Montorio since the 19th century. While there is no direct evidence that it was one Theodoric’s many palaces, the sheer size and scale strongly suggests it was a royal estate. If it wasn’t Theodoric’s palace, it must have belonged to someone of enormous wealth who was very close to him.

Theodoric was not technically a Roman emperor. He was three different varieties of king, though, starting in 475 A.D. as King of the Ostrogoths, then adding King of Italy in 493 and of the Visigoths in 511. By the time of his death in 526, Theodoric reigned over most of what had been the Western Roman Empire. He spent his childhood as a noble hostage at the imperial court in Constantinople and was educated there in the Eastern Roman tradition.

As ruler of a territory stretching from the Atlantic to the Danube, Theodoric embraced the ancient imperial trappings. He donned the purple, accepted the regalia of the Western Empire from Eastern Emperor Anastasius I Dicorus and allowed all Roman citizens in the kingdom to be governed by Roman judicial law. He instituted a vast program of reconstruction of Roman cities and infrastructure, restoring ancient aqueducts, baths, churches, the Aurelian walls of Rome and the defensive walls of a myriad other cities in Italy. He threw in a few new palaces for himself while he was at it, most famously in his capital of Ravenna, but also in other northern Italian cities like Verona.

The mosaic will remain in situ. It will be cleaned and documented in detail before being reburied. Some local residents have proposed covering it with plexiglass so the mosaic can still be seen, something that has been done already in Verona’s historic center, but this mosaic is in a terribly awkward position, trapped under networks of old pipes surrounded by homes, so it’s not a good candidate for display, unfortunately.

Archaeologists have discovered the earliest confirmed example of Maya calendar notation on two fragments of plaster at the Maya site of San Bartolo, Guatemala. The paint-on-lime-plaster fragments feature a dot and a horizontal line over the head of a deer. This is “7 deer,” one of the days of the Maya calendar. Radiocarbon dating of charcoal found next to the plaster returned a date range of 300-200 B.C.

“The Maya had a solar calendar, like us, but they also had a ritual one,” says Hurst. “We also have one, as Easter is part of that sequence of rituals throughout the year,” she adds. It was associated with a creation myth and also to mark the celebrations that accompanied the Haab, the 360-day calendar. The remaining five days, although they were counted, were disastrous and people avoided leaving their homes. Surrounding both was the Calendar Round, which completed its cycle every 52 years. The complex way that the Maya had to organize time was completed with the Long Count, a vigesimal system (base 20) of counting the days linearly. It is with the latter that it has been possible to find equivalencies between the Maya calendar and the Gregorian calendar.

San Bartolo made global news in 2001 when archaeologists discovered vividly painted murals from the Late Preclassic period (400 B.C. to 200 A.D.) in its central stepped pyramid, dubbed Las Pinturas after the colorful wall paintings. Ceramic artifacts dated them to around 100 B.C., the penultimate of seven construction phases of the pyramid. The calendar hieroglyphics date to the third phase.

Previous discoveries of hieroglyphic inscriptions at San Bartolo proved that writing systems had developed in the Central Maya Lowlands area far earlier than previously realized. The earliest examples of Maya hieroglyphic writing, found in Oaxaca, Mexico, date to around 400 B.C. The earliest examples in San Bartolo date to around 300 B.C., a significant movement in a short time considering San Bartolo is more than 500 miles southeast of Oaxaca.

During the third phase of construction, the central pyramid was smaller. When it was expanded, walls had to be knocked down. Archaeologists discovered more than 7,000 pieces of plaster, remnants of the destroyed walls. They were disposed of carefully, not simply thrown away as construction debris. The former walls were deliberately deposited inside the newly-enlarged chamber, a sort of symbolic burial of the sacred imagery and text.

The study of the find has been published in the journal Science Advances and can be read in its entirety here.

A hoard of more than 1,000 coins from the second quarter of the 4th century has been unearthed in Bubendorf, north central Switzerland. The hoard was discovered by volunteer archaeological scout Daniel Lüdin in a forested area near Wildenstein Castle. When his metal detector signaled a strong alert, Lüdin dug down a little and found a few Roman coins and some potsherds, not enough to explain the strength of the signal. He dug down a little more and hit the jackpot. Literally: a broken pot filled with coins.

He filled in the hole and notified canton heritage officials at Archeologie Baselland who promptly dispatched a team to the find site. They removed the pot in a soil block so that all of the coins, pot fragments and any invisible archaeological treasures like traces of organic remains could be excavated in laboratory conditions. The block removal also allowed researchers to CT scan the soil block to map out the contents. A black space seen in the CT scans between two layers of coins turned out to be a simple piece of leather.

The total coin count after the hoard was fully excavated is 1290 coins, all copper coins, so it was basically a change jar. It adds up, though, and the total value of 1290 coppers was the equivalent of a gold solidus, or about two months’ salary for a soldier in the legions. All of the coins were minted during the reign of Constantine (306-337 A.D.). The most recent among them date to 332-335 A.D.

What makes the hoard so unusual is that it was buried during a time of political and economic stability. Coin hoards from the 4th century were typically buried during periods of unrest, but Constantine’s reign was not among them. Hoards from this period are vanishingly rare throughout the Empire. It seems likely that this one was buried for other reasons. One possibility is a religious offering as the find site was on the border between three known Roman estates, so it could have been a boundary line sacrifice.

Here is 3D model of the hoard after the external soil was cleaned but before the contents were excavated in the laboratory.

Archaeologists have unearthed two early Western Han tombs containing more than 140 funerary objects at the  Dongzha New Village site in Yancheng, eastern China. The wooden chamber tombs are filled with water and soil, preserving organic materials like wood and plant fibers. The rich furnishings include bronze ware, lacquer ware, pottery, painted wood figurines and more than 100 weapons.

The tombs were discovered last week, and only one of the two, M84, has been fully excavated thus far. It is a rectangular cut pit containing a central wooden coffin and two wooden caskets, one on the side, one at the foot of the burial coffin. The coffin was covered with rectangular wooden boards. The three compartments are packed tightly with bronze mirrors, pottery coins, glazed ceramics, pottery tripods, cups, plates, spoons and other utensils. One of the coins, a Yingyuan, is the first example found in Yancheng.

The other tomb, M82, is larger and has only been partially excavated. It too is a rectangular pit with a wooden burial chamber containing a wooden coffin, a side chamber and a foot chamber. The excavation of the small side and foot chambers revealed complete wooden crossbows, bows, arrows, painted wooden figurines, lacquer boxes, lacquer cups, game boards, pottery, pottery coins and plant seeds.

Both of the owners of these tombs must have been wealthy, high-status individuals to afford such rich burials. A jade bi (a disc with a hole in the middle that had religious significance often found buried in the graves of the elite) discovered in M82 confirms he was someone of high social rank.

Yancheng was settled in 119 B.C. in the Western Han Dynasty as a center for the harvest of sea salt in the rivers and wetlands around the city. Salt was a lucrative business and the city prospered. Han noble families displayed their wealth in “thick burials,” meaning tombs crammed to the gills with valuables and practical items for the deceased to enjoy and use in the afterlife just as he had when he was alive. The custom made Han tombs very attractive to looters, and so many of them were emptied out centuries ago that the discovery of even one  still-thick burial is rare. Finding two is a huge archaeological boon to our understanding of Han funerary practices.