A hiker on the hunt for wild asparagus in the woods outside Livorno harvested a Roman funerary marker instead. Retired firefighter Roberto Tessari was foraging last Wednesday after heavy rains when he spotted a rectangular stone slab at the water’s edge of a canal. He turned it over and saw that it was a funerary inscription.

An active member of the Livorno Archaeological Paleontological Group, Tessari knew to report the find to the Superintendency of Archaeology, Fine Arts and Landscape for the provinces of Pisa and Livorno and sent the official archaeologist, Dr. Lorella Alderighi, whom he knows personally, pictures of the slab. He then called his firefighter brethren to help him pull it out of the water. They lifted the stone safely and transferred it to the Superintendency. In a happy coincidence, Tessari’s son was on the firefighting team dispatched to the scene.

The slab is 45 cm (17.7 inches) wide, 9 cm (3.5 inches) thick and 29 cm (11.4 inches) high, exactly one Roman foot. It dates to the 2nd century A.D. and is in excellent condition, with an intact inscription framed by a deeply carved cornice. The letters are 4 cm (1.6 inches) high and expertly carved in capital letters carefully laid out to make three even lines.

The three lines of Latin text read:

T ANCONIUS SEVERUS
ANCONIVS PRISCVS
ET SABINIA SEVERA
V F

It is a dedication to one Titus Anconius Severus from his parents, father Anconius Priscus and mother Sabinia Severa. The abbreviation V F stands for Vivi Fecerunt, meaning that the parents had the tomb and marker made while they were still living.

The names are not documented in any known sources, but there are interesting details in . Young Titus, for example, bears his father’s family (gens) name of Anconius and his mother’s family name Severus as a cognomen (the third personal name). The cognomen started out as a nickname to distinguish people from the same family since there were so many repeated praenomen (first names) and eventually became inherited as well. They were almost always inherited along the paternal line, but the mother’s family name could be passed down to a son as a cognomen on occasion. The emperors of the Flavian dynasty, for example, used the mother’s name as cognomina for the second sons — Vespasian after his mother Vespasia Polla, Domitian after his mother Flavia Domitilla. One reason for including the mother’s name in a son’s name was if her family more distinguished, so not necessarily adopting the mother’s name per se, but rather including the name of the maternal grandfather.

“The discovery is extremely interesting as it is one of the rare Roman inscribed tombstones with perfectly preserved text found in the Livorno area,” emphasizes Dr. Alderighi. “Given the site’s isolation, today as perhaps in the past, with its wooded and uncultivated nature, it cannot be ruled out that the tombstone may indicate the location of a stonemason’s workshop, or that it was never connected to a funerary structure, as the roughly hewn marble back shows no traces of mortar to the naked eye. The inscription likely dates to the 2nd century AD.”

The male names (Titus Anconius Severus, Anconius Priscus) and the female figure (Sabinia Severa) do not belong to known individuals, and only the first male figure has a praenomen cited. Furthermore, the males lack patronymics and tribe names, and the gentilic name is copied from the name of a city (Ankòn/Ancon). These are all factors that could indicate the status of freedmen, or those economically important social groups that left traces of themselves in the epigraphic documentation of northern Etruria between the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD.

The slab is now being cleaned and conserved by Superintendency experts who will conduct an in-depth analysis of the stone, carving and inscription.

An excavation in a new section of the Joséphine Baker school complex in Dijon has unearthed at least five or six new seated burials dating to the Gallic period between 300 and 200 B.C. Three of them form a new alignment parallel to the first burials uncovered, while the remaining two/three follow the original alignment.

The first seated burials were excavated in 2024 in the former garden of the Corderliers convent. They had all been laid to rest in the same manner: seated on the bottom of a circular pit, backs against the eastern wall, facing west. Their hands were on their laps or legs. They were buried without grave goods, except for one individual who was found wearing a black stone armband. The style of the armband is what identified the graves as dating to the Gallic period.

While the excavation of the school complex uncovered new graves, the French National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research (INRAP) revealed the results of the analyses of the first 13 burials. They were all adult males between 40 and 60 years old when they died, ranging in height from 1.62 to 1.82 meters (5’4″-6′).

They were in good overall health with excellent teeth, but osteoarthritis in the bones, particularly in the legs, attests to them having consistently experienced strenuous physical activity in their lives. Intriguingly, five or six of the 13 have signs of unhealed sharp force trauma, namely cuts on the humerus bones and in one case, two sharp blows to the skull, likely from a sword. This means they were at least cut at the time of death and even if the humerus blows were not the coups de grace, the deceased were deliberately killed.

Including earlier discoveries in 1992, about 20 tombs with sitting Gauls have been discovered in a small area of Dijon’s city centre.

That is more than a quarter of the 75 tombs featuring sitting Gauls identified worldwide. Other sites have been found in France, Switzerland and the UK.

Regis Labeaune, a researcher at the French archaeological institute, Inrap, said the latest bodies were “particularly impressive discoveries”.

“Given the number and quality of these discoveries, we can say there was a significant Gallic settlement in Dijon,” he told AFP.

A small bronze bull head figurine discovered by a hiker in the Serra de Tramuntana mountain range in Mallorca, Spain, is now being studied by archaeologists. The head is just three centimeters (1.2 inches) long and is only miniature bull head found in Mallorca known to survive. Thanks to the diligence of the hiker who immediately notified the Consell de Mallorca of the find and handed it over to the authorities, this unique artifact will be preserved in a Mallorca museum.

Dating to between 600 and 200 B.C., the bull head was crafted by the sophistic metal craftsmen of the post-Talaiotic culture, descendants of the first settlers of Mallorca and other Balearic Islands. They are named after megalithic towers known as talaiots that pepper the landscape of the islands, about 300 of them on Mallorca alone. The features of the bull — ears, horns, eyes, nose — are meticulously shaped and incised in the stylized form typical of the Talaiotic Culture. Archaeologists believe it was once part of a larger sculpture or a decorative fitting.

The wee bull head shares common design elements with and is a contemporary of the far larger bull heads of Costitx, icons of the bull’s ancient totemic significance in Spain’s cultural history. The three life-sized heads were discovered at the archaeological site of Son Corró outside Costitx, Mallorca, in the late 19th century, and are believed to be related to a Talaiotic bull-worship cult. They are now exhibited at the National Archaeological Museum in Madrid, much to the consternation of Costitx, which has repeatedly petitioned Spain’s government to return the heads to their home only to be denied over and over again. That loss adds a great deal of weight to the miniature version staying put.

The bull head is now undergoing archaeological and metallurgic analysis by Consell de Mallorca researchers. They hope to narrow down when it was manufactured, the metallurgic techniques employed, the metal composition and answer the question of whether it was originally mounted to a larger piece.

The only known pictorial depiction of the Gallic god Sucellus has been discovered in a Gallo-Roman sanctuary near Tournus, Burgundy. The sanctuary was in continuous use from the late Iron Age until the 4th century.

The Mancey site is located on a high point overlooking the area. Geophysical surveys in 2020 found six large stone mounds that were part of a religious complex rather than a necropolis or a settlement. After test excavations in 2023 proved fruitful, a three-year program of excavations focused on the two largest mounds, dubbed M3 and M5, followed. Approximately 20,000 artifacts have been documented since 2023.

The smaller of the two mounds, M3, is a rectangular building with a vestibule opening into a sacred hall. It was occupied in four phases.
Phase 1: Earliest occupation in room 1, 287-289 A.D. to 324-325 A.D.
Phase 2: Construction of room 2 and raising of the floor in room 1, 324-325 A.D. to 367 A.D.
Phase 3: Floor raised in room 1, ca. 367 AD
Phase 4: Dismantling of the sacred hall and closing rituals, after 367 A.D.

The 2025 excavation reached the oldest phase of construction. They unearthed a hoard of 17 coins from that time, including an aureus struck by Tetricus I (271 – 274 A.D.), the last emperor of the short-lived Romano-Gallic empire which took over protecting Gaul from Germanic incursions when the central Roman empire lost control between 260 and 274 A.D. The coins were buried together and are believed to have been a foundation deposit made to bless the new temple.

Few remains from this first era of temple construction have been unearthed. The second phase is much more well-represented, with the floor level in particular in an exceptional state of preservation because it was encapsulated by a raised floor and fill in Phase 3 . It was replete with animal and object remains from ritual deposits. More than 10,000 animal remains of many different kinds were found, including suckling pigs, chickens, songbirds, pike and trench. Archaeologists believe ritual banquets took place on that floor, and the remains of the feasting and offerings were deliberately left in place, never cleaned and allowed to accumulate over time. Artifacts found on the floor include ceramic beakers, bone pins, jewelry and coins, objects of high quality that suggest the space may have been exclusively used by the local elite.

The temple was abandoned shortly after Phase 3.

Phase 4 corresponds to the abandonment layer of the monument, particularly spectacular both for its composition and the quality of the artifacts unearthed. It yielded an exceptional collection of stone liturgical furnishings, including two statue pedestals, a large table, a tabular altar with a rim, and a probable masonry altar (80 × 40 cm) covered with painted plaster. One of its faces depicts the Gaulish god Sucellus; based on current knowledge, this appears to be the only known painted representation of this deity.

The stratigraphy indicates that after the initial looting of the sacred hall, the tiled roof was largely removed. The two statue pedestals were then re-erected above the rubble, almost in the center of the sacred hall, and a hearth was then built at the foot of one of them, directly on the first collapsed levels. […]

Around this hearth, numerous animal remains, fragments of ceramic and glass goblets, and a significant number of coins were found. The range of artifacts observed appears very similar to that documented for phase 2. This continuity suggests that the actions performed in the temple ruins were part of a pre-existing ritual tradition. The assemblage most likely evokes a final ritual feast celebrated in the ruins of the monument, symbolically contributing to its condemnation sometime around 370 AD.

Finally, a pit dug into the first collapsed level, in front of the podium, yielded a remarkable deposit consisting of about a hundred coins, a particularly unusual cult lamp, and ten white clay statuettes of mother goddesses from the Autun workshop of the coroplast Pistillus (a century older than the pit). This deposit of condemnation thus constitutes one of the last cultic acts performed in the sanctuary.

Coins continued to be thrown into the remains of the collapsed temple until the end of the 4th century.