From gold coins found in an ancient massacre to mysterious ancient walls, here are 8 amazing
archaeological discoveries!!!
8.
Gold Found in 1500 Year-Old-Tragedy
In 2010, partially buried bodies from 1,500 years ago began appearing at a site called
Sandby Borg on the island of Öland in Sweden.
Since then, archaeologists have been trying to figure out what happened here, and have
made some surprising discoveries.
The massacre that took place was so large that it’s impossible to know for sure how
many people lost their lives- estimates place the number in the high hundreds, and it wasn’t
a pleasant death.
They appeared to have been murdered in as humiliating a way as possible.
Some bodies were found with goat or sheep teeth stuffed in their mouths, and others
were clearly killed while trying to escape.
Interestingly, though, a number of coins and treasures have been found at the site that
have helped identify the time at which it happened and what the society was like.
A Roman coin, dated between 425 and 455 AD shows that the empire had been in contact
with the residents of the island, and other things like silver broaches, bells, gold rings
and beads have been uncovered.
This is quite unusual, as normally these sites would have been plundered for all valuables.
It seems that following whatever event happened here, the area was feared and became taboo
for anyone to touch- with even the livestock being left to die while they were tied up
to posts.
7.
Las Bolas, Costa Rica
The Diquis Spheres, or Las Bolas as they are known locally, are stone balls that have been
mysteriously found in Costa Rica since the 1930’s.
After the discovery of the first, over 300 have been documented in sizes ranging from
a few centimeters to over two meters.
Most of them have been carved from an igneous stone called granodiorite.
The heaviest weighs over 16 tons!
While there are no carvings on the spheres, they are clearly man-made as the shapes aren’t
formed naturally, and some have chisel marks in them from where they had been worked on.
All of the stones were buried underground, and are often found during excavation works
or the preparation of fields for agricultural purposes.
No one’s certain what they were for or what they represent, but if you ever visit Costa
Rica you’ll see them decorating buildings like schools, hospitals and the Assembly Building.
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6.
Old Stone Inscription
In 1878, locals in a small town called Beyköy in Turkey found pieces of a strange stone
in the ground.
They removed them, and realized that they were all part of a larger artefact, a 29-meter
long hieroglyphic inscription in a virtually lost language called Luwian.
No one at the time understood the meaning of the symbols, so the stones were used to
build the foundations of a mosque, which meant they were totally destroyed.
Luckily, though, the French archaeologist Georges Perrot, was able to copy the inscription
before it was lost forever.
Still, the Luwian language wasn’t deciphered until the 1950’s, so his copies were left
in storage and were forgotten about.
This changed in 2012 when the noted archaeologist, James Mellaart, died, and his possessions
were being organized.
Within the volumes of pages were copies of the versions that George Perrot had made,
and translators went to work.
It turns out that the inscriptions from the 3,200 year old stone spoke about the travels
and exploits of Prince Muskus of Troy.
It detailed an expedition he led on behalf of his people to conquer Ashkelon, in modern
day Israel, and build a fortress to control the land.
There were also stories of the in fighting between different leaders of Troy and the
surrounding areas, and how life at the time was tough, with new claims to the throne constantly
vying for power.
The translations of the tablets have given a valuable insight into events of the time,
and helped us to further understand the ancient civilization.
5.
Blackbeard’s Ship
Edward Teach was one of the most feared pirates during the golden age of piracy in the Caribbean,
striking terror in the minds of the merchant sailors who operated in the area.
One of the reasons for this was his ship, the Queen Anne’s Revenge, which was a frigate
that he had captured from the French and turned into his flagship.
At 200 tons, it towered above the waves in a way that no other pirate ship did, but it
was only in use by the pirate for less than a year.
After blockading the harbour of Charleston in 1718, the ship ran aground in shallow waters
and they were forced to abandon it.
It had long been theorized that the wreck still lay on the river bed, and in 1996 an
independent research company found evidence of cannon and then a large shipwreck.
It was about 28 feet underwater and a mile offshore from Fort Macon State Park in North
Carolina.
In the following years, 31 cannons of different sizes have been recorded, as well as more
than 250,000 other artefacts.
In typical Blackbeard fashion, the discovery of the ship led to further controversy as
to who should have control over the images that have been taken of the ship.
In 2015 the North Carolina State Legislature passed a law to say that everything related
to the ship was property of the state, and as legal proceedings continue there has been
no further excavation of the site since then.
4.
Antikythera Mechanism
Most of us think that computers first came into existence in the 20th century- we’ve
all seen the images of how big they were when they were first invented.
One discovery, however, has amazed archaeologists, and shown that some ancient civilizations
were far more advanced than we had ever thought.
In 1902, an archaeologist named Valerios Stais, was looking through artefacts that had been
recovered from a Roman shipwreck in the Mediterranean sea, and realized that a piece looked like
a heavily corroded gear wheel.
81 further fragments were found, which included 30 hand cut bronze gears, and they all fit
together into what is now referred to as the Antikythera Mechanism.
It’s thought the device was housed in a wooden frame with two doors, and covered in
instructions for how to use it.
It’s not entirely certain what it was used for, but most evidence suggests it was a method
for the Greeks to calculate astronomical cycles to help with timing agricultural and religious
festivals, as well as with navigation.
The system of cogs and dials is so complex, that nothing designed in the following thousand
years came anywhere close to it in terms of design.
While it’s not a computer like we are familiar with, the Antikythera Mechanism is an incredible
piece of engineering, and shows that there’s a lot that we still have to learn about the
Ancient Greeks.
3.
Gobekli Tepe
Klaus Schmidt, a German archaeologist, was looking for a new site to explore in 1994
when he came across research from 1963 by some Chicago researchers who had found some
unusual stone slabs in Turkey.
The site, known as Gobekli Tepe, was in southeastern Turkey near the city of Urfa.
Originally the slabs that had already been recovered were thought to be grave stones,
but Schmidt suspected they were more important than that, so he set to work.
The following year he made one of the most important archaeological discoveries of all
time!
He found that the slabs were, in fact, the tops of massive T-shaped structures that were
more than 11,000 years old.
This meant they were built by people who hadn’t even developed the use of metal tools or pottery,
and who had still been able to construct such large megaliths more than 6,000 years before
those at Stonehenge.
The initial finds were shallow enough in the ground that they had been scratched by plows,
but as they dug deeper they found more, and realized they were all arranged in circular
designs, and set within ditches that had been dug into the ground.
Unusually for finds like this they didn’t recover any evidence of a settlement, like
houses, trash pits, cooking sites or fertility figurines that were common in settlements
from this period.
They did, however, find evidence of primitive tool use, and tens of thousands of animal
bones- signs that hunter gatherers had been present here eating gazelles, boar, sheep,
deer and birds.
The interesting thing about Gobekli Tepe is that it has led to historians reevaluating
how ancient societies worked.
It was assumed that it was only after complex societies and communities had developed that
they were able to devote enough resources to building monolithic structures.
Sites like these, however, seem to imply the opposite is true.
For some reason these people were compelled to build these large creations, and they needed
to develop a sense of society to enable them to do so.
2.
The Khatt Shebib
In 1948 Sir Alec Kirkbride, a British diplomat, flew across Jordan and noticed a strange formation
in the sands that seemed to stretch as far as the eye could see.
He wasn’t able to explore it any further at the time, and it was only in 2016 that
researchers were able to gather low-level oblique photographs of the site to study it
in more detail.
What they discovered was unexpected- a 150 kilometer stone wall that was dated from before
Roman times.
The Khatt Shebib, as it became known, is not actually one long continuous wall, but a series
of shorter ones.
Some of them branch off the main stretch, and at some parts there are two walls running
parallel to each other.
What’s peculiar, though, is that no one has any idea why such a long wall was built
in this region.
Similar ones, like the Great Wall of China, were designed to keep people from crossing
into new territories, but the Khatt Shebib doesn’t lie along the border of any ancient
civilization that we know of, in fact it seems to pass straight through the middle.
The wall was about a meter and a half high, and built out of stacked rocks.
Despite its primitive design, it would have taken a huge amount of time and manpower to
construct.
David Kennedy, the leader of the team investigating the wall, says there was no way it was designed
to stop cavalry from progressing, because they never would have operated in such a rocky
area in the first place.
It also wasn’t tall enough to stop other forms of attack, so the team remains clueless
as to the reasons why it was built here.
He suspects, though, that it was simply built to mark the line between the desert and the
area where farming was possible.
There are hundreds of small towers along the wall, again not secure enough to serve as
military outposts, and it’s thought they would have been used to shelter from sandstorms.
Whether it was an ineffective design for military purposes, or simply a long wall around farmland,
it’s been a puzzle for more than half a century, and is an impressive structure to
have been built thousands of years ago.
1.
Sea of Galilee Cairn
The Sea of Galilee is a large freshwater lake in Israel.
It’s a large body of water that reaches depths of up to 141 feet and is probably best
known from the Bible as the place where Jesus was said to have walked on water.
The area has been inhabited by humans for thousands of years, and the lake’s waters
used to provide sustenance to those who live nearby, so it’s hardly a surprise that there
are ancient structures around it.
The thing that surprised archaeologists, though, was the discovery of a Cairn about 30 feet
beneath the surface.
Cairns are circular arrangements of rocks that were often built as signposts, burial
markers, for defence, and countless other reasons- but this one in the sea of Galilee
was unusual.
First of all it is huge with a diameter the same as the length of a Boeing 747.
The second strange thing about it is that it was submerged underwater, which would seem
like a bizarre place to build a location marker.
Further study with sonar in 2003 showed the full extent of the structure.
It is 230 feet wide at the base, 32 feet tall and is estimated to weigh about 60,000 tons.
That makes it twice the size of Stonehenge.
Because it’s so far underwater, the site is yet to be excavated and clues as to its
purpose have remained scarce.
The one conclusion that can be drawn is that since the structure would have likely been
built on dry land, it would suggest the sea was much shallower before, with the Cairn
being submerged as the waters rose.
If this was the case, it raises the question of what other important structures are still
to be found in the depths?
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