From hidden cities to long buried treasure, these incredible archaeological finds changed
everything.
Some of them may sound familiar, some you may never have heard of at all, but they all
rewrote the history books.
When you think about the Stone Age, you probably think about cavemen with crude stone tools.
You probably don't imagine cities and agriculture.
But Stone Age settlements existed, and one of the biggest was recently unearthed near
Motza, Israel.
This prehistoric city is 9,000 years old and once housed between 2,000 and 3,000 people,
which makes it one of the largest of its kind ever unearthed.
"It's a once-in-a-lifetime project, and I couldn't hope for anything better than this.
It's an amazing discovery."
Archaeologists previously believed that the area was uninhabited 9,000 years ago, so the
discovery changes what we know about the rise of civilization in the Middle East.
This is a sophisticated settlement complete with large buildings, back allies, storage
sheds full of legumes, and burial places.
It's all evidence that the people who lived there weren't just capable of complex planning
- they also had sophisticated large-scale agricultural practices.
Additionally, archaeologists found the bones of sheep, which suggests extensive shepherding
practices, as well as flint tools like axes, arrowheads, and knives.
In 1934, Edith Pretty decided to excavate the large mounds on Sutton Hoo, her property
in southern England.
According to some stories, she'd seen a ghostly procession marching through the mounds, and
that was part of what piqued her curiosity.
A self-taught archaeologist named Basil Brown took the job.
Inside the largest mound, he found rust stains and nails placed at regular intervals in the
ground, which turned out to be the 80-foot long phantom imprint of a ship.
Inside was an undisturbed cache of 263 objects, which included weapons and silver and golden
goods like cutlery, buckles, and coins.
There was also a unique, full-face helmet.
The treasure included objects from as far away as the Middle East and the Byzantine
Empire, so its discovery gave archaeologists new information about Anglo-Saxon trade networks.
Sutton Hoo was the largest Anglo-Saxon ship burial ever discovered, but archaeologists
still don't know who was buried there.
They didn't find a body, though that doesn't necessarily mean there never was one.
The soil at Sutton Hoo is acidic, so the bones might've decayed away just like the wood of
the ship did.
Historians do believe it was someone important, though, perhaps King Raedwald of East Anglia,
who died around the same time the ship was buried.
In 1894, builders in the city of Madaba, Jordan were erecting a new church on the ruins of
an old one when they uncovered an intricate mosaic floor made from some 750,000 small
tiles.
It was a map that dated from the 6th century AD, and it covered an area about 34.5 feet
by 16.5 feet, though it was much larger in antiquity and probably originally contained
up to 2 million tiles.
The map shows the biblical holy land from Lebanon to the Nile delta and from the Mediterranean
to the eastern Jordanian desert.
Archaeologists think it's the oldest map depicting the region.
"This map tells us that the whole area was the heart of Christian land."
The Madaba Map includes place names written in Greek, and even has details like palm trees,
gates, and churches.
But what was really monumental about the find is that it revealed the southern end of the
Dead Sea as the location of the ancient city of Zoar, which is mentioned in the Bible as
a neighbor of the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah.
Knowing the location of Zoar provides archaeologists with a clue about where Sodom and Gomorrah
might've been located.
The map still resides in its hometown of Madaba, and you can view it from behind a chain on
the floor of the Church of Saint George.
If you live in America, you're probably never going to find treasure buried in your backyard.
But if you live in Europe, there's actually a chance that someone may have left a hoard
of silver and gold in a field somewhere.
In 2009, a British farmer named Fred Johnson gave a treasure-hunter named Terry Herbert
permission to go metal detecting in his field.
When Herbert returned, he told Johnson that he'd found Anglo-Saxon treasure.
Named the Staffordshire Hoard, the find was astonishing.
It contained objects made from silver, gold, and garnet, and they were nearly all objects
of war, like sword-hilt fittings, pommel caps, and scabbard pendants.
The treasure didn't include any coins or jewelry, and most of the objects had been bent or broken,
which suggests they'd been deliberately damaged.
There are a few theories about how this collection of precious objects might've been accumulated.
The swords of conquered soldiers may have been stripped and repurposed.
Unfortunately, though, there are no clues as to the identity of the treasure's original
owner.
All that can really be said for sure is that at some point, the person who owned it all
decided to bury it in a hole along an old Roman road, and that's where it stayed for
1,300 years.
In the 1800s, people were still in disagreement about the age of the world and humanity's
place within it.
In fact, to this day some people still remain in disagreement about topics that we thought
were settled long ago.
"That was a joke about the world being flat, right?"
"Was it?"
Back in the 19th century, the discovery of something like the set of paintings in the
Cave of Altamira was enough to result in significant division between scientists and everyone else.
Located in northern Spain, the Cave of Altamira was discovered by a hunter in 1868.
Amateur archaeologist Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola took an interest in the cave and told everyone
that he thought the paintings inside were made during the Palaeolithic era.
His theories weren't exactly warmly received, though.
Some people even speculated that the paintings were modern forgeries, since they were clearly
too sophisticated to have been made by cavemen.
Sautuola was publicly humiliated - and when scientists finally realized he'd been right
all along, it was too late, as he'd already been dead for 14 years.
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