Unique medieval foot prosthesis found in Austria

A medieval skeleton found with the remains of a wooden prosthetic foot in Hemmaberg, southern Austria, is a unique find and the oldest example of prosthesis use in Europe, researchers have said.

The remains of the middle-aged man were found in a cemetery which belonged to an early medieval church. His left foot had been amputated above the ankle, perhaps after an accident, but against the odds he managed to survive the operation.

He is believed to have died in the mid to late-6th century AD. Archaeologist Franz Glaser said that it is likely he lived for around two years after being fitted with the prosthetic. This would mean the prosthetic is around 1,500 years old, making it the oldest artificial limb found in Europe (older specimens have been found in China and Egypt).

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Apulian burial rituals prove you can take it with you

Death is inevitable, but what death shows us about the social behaviors of the living is not. And recent University of Cincinnati research examining the ancient bereavement practices from the the Central Apulian region in pre-Roman Italy helps shed light on economic and social mobility, military service and even drinking customs in a culture that left no written history. 

Red-figure hydria with grave scene: Women offering fillets to the deceased.  Apulian Greek 450-300 BCE, terracotta [Credit: archaeology.wiki] 

For instance, by focusing on the logistics of burials, treatment of deceased bodies and grave contents dating from about 525-200 BC, UC Classics doctoral student Bice Peruzzi found indication of strong social stratification and hierarchy. She also found indications of the commonality of military service since men's tombs of the era routinely contained metal weaponry lying across or near the skeletal remains.

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Sulawesi find: 118,000-year-old stone tools point to 'archaic group of humans'

Discovery of 311 implements on Indonesian island suggest modern humans settling there 60,000 years ago would have met an ‘isolated human lineage’

A model of a skull from a species of Hobbit-sized humans called Homo floresiensis, which was found in a cave on the Indonesian island of Flores. Scientists now believe they may have had relatives on other islands. 

Photograph: Stephen Hird/Reuters/Corbis

The diminutive prehistoric human species dubbed the “Hobbit” that inhabited the Indonesian island of Flores long before the arrival of Homo sapiens apparently had company on other islands.

Stone tools that are at least 118,000 years old have been discovered on the island of Sulawesi, indicating a human presence, scientists said on Wednesday. No fossils of these individuals were found in conjunction with the tools at the site called Talepu, leaving the toolmakers’ identity a mystery.

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Bronze Age stilt houses unearthed in Cambridgeshire

Large circular wooden houses built on stilts collapsed in a dramatic fire 3,000 years ago and plunged into a river, preserving their contents in astonishing detail. Archaeologists say the excavations have revealed the best-preserved Bronze Age dwellings ever found in Britain. 

Archaeologists at Must Farm have uncovered the charred wooden roof structure  of a 3,000 year old round house [Credit: Cambridge Archaeological Unit] 

Archaeologists have revealed exceptionally well-preserved Bronze Age dwellings during an excavation at Must Farm quarry in the East Anglian fens that is providing an extraordinary insight into domestic life 3,000 years ago. The settlement, dating to the end of the Bronze Age (1200-800 BC), would have been home to several families who lived in a number of wooden houses on stilts above water.

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Dog domestication may have increased harmful genetic changes, UCLA biologists report

The domestication of dogs may have inadvertently caused harmful genetic changes, a UCLA-led study suggests.

Domesticating dogs from gray wolves more than 15,000 years ago involved artificial selection and inbreeding, but the effects of these processes on dog genomes have been little-studied.

UCLA researchers analyzed the complete genome sequences of 19 wolves; 25 wild dogs from 10 different countries; and 46 domesticated dogs from 34 different breeds. They found that domestication may have led to a rise in the number of harmful genetic changes in dogs, likely as a result of temporary reductions in population size known as bottlenecks. 

“Population bottlenecks tied to domestication, rather than recent inbreeding, likely led to an increased frequency of deleterious genetic variations in dogs,” said Kirk Lohmueller, senior author of the research and assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology in the UCLA College.  

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Success for cutting edge artefact imaging technique

The EU TISCH project has demonstrated that terahertz imaging and spectroscopy can be a viable, non-destructive and non-invasive tool to aid the retrieval and analysis of images of obscured features of artwork. Through a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, Dr Bianca Jackson from the University of Reading in the UK was able to apply this technique to inspect layers of paint, detect structural defects in ceramics and image the physical structure of paintings and manuscripts. 

Mosaic depicting Jesus at Hagia Sophia, Constantinople  [Credit: Columbia University] '

Institutions that carry out cultural heritage research don't have a lot of extra money for emerging technology, but they do have the hearts and minds of the people – folks love to talk about what is being done with technology to better understand the mysterious Mona Lisa, or whether or not a sarcophagus contains Queen Neferititi,' says Jackson. 'So one of best ways to reduce costs and increase the accessibility of terahertz technology to open up new and interesting areas of applied research.'

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Bronze Age houses: What the finds tell us

At a quarry in Cambridgeshire, archaeologists say they have discovered Britain's "Pompeii - a number of well-preserved dwellings dating back to the Bronze Age. The artefacts found there reveal new details about the period between 2500 and 2000BC and those who lived through it.

One of the finds at Must Farm quarry in Cambridgeshire were pots with meals still inside. According to Selina Davenport, an archaeologist who helped uncover the Bronze Age dwellings, the find suggests that the pots were being used to make pottage.

"Think porridge and add a few extra herby things, and if you were lucky you might have had honey to dollop in the middle. It isn't a great meal, and if someone put a bowl in front of you, you wouldn't light up," says Chris Gosden, Professor of European Archaeology at the University of Oxford.

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Bronze Age village found near ancient Roman city

A 3,500-year-old settlement has been unearthed near an ancient Roman city in northeast Italy.

The Roman city of Aquileia, in Friuli Venezia Giulia, is one of Italy's 51 world heritage sites but the discovery of a Bronze Age village just outside the city has cast new light on the area's human history, Corriere della Sera reported.

The village was found next to an ancient Roman canal, known as the Canale Anfora, by a team of archaeologists from the University of Udine.

From 200BC until 400AD Aquileia – today home to just 3,500 inhabitants – was one of the biggest and most important market towns in Europe, with a population of some 100,000.

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Dorset's oldest settlement 'could fall into sea'

Parts of what is believed to be Dorset's oldest human settlement could be lost to coastal erosion, archaeologists have warned. 

Excavations were carried out in 2009, metres from the cliff edge  at Doghouse Hill 

[Credit: Paul Baker] 

Hunter-gatherers lived on Doghouse Hill near Seatown up to 10,000 years ago. The settlement was on land a mile inland, but erosion means it is now on a cliff edge which has crumbled further during the winter storms. Archaeology writer Paul Baker said there was an "imminent danger" of landslips. 

The National Trust, which owns Golden Cap Estate, led excavations in 2009 that unearthed a stone hearth, fire pit and pot shards from Bronze Age periods (2,500 to 1,000BC) and other relics from the Mesolithic Age (10,000 to 4,000BC) when Dorset was inhabited by hunter-gathers living off the land.

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Medieval fish trap found in Poland's Lake Lednickie

During the survey of debris of the medieval bridge leading to Ostrów Lednicki, a team of underwater archaeologists from the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń discovered a fish-pot filled with the remains of fish. 

View of the top of the fish-trap [Credit: M. Popek] 

"It is the only relic of the 9th-10th century found during underwater research in Poland" - explained Dr. Krzysztof Radka, head of underwater research. 

The trap is preserved in good condition. Inside it were the remains of caught fish - according to preliminary calculations, there were more than 4,000. Originally, the fish-pot resembled a narrow, oblong, pointed basket with length of approx. 1.6 m. The trap recovered by archaeologists from Toruń was made of wicker. At the time of discovery it was between parts of a mediaeval bridge, which confirms its distant origin. 

By using a water ejector (sediment removal device), the researchers managed to expose the fish-pot and then make full drawing and photographic documentation underwater, even though their activities were difficult due to the limited visibility underwater.

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Behind the Myth of King Midas

What was behind the legendary story of King Midas and his golden touch?

That is the question to be answered—not with chests full of gold, but with a spectacular array of 150 objects, including more than 120 specially-loaned ancient artifacts from four museums in the Republic of Turkey, keys to telling the true story of a very real and powerful ruler of the Phrygian kingdom. The Golden Age of King Midas is an exclusive, world premiere exhibition developed by the Penn Museum, 3260 South Street in Philadelphia, in partnership with the Republic of Turkey. A special Opening Celebration on Saturday, February 13 kicks off the exhibition, which runs through November 27, 2016.

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What History Gives, the Sea Steals

On a North Sea shore in Scotland, a group of archaeologists struggles to dig in a storm. The wind is so fierce it threatens to blow them over, and bursts of hail and near-horizontal rain send them periodically scurrying for shelter. They’re battling water on more than one front: waves surge up the beach, threatening to inundate the worksite. Sometime after an expensive camera sails off a tripod and breaks, they abandon their dig.

Undaunted, the crew of professional and volunteer archaeologists returns a few months later to finish work at the site, a coastal farm called Meur. The structures they’re excavating have survived for thousands of years. But a strong storm uncovered the site in the first place, and the next storm could drag it into the ocean for good. In Scotland, as on coastlines around the world, climate change is both helping to reveal new archaeological sites and threatening to destroy them. Researchers and citizen scientists are racing time to collect the stories of these vanishing sites.

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Pompeii begins gladiator domus restoration

An elaborate restoration of a ruin once home to gladiators in the hours before they embarked on bouts to the death has got underway in Pompeii, five years after its collapse raised serious questions about the management of the famous UNESCO site. 

Restoration work on the gladiator domus at Pompeii has begun, five years  after it collapsed [Credit: Archaeological site of Pompeii] 

The gladiator domus, or Schola Armaturarum, on Pompeii's central Via dell'Abbondanza, was a building in which gladiators once kept their weapons and trained before battle. 

More recently, it was a site once much admired by visitors thanks to its stunning, military-themed frescoes. 

However, the impressive domus was transformed into a heap of rubble and dust on the morning of November 6th 2010, following a night of heavy rainfall.

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Marie-Antoinette's torrid affair with Swedish count revealed in decoded letters

French experts unravel mystery content of Marie-Antoinette’s secret love letters to a Swedish count thanks to cutting-edge imagery technology

Newly decoded letters penned by Marie-Antoinette suggest France’s last queen had a torrid affair with a Swedish count, amid claims that two of the children she had with Louis XVI were illegitimate.

Two centuries after the notoriously decadent royal was guillotined during the Revolution, researchers in France have finally unlocked the secrets of blacked-out secret passages from Marie Antoinette’s letters to Axel de Fersen, a friend of France’s royal family.

The first of 13 passages to be revealed in the coming months reads: “I will end [this letter] but not without telling you, my dear and gentle friend, that I love you madly and that there is never a moment in which I do not adore you.”

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Britain's Pompeii? Well, we can dream

You may snort at the fact that a bronze-age village has been compared to the most famous Roman site in the world. But what we lack in grandeur we make up for in romanticism

They’re calling it Britain’s Pompeii, after the well-preserved Roman town in the heart of Italy. There, temple columns stand tall against the sky and it’s easy to squint and imagine that the crowds milling around are wearing togas and buying tickets to see someone get eaten by a lion.

Britain’s Pompeii isn’t a Roman ruin, it’s a bronze-age one. But you still might be expecting something dramatic; standing stones, maybe, or a burial labyrinth. Actually, it’s quite a lot of wood, in a sort of bog. It looks like a wet weekend in East Anglia. It is.

To be fair, it’s an extraordinary find and will shed new light on the way humans lived on these islands a thousand years before the birth of Christ. There are wooden pots, glass beads and preserved textiles showing fibres woven by hand in patterns that would be familiar to us today. Archaeologists are right to be excited. Comparing it to Pompeii is a way of getting across how important they think it is. It may revolutionise our understanding of British bronze-age culture, the way the excavations in the shadow of Vesuvius did with Roman life. 

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Lasers used to make Staffordshire Hoard replicas

Laser technology is being used to help create replicas of items from the Staffordshire Hoard.

The hoard contains 3,500 items of jewellery and weapons from Anglo Saxon times with a value of more than £3m.

The Jewellery Industry Innovation Centre in Birmingham is working with the city's Museum and Art Gallery to make pieces to go on show to the public.

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Ancient burial rituals prove you can take it with you ... and what you take says a lot

Research on ancient burial tombs unlocks the mysteries of pre-Roman social status and cultural change, including urbanization, militarism and even likely shifts in drinking patterns.

This image shows a 4th century assemblages with fine Greek vases, banquet implements and metal weapons.

Death is inevitable, but what death shows us about the social behaviors of the living is not.

And recent University of Cincinnati research examining the ancient bereavement practices from the the Central Apulian region in pre-Roman Italy helps shed light on economic and social mobility, military service and even drinking customs in a culture that left no written history.

For instance, by focusing on the logistics of burials, treatment of deceased bodies and grave contents dating from about 525-200 BC, UC Classics doctoral student Bice Peruzzi found indication of strong social stratification and hierarchy. She also found indications of the commonality of military service since men's tombs of the era routinely contained metal weaponry lying across or near the skeletal remains.

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Bronze age dig in Whittlesey uncovers very rare 3,000 year glimpse into the past

A unique treasure trove of historical artefacts thousands of years old has been discovered near Whittlesey.

Two Bronze Age round houses, dating back to around 1290 BC were discovered in Must Farm Quarry, off Funthams Lane.

The 3,000 year old houses, which were built on stilts were destroyed by a fire and collapsed into a river - which preserved the bowls, tools and even timber in clay.

Now archaeologists have been able to learn more about how our ancestors lived.

A £1.1 million project to excavate the site, funded by government heritage agency Historic England, and quarry-owners Forterra, has been launched.

Mark Knight, site director of the excavation, said: “We are, effectively, for the first time in British history about to go inside a Bronze Age roundhouse.

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How blue and green clays kill bacteria

Since prehistoric times, clays have been used by people for medicinal purposes. Whether by eating it, soaking in a mud bath, or using it to stop bleeding from wounds, clay has long been part of keeping humans healthy. Certain clays have also been found with germ-killing abilities, but how these work has remained unclear.

A new discovery by Arizona State University scientists shows exactly how two specific metallic elements in the right kinds of clay can kill troublesome bacteria that infect humans and animals.

"We think of this mechanism like the Trojan horse attack in ancient Greece," said Lynda Williams, a clay-mineral scientist at ASU's School of Earth and Space Exploration (SESE). "Two elements in the clay work in tandem to kill bacteria."

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Long-lost Roman roads discovered on flood maps: Hi-tech Lidar data reveals the route of 2,000-year-old highways across Britain

History sleuths: Maps of the UK, designed to detect the regions most at risk of flooding, are also helping amateur archaeologists to unearth previously undiscovered Roman roads. Pictured, file image of archaeologists at the ruins of a Roman site in Colchester

Aerial flood maps of Britain are revealing more than just at-risk regions - they have also led to the discovery of several Roman roads.

Amateur archaeologists have been able to use the flood-mapping technology to trace the paths of Roman roads which have remained buried under the land for some 1,600 years.

The aerial flood maps were created by aircraft equipped with laser scanners which measure the distance between the aircraft and the ground.

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