A Roman-era mosaic unearthed on Turkey's Aegean coast features 15 hand-laid scenes, and two named household pets, Emerald the cat and Ocean the dog, immortalized in stone by a family that clearly loved them. The discovery came during excavations at Adramytteion, an ancient harbor city, where a research team from Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University […] The post Archaeologists uncover 2,000-year-old Roman mosaic in Turkey honoring a family's pet cat and dog by name appeared first on American Almanac .
A Roman-era mosaic unearthed on Turkey's Aegean coast features 15 hand-laid scenes, and two named household pets, Emerald the cat and Ocean the dog, immortalized in stone by a family that clearly loved them. The discovery came during excavations at Adramytteion, an ancient harbor city, where a research team from Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University has been working since 2012. Led by archaeologist Hüseyin Özgen, the team only recently broke through to the Roman villa itself, excavating the structure across 2025 and early 2026. Inside, they found the mosaic, roughly 16.4 by 11.8 feet, spread across the floor of what had once been a private home. Özgen published his findings in the Journal of Mosaic Research. The mosaic contains 15…Open
A homeowner in southeastern England got more than he bargained for when a builder working on a kitchen addition unearthed human remains that turned the backyard into a crime scene, only for specialists to confirm the bones were roughly a thousand years old. Ross Sledger, 49, was at work in the spring of 2019 when […] The post English couple's kitchen renovation turns up 1,000-year-old Anglo-Saxon bones — and a police investigation appeared first on American Almanac .
A homeowner in southeastern England got more than he bargained for when a builder working on a kitchen addition unearthed human remains that turned the backyard into a crime scene, only for specialists to confirm the bones were roughly a thousand years old. Ross Sledger, 49, was at work in the spring of 2019 when the builder adding a kitchen extension to his home in Wye, Kent, called with news no homeowner wants to hear. Fox News Digital reported that the builder told Sledger he had found bones in the ground, and he was not joking. Sledger's first instinct was to shrug it off. Rural properties in England sit on centuries of agricultural use, and animal bones turn up regularly. But the builder made clear this was something different. …Open
A salvage crew following a faint metal-detector signal through deep mud off the Florida Keys hauled up a 55-pound copper ingot from the Nuestra Señora de Atocha, a 400-year-old Spanish shipwreck that keeps giving up its secrets. Captain Drake Nicholas was working from the deck of the salvage vessel DARE, roughly 35 miles west of […] The post Treasure hunters pull 55-pound copper ingot from legendary Atocha wreck, eye 19 more targets appeared first on American Almanac .
A salvage crew following a faint metal-detector signal through deep mud off the Florida Keys hauled up a 55-pound copper ingot from the Nuestra Señora de Atocha, a 400-year-old Spanish shipwreck that keeps giving up its secrets. Captain Drake Nicholas was working from the deck of the salvage vessel DARE, roughly 35 miles west of Key West, when his detector registered a barely-there hit. He dug. The signal grew louder. What he pulled from the seafloor was not the cannon he expected but a crude block of copper that had sat in the mud since 1622. The ingot is worth an estimated $18,000 to $25,000, according to an August press release from Mel Fisher's Shipwreck Expeditions , the company that has spent decades recovering treasure from the…Open
Archaeologists in western Slovakia have uncovered an ancient Roman military camp littered with soldiers' remains and battlefield weapons dating to the reign of Emperor Marcus Aurelius, a find officials say reshapes understanding of Rome's reach into barbarian territory. The Institute of Archaeology of the Slovak Academy of Sciences announced earlier this summer that excavators working […] The post Roman military camp unearthed in Slovakia reveals soldiers' bones, weapons from Marcus Aurelius era appeared first on American Almanac .
Archaeologists in western Slovakia have uncovered an ancient Roman military camp littered with soldiers' remains and battlefield weapons dating to the reign of Emperor Marcus Aurelius, a find officials say reshapes understanding of Rome's reach into barbarian territory. The Institute of Archaeology of the Slovak Academy of Sciences announced earlier this summer that excavators working near the town of Šurany, in Slovakia's Nitra region, had struck something far older than the industrial park they were preparing to build. Beneath roughly 370 acres of earth lay the footprint of a Roman marching camp from the second century A.D., the first ever found in that part of the country. What came out of the ground told a story of combat and sudden…Open
An Oxford researcher says the famous curves of the Parthenon were never designed to fool the human eye, and the story that they were rests on zero direct evidence. For more than two millennia, students, tourists, and architecture professors have repeated the same elegant claim: the ancient Greeks built subtle curves into the Parthenon so […] The post Oxford mathematician dismantles a 2,000-year-old myth about the Parthenon appeared first on American Almanac .
An Oxford researcher says the famous curves of the Parthenon were never designed to fool the human eye, and the story that they were rests on zero direct evidence. For more than two millennia, students, tourists, and architecture professors have repeated the same elegant claim: the ancient Greeks built subtle curves into the Parthenon so that its perfectly straight lines would not appear to sag. The idea has shown up in textbooks, documentaries, and guided tours of the Acropolis. Professor Alain Goriely, an Oxford mathematician, now argues in a peer-reviewed study that the whole thing is a myth, and always was. Goriely's paper, titled "The illusion of illusions: there are no optical corrections in the Parthenon," was published in the…Open
A hobbyist with a metal detector stumbled onto thousands of silver coins buried in the Finnish countryside for roughly a thousand years, a find experts are calling the largest Late Iron Age coin cache ever discovered in Finland. Kalle Lappinen was sweeping a field near Sysmä, a quiet town in southern Finland, on September 3 […] The post Amateur archaeologist unearths Finland's largest Viking Age silver hoard with a metal detector appeared first on American Almanac .
A hobbyist with a metal detector stumbled onto thousands of silver coins buried in the Finnish countryside for roughly a thousand years, a find experts are calling the largest Late Iron Age coin cache ever discovered in Finland. Kalle Lappinen was sweeping a field near Sysmä, a quiet town in southern Finland, on September 3 when his detector signaled something beneath the soil. What he found was no stray relic. Buried about 18 inches underground, packed inside birch bark containers wedged between stones, lay a trove of Viking Age silver that professional archaeologists would spend the next day pulling from the earth, ABC News reported . By September 4, the retrieval team from Lahti Museums had recovered almost 10 pounds of silver from…Open