Top Archaeological Novelties Found Underwater in 2024
Surprisingly, historical landmarks can survive in water. A 2,000-year-old temple from the “Indiana Jones civilization” has been found submerged off the coast of Italy. An ancient sunken bridge in Spain shows that people inhabited the Mediterranean island nearly 6,000 years ago. A torrential downpour hit an excavation site and uncovered a 233-million-year-old dinosaur. Archaeologists have discovered underwater images of several New and Late Kingdom pharaohs in the southern Egyptian province of Aswan. Archaeologists have found a centuries-old statue of a Greek god at the bottom of a Roman sewer.
Child sacrifices were practiced in Peru about 1,000 years ago, and archaeologists have found more than 500 bodies in the last five years
In the coastal desert north of Lima, Peru, archaeologists have uncovered the skeletal remains of 227 children, apparently killed and buried hundreds of years ago in a massive ritual sacrifice. The find represents the largest child burial on Earth, according to researchers who have been excavating the site for more than a year, and the bodies discovered so far may be just the tip of the proverbial blade. “No matter where you dig, there’s another one,” said the site’s lead archaeologist.
The Vikings traded, hunted with the Arctic inhabitants and fought with the Indians
After establishing settlements in Iceland and Greenland in the ninth and tenth centuries A.D., the Vikings reached what is now Newfoundland, Canada, around A.D. 1000. In the 13th century, the Inuit and Thule Norse hunted walruses in the high Arctic, according to a new study. Medieval walrus ivory may indicate trade between the Norse and Native Americans hundreds of years before Columbus, the study found.
DNA analysis reveals features of people’s lives in other eras
DNA has revealed incest, smallpox and violent deaths among Christians living in caves in medieval Spain. And a Stone Age burial site in France, used for 800 years, is made up almost entirely of men; ancient DNA shows they are heavily related.
Archaeologists continue to dig up medieval burial sites in Eurasia
The first medieval necropolis has been discovered in Veliky Novgorod. A 1,700-year-old “barbarian” burial site has been discovered on the border of the Roman Empire in Germany. Archaeologists in Kazakhstan have discovered 10 kurgans, or burial mounds, dating back to the Middle Ages, and some of them have “whiskers.”