Amateur UK Metal Detectorist Finds Roman Hoard

A metal detectorist has found a cache of bronze treasures in Gloucestershire, dating back to the last decades of the Ancient Roman occupation of Britain. The fragments, dated between 318 and 450 AD, appear to have been deliberately broken and hidden. The cache includes fragments of metal boxes, handles from boxes, pieces of metal statues, bronze jewellery pieces, part of a cooking vessel, buckles, and furniture fittings.

A dog statue, archaeologists believe, is an example of a healing statue. Dogs were considered a healing totem, since they would aid their own healing by licking their wounds.

Rose Gold Jewellery from Ancient Colombia

Rose gold is trendy now, but ancient Colombians also valued it. Researchers have found Colombia's Nahuange people, who lived during the first millennium AD, were capable of making impure gold appear more valuable. And they often intentionally over polished their gold products to reveal pink and orange tones underneath - creating a rose gold jewellery. Rose gold gets its colour from copper. The pink hued metal was particularly popular in Russia with Jeweller Peter Carl Fabergé in the late 19th century.

Researchers studied 44 pinkish metal artifacts from the Nahuange culture. Little is known about the society of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta mountain range, near Colombia's Caribbean coast, which flourished between 100 and 1,000 AD. Andean goldsmiths created a process called depletion gilding that allowed them, through a combination of oxidation and polishing, to bring the gold to the surface. In the case of the rose gold jewellery, the craftsmen intentionally polished past this golden layer to reveal the copper content beneath.

Drones Reveal Unexplored Ancient Settlement in Iraqi Kurdistan

During the Cold War era, US spy satellites snapped stealthy images of the Soviet Union, China and their allies in Southeast Asia and the Middle East. When these images were declassified in the 1990s, photos of a rocky terrace in Iraqi Kurdistan caught the attention of archaeologists, who believed they could spot the ancient remnants of a large, square fort. Qalatga Darband, as the settlement is called, is located at a strategic point on the Darband-i-Rania pass, which once linked Mesopotamia to Iran. Archaeologists think the city was built on a route that Alexander of Macedon took in 331 BC while pursuing Persian King Darius III; who was fleeing from his defeat at the Battle of Gaugamela.

Drone images of Qalatga Darband were processed to enhance color differences and experts were able to observe irregularities in crop growth—an indicator of a structure below ground. The city, nearby Lake Dukan, was circled by a wall and had a fort, a temple, and wine presses.

Qalatga Darband appears to have been occupied during the early Parthian period, which spanned from the first century B.C. to the first century A.D. A coin discovered at the site depicts the Parthian king Orodes II, who ruled between 57 B.C. and 37 B.C. The Parthians were a major power, conquering vast swaths of territory after successful campaigns against a number of powerful groups, including the Hellenistic Seleucids and the Romans.

The sarcophagus of Hercules

The sarcophagus of Hercules was brought from Zurich to Istanbul earlier this month and was put on display in the museum of Antalya, a southern city where the second century artifact originated. The sarcophagus is believed to have been stolen from the ancient city of Perge, 18 kilometers (11 miles) east of Antalya on the Mediterranean coast, sometime in the 1960s. After undergoing restoration in the U.K. several years ago, it was seized by Swiss customs authorities in 2010. The fabled Twelve Labors of Hercules, from the killing of a mythological lion to cleaning the stables, are depicted on the exterior of the sarcophagus. Since 2003, Turkey has been pursuing a legal process for the retrieval of several artifacts. Over 4,000 smuggled historical artifacts were repatriated to Turkey from 2004 to 2016.

The piece was placed next to the "Weary Heracles" statue, which itself was retrieved from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. The top half of the statue was missing for decades before being located in the Boston museum, which purchased it in 1982. The bottom part was discovered in Perge in 1980 and was showcased in the Antalya Museum.

Culture and Tourism Minister Numan Kurtulmuş attended an unveiling ceremony yesterday where the sarcophagus was covered in red velvet and circled with bougainvillea flowers.

Thracian tomb reveals Gold treasure

In late 2012 Bulgarian archaeologists found golden treasures in an ancient Thracian tomb near a Unesco world heritage site about 250 miles north-east of the capital Sofia. Items included gold bracelets with snake heads, a tiara with animal motifs and a horse-head piece along with a hoard of other ancient golden artefacts. The items date to the end of the fourth or the beginning of the third century BC. They were found in the biggest of 150 ancient tombs of the Getae, a Thracian tribe.

Among the objects found were a golden laurel and ring, rhytons - silver drinking vessels shaped like horns, Greek pottery and military items including weapons and armour. The tomb in Zlatinitsa, 180 miles east of the capital Sofia, is also extraordinary in that it remained unopened since the 4th century BC. Most Thracians tombs were looted in antiquity.

The tomb was of an upper-class lord or similarly powerful and wealthy leader. "The used weapons and the arrow wounds in the bones of his horse indicated that he was a warrior. He was buried in the biggest burial mound in the region," said Prof Agre. "This was like a province of England, such as Kent, and he was the leader.

Foo Fighters - Hitler's Stealth Fighter

The term 'Foo Fighter' was used by Allied aircraft pilots in World War II to describe various UFOs or mysterious aerial phenomena seen in the skies over both the European and Pacific theaters of operations. Though "foo fighter" was named by the U.S. 415th Night Fighter Squadron, the term was also commonly used to mean any UFO sighting from that period.

Formally reported from November 1944 onwards, witnesses often assumed that the foo fighters were secret weapons employed by the enemy. The Robertson Panel explored possible explanations, for instance that they were electrostatic phenomena similar to St. Elmo's fire, electromagnetic phenomena, or simply reflections of light from ice crystals.

The Horten Ho 229 – “Hitler’s Stealth fighter” was the first “flying wing” aircraft with a jet engine. It was the first plane with design elements, which can be referred to as stealth technology, to hinder the effectiveness of radar to detect the plane. In 1943, the head of the German Luftwaffe, Hermann Göring, presented what is known as the “3 X 1000” goal. Goring wanted a plane that could carry 1000 kg of bombs (2,200 lb), with a range of 1000 km (620 miles), at a speed of 1000 km/h (620 mph). Work on the next prototype version of the plane, the H.IX V3, ended when the American 3rd Army’s VII Corps on April 14, 1945 reached the Gotha plant in Friederichsroda.

The only remaining Horten Ho 229 known was restored at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center. The H.IX’s wings were made from two carbon injected plywood panels adhered to each other with a charcoal and sawdust mixture. Engineers at Northrop tested a non-flying reproduction and found the design gave about a 20 percent reduction in radar range detection over a conventional fighter of the day.

Amateurs Discover Rare Ancient Roman Mosaic in England

Amateurs in southern England have stumbled upon a rare find ... an ancient Roman mosaic. While the group discovered many artifacts in the past three years, their findings pale in comparison to the 4th-century artwork.

The find is being hailed as the most important discovery of its kind in Britain in over fifty years. Measuring more than 20 feet (6 meters) in length, experts believe that it depicts the Greek mythological hero Bellerophon.

Unrecorded ancient shipwreck found in Black Sea

An expedition of marine archaeology, called the Black Sea Maritime Archaeological Project, has found ships used in antiquity at the bottom of the Black Sea. According to reports, nobody has seen or registered those ships before. In June, Bulgaria gave permission to the Norwegian research vessel Havila Subsea to enter the country’s territorial waters from August to October. “We have seen many shipwrecks, but we rarely see such a thing with its entire structure. But here in the Black Sea the environment is such that much has been preserved, from the structure of the ship and its cargo.”