The ancient slice of decorative oak, which was carved 2,000 years before Stonehenge and more than 4,000 years before the Romans set foot on the British Isles, is believed to be the oldest piece of carved wood in Britain.

The wood, which measures just about three-feet-long, one-and-a-half feet wide, and half-an-inch thick, was found snuggly underground in a thick layer of peat, which impeccably preserved the wood. 

Since its discovery, the Mesolithic piece of wood has undergone scientific analysis by experts at Historic England in partnership with scientists from the Nottingham tree-ring dating laboratory, and the Centre for Isotope Research at the university of Groningen. 

Radiocarbon and tree ring dating on the slab give a 95% chance probability that the wood was carved between 4,640 BC and 4,605 BC, at the tail end of the Middle Stone Age when inhabitants of England roamed in hunter-gatherer communities and began using stone tools. 

While the meaning behind the carvings on the wood remain a mystery, experts say they are similar to the decorations on the Shigir Idol – a 12,500-year-old wooden sculpture that was discovered in the Ural Mountains of Russia and is thought to be the oldest example of carved wood in the world.

Derek Fawcett, the owner of the land where the carved wood was found, will donate the artifact to the to the West Berkshire Museum in Newbury once scientific analysis is complete, Historic England said in a press release. The donation coincides with England’s Museum Week which this year runs from June 5-11.

“This is a really brilliant find…and a tangible link to humans who lived in this area long before any towns and villages had been created,” Janine Fox, curator at West Berkshire Museum, told Historic England.

The items included a Corinthian bronze helmet from the 3rd or 4th century BCE and an Attic kylix bowl from 550–40 BCE, ceramics, as well as four gold coins that were stolen from the National Archaeological Museum in Parma in 2009.

“The condition of the helmet indicates that it was stored in the ground for a very long time,” said a press release from the Bavarian State Criminal Police Office. “It was probably unearthed in southern Italy in the course of a pirate excavation.”

A 16th-century Venetian casket, stolen from the Castello Sforzesco museum in Milan in 2006, was also recovered and returned to Italy. It had been illegally trafficked through the United Kingdom to Belgium and then to Germany, where it was offered for sale. The casket, produced in the Embriachi workshop, featured “a distinctive combination of wood inlays and animal bone carvings.”

In December 2019, the Carabinieri cultural heritage police in Italy identified an auction house in Munich was selling the kylix bowl, a drinking cup used in ancient Greece, despite its illegal export from the country. The bowl was investigated and secured by the Bavarian State Criminal Police under the country’s cultural property protection law.

The four Roman-Byzantine gold coins, which were individually minted, were introduced as a new monetary unit by Emperor Constantine the Great in 309. The solidus and aureus remained in circulation for more than a millennium until the conquest of Constantinople. They were recovered from both companies and private owners.

German police had recovered the items through investigations starting in the summer of 2019.

The repatriation of the items took place in a ceremony in Rome between Guido Limmer, vice president of the Bavarian State Criminal Police Office, and Vincenzo Molinese, Generale di Brigata, on June 5. “The return underlines once again the very good cooperation between the Italian and Bavarian authorities,” said Limmer. “It is the result of the deeper thought that protects cultural assets as a common European heritage.”

The Nazca lines are UNESCO-protected geoglyphs dating from between 100 BCE and 300 CE that depict humans, camelids, birds, orcas, felines, and snakes. There are a range of theories surrounding their purpose, including that the Nazca geoglyphs depict deities, are a form of irrigation, or are a calendar with astrological alignments, though it remains unclear.

Discovered about 100 years ago with the advancement of aerial technology, the geoglyphs are nearly impossible to decipher from the ground.

Researchers at Yamagata University in Japan developed and trained the AI-driven deep learning technology to spot the lines from satellite images.

DL, as the researchers explain, “is a particular kind of machine learning that achieves great power and flexibility in pattern analysis of images, speech, language, and more. In archaeology, DL is used in the analysis of the iconography, text, and writing of excavated objects.”

While the variability in design and limited subset posed a challenge with training the AI program, researchers were able to develop a new approach to detecting geoglyphs based on similarities to other known designs.

Four new geoglyphs were identified during this process. Of the four, they depict a human-like figure holding a club, a pair of legs or hands stretching more than 250 feet, a fish, and a bird. The new designs were subsequently verified during on-site visits.

“We could identify new geoglyph’s candidates approximately 21 times faster than with the naked eye alone,” said researchers. “The approach would be beneficial for the future of archaeology in a new paradigm of combining field survey and AI.”

Late last year, the team discovered 168 new geoglyphs using aerial photography and drone images.

In 1476, Galicia was embroiled in the Irmandiño revolts, during which peasants tried to assert their freedom from the state’s nobility. Roughly 130 castles and forts were destroyed during the conflict, among them the Tower of Meira, where the phallic whetstone was found.

Phallic symbols and penis shapes recur in artifacts from ancient civilizations, such as the Roman Empire and the Celts. These artifacts were rarely sexual but were instead symbols of power. They were believed to protect people from “potential evils and dangers,” according to Arbore. 

However, phallic symbols and tools are rarely seen during the Medieval period, which the archaeologists say speaks to the “symbolic association between masculinity, violence, and weapons…in different cultures,” both in the past and today. 

The excavation began three years ago, according to Darío Peña, one of the archaeologists on the Arbore team. During the first year, Arbore excavated and restored the tower. Last year, the focus was on the structure’s surrounding wall, and this year, the team excavated the main building, where, on May 19, the stone penis was found. 

Further excavation depends on the owners of the land and the municipality of Moaña, where the site is located. 

The artifacts—dating from the 8th century BCE through the Middle Ages—included clay vases, clothing elements, precious metals and jewels, weapons, tools, furnishings, sarcophagi, funerary urns, detailed mosaics, painted decorations, as well as a variety of statues in bronze, marble and limestone.

The illegally exported items came from “clandestine exacavations” and “offer a cross-section of the many productions of ancient Italy and the islands,” including “numerous and diversified archaeological contexts (funerary, cultural, residential and public) … concentrated in particular in Etruria and Magna Graecia,” according to a statement from the Ministry of Culture.

The most valuable artifacts were identified as a bronze tripod table, two parade horse headboards from the Appulo-Lucan area, two funerary paintings, several Imperial-age marble heads, as well as a wall painting depicting a small temple likely taken from a Vesuvian residence.

The items were recovered from the English company Robin Symes Ltd through an investigation by the Carabinieri cultural heritage police, in collaboration with the Italian Culture Ministry, the State Attorney General and the Italian Embassy in London. According to a press release, the company belonging to Symes had opposed “repeated recovery attempts” by the Italian Judicial Authority, and was also sued in Italy through the State Attorney General.

The repatriated items were presented during a press conference at the National Museum of Castel Sant’Angelo in Rome on May 31 led by Minister of Culture Gennaro Sangiuliano  and the head of the Carrabinieri, Vincenzo Molinese.

Symes’ legacy of trafficking antiquities also popped up last month when Greece recovered 351 antiquities also from the art dealer’s liquidated company after a 17-year legal battle and the Manhattan District Attorney’s office repatriated an item to Iraq. Symes was convicted of contempt of court for lying about antiquities he held in storage locations around the world in 2005. He sentenced to two years in prison, but only served seven months.

The workshops contained stone beds, clay pots, natron salt, resin material, and linen gowns used in the mummification process for humans and sacred animals, as well as ritual vessels, according to Mostafa Waziri, secretary-general of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, in his comments to the press. Waziri said the artifacts date back to the 30th Pharaonic Dynasty (380 BCE to 343 BCE) and Ptolemaic period (305 BCE to 30 BCE). He also unveiled a colorful sarcophagus.

According to Sabri Farag, head of the Saqqara archaeological site, the tombs were for Ne Hesut Ba, a top official from the Old Kingdom of the fifth dynasty of ancient Egypt, and Men Kheber, a priest from the New Kingdom’s 18th dynasty.

Reuters reported that officials said the walls of Ne Hesut Ba’s tomb had inscriptions of cultivation, hunting, and other daily activities, while Men Kheber’s tomb was engraved with “scenes showing the deceased in different positions”.

The archaeological discovery was made after a year-long excavation near the sanctuary of the goddess Bastet, which is home to the catacombs of mummified cats in Saqqara, some 19 miles south of Cairo, according to Reuters. The sanctuary is the same location where hundreds of mummified animals and statues were discovered in 2019.

The National Museum of Antiquities has been excavating at Saqqara since 1975, but the area has been an especially rich source of high-profile discoveries recently. In 2022, Egyptian archaeologists uncovered five painted tombs, the tomb of an ancient dignitary, and a sarcophagus belonging to King Ramses II’s treasurer. Earlier this year, they found an intact 52-foot-long papyrus from 50 BCE, a 3,200-year-old necropolis for the elite, and the oldest known mummy in the country.

Many of these items will be displayed at The Grand Egyptian Museum, a 5.2 million square foot state-of-the-art facility near the Giza Pyramids on the outskirts of Cairo, is scheduled to open later this year after construction is completed. It will house all of the treasures discovered in King Tutankhamun’s tomb, as well as 100,000 antique artifacts.

Private construction work on a lot in the area drew the attention of Israel Antiquities Authority inspectors, who found that bulldozers had completely destroyed an ancient burial cave, leaving only a burial mound. They also discovered several suspicious piles of earth. Removing them revealed an ancient rock-hewn Roman burial cave with nine niches that the construction had badly damaged.

They retrieved three fully decorated stone ossuaries, along with ossuary fragments. The small rectangular burial chests were carved in soft limestone and topped with flat lids. Incised on the side of one of the ossuaries was a burial structure with a mausoleum in Greek or a “nefesh” in Hebrew. Another depicted a circular wreath with holes, which some believe symbolize victory over death.

The ossuaries would have been used for a secondary burial of human bones collected after the flesh rotted away. This practice was customary among the Jewish community in Galilee from roughly the first century BCE through the second century CE.

These ossuaries, however, were found empty and had been moved from their original placement, suggesting that the cave had been looted.

Construction work at the site was stopped while Israel Antiquities Authority inspectors documented the site and collected the finds to prevent further looting, and police questioned several people.

“The original details of the destroyed cave cannot be reconstructed, and almost two-thousand-year-old cultural assets are lost forever. Thanks to the vigilance and determination of the Kafr Kanna Police, and the successful cooperation with the Israel Antiquities Authority, one of the caves was mostly saved,” said Amir Ganor, director of the Theft Prevention Unit at the Israel Antiquities Authority.

While one cave sustained serious damage, the other was looted. Damaging or failing to report finding antiquities is a criminal offense in Israel, punishable by law with up to five years of imprisonment, though most judges hand down monetary fines.

The police department for the protection of cultural heritage, the Carabinieri, worked with the special operations group ROS and the “Cacciatori Puglia” airborne squadron to carry out dozens of searches against individuals suspected of looting and illicit excavations as well as the trafficking of stolen archaeology artifacts with “inestimable historical, cultural and commercial value.”

According to the Italian daily newspaper La Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno, the operation was nicknamed “Canusium,” a reference to the ancient name of the municipality where the trafficking group based its operations. Investigative work and precautionary measures spanned the regions of Puglia, Basilicata, Campania, Lazio, and Abruzzo, and lasted almost a year.

While 21 suspects have been arrested so far as part of Operation Canusium, investigators said there are a total of 51 suspects, including grave robbers, international traffickers, and a type of middleman known as a fence. The fences placed the illicit archaeology items, among them vases, jewels, oil lamps, and gold coins, up for sale in both domestic and international markets.

The 3,586 artifacts that have been recovered include loom weights, bell-shaped kraters, jugs, cups, plates, miniature vases, oil lamps, and coins from as early as the 4th century BCE.

Prosecutor Francesco Tosto called the found items rare and valuable, estimating the value of the coins to be €50,000–€60,000.

According to CNN, Italian police also recovered 60 metal detectors and other objects consistent with clandestine excavations, including long metal spikes and shovels.

The area currently known as Naples was first called Cumae, the first ancient Greek colony in Italy. Around 650 BCE the settlement was renamed Neapolis, or New City, and was of the most important and powerful colonies held by the Greeks, with its own forum, a bevy of temples, and multiple underground catacombs.

The ancient structures that remain are 33 feet below Naples and, until recently, unreachable to archaeologists interested in Greek life in Italy. With the help of subatomic particles called muons, cosmic rays in the Earth’s atmosphere that can pass through solid matter, and a sensitive type of photosensitive film, and a detection unit that looks like a large flatbed scanner, archaeologists were able identify, without digging, a burial chamber that dates to between the sixth and third centuries BCE.

Because cosmic rays come from within the Earth’s atmosphere, the researchers had to find a spot below their target area to record how the muons scatter. In this case, Valeri Tioukov, a physicist at Italy’s National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN) and author of a study first published by the journal Scientific Reports in April that details the findings, placed the muon detection devices in a 19th-century cellar almost 60 feet underground. The devices recorded what is called the muon flux (the movement of the particles in a specific area over time) for 28 days. 

While 10 million muons were recorded and revealed a 6.5-by-11.5-foot structure, the intricacies of the burial chamber are still mystery. “In this configuration, there is no way to resolve objects of less than 10 cm [4 inches] in size,” Tioukov told Live Science. “So, we can potentially see the approximate shape of the room, but not small details like bones.”

In the past, the process, called muography, has revealed a hidden corridor above the above the ancient entrance to the Pyramid of Giza and search for remnants of fuel in a reactor following the 2011 earthquake and tsunami that destroyed the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan.

These “extremely precise depictions” of Stone Age hunting traps, called kites because of their shape, were engraved on stone slabs. These structures would have been used to lure wild animals into enclosed herds, where they would have then been slaughtered.

Massive converging walls measuring from a few hundred feet to more than three-miles-long were constructed to drive animals toward a large corral surrounded by a number of pits up to more than 13-feet deep each.

Across the Middle East and Asia, more than 6,000 of these kinds of structures have been found. They are most numerous in present-day Saudi Arabia, southern Syria, and eastern Jordan. Though they were first spotted among the desert landscape by aircraft pilots in the 1920s, there have been few studies published on the hunting traps.

Archaeologists discovered two engraved slabs in Saudi Arabia and Jordan in 2015. A former settlement near Jibal al-Khashabiyeh in Jordan is home to eight previously identified hunting kites. The markings appear on a two-and-a-half foot long stone believed to be approximately 7,000 years old. In Saudi Arabia, the larger engraved stone was found in the Jebel az-Zilliyat region at almost 13 feet long. The slab shows two different kites only 394 feet apart and is estimated to be 8,000 years old.

The study found that the shape, layout, and proportions of the engravings are consistent with the remains of the kites. While the kite in Jordan was 425 times larger than the plan, the kite in Saudi Arabia is 175 times larger on a 1:175 scale. Additionally, the drawings maintain cardinal directions.

“The engravings are surprisingly realistic and accurate, and are moreover to scale,” the study reported.

The representation of the deep pits, however, were not dug to scale in the drawings, appearing as mere circles on the stones.

Ultimately, these kites were among the largest structures in human history at the time of their construction. The drawings suggest that the people who built and used the kites had a keen sense of spatial awareness. The construction of these massive kites would likely have been a collective effort by local communities to hunt a large number of animals at once.