Archaeology: Fragment of 13th C mural showing St Peter found at Plovdiv’s Great Basilica site

Archaeologists working at the site of the Great Basilica in Plovdiv, the largest early Christian church found on the Balkans, have uncovered a fragment of a mediaeval mural believed to depict St Peter.

The fragment is estimated to date to the 13th to 14th centuries.

It was found in the hitherto unexamined northern nave, not far from the city’s Roman Catholic church close to the intersection of Maria Louisa and Tsar Boris III boulevards.

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Archaeologists accidentally discover dozens of ancient shipwrecks at the bottom of the Black Sea

The Black Sea Maritime Archaeology Project had intended to find out how quickly water levels rose in the Black Sea after the last Ice Age, but the team ended up discovering a whole lot more than they had bargained for, Quartzreports. While examining the seabeds, the scientists found dozens and dozens of previously undiscovered shipwrecks — 41 in all.

"The wrecks are a complete bonus, but a fascinating discovery, found during the course of our extensive geophysical surveys," the project's principal investigator, Jon Adams, said in a statement.

Many of the shipwrecks were in spectacular condition due to the low oxygen levels that exist nearly 500 feet below the surface. "Certainly no one has achieved models of this completeness on shipwrecks at these depths," Adams said.

Many of the ships date back to the Byzantine and Ottoman empires. The researchers are using photographs to build 3D models of their finds and hope tolearn more about "the maritime interconnectivity of Black Sea coastal communities and manifest ways of life and seafaring that stretch back into prehistory." Jeva Lange

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Unusual Medieval Graves Found In Poland

Ten monumental tombs discovered in Sasiny (Podlaskie), initially believed by archaeologists to contain Neolithic burials, were found to be less that 1,000 years old, and made by Christians.

The cemetery in Sasiny is located in the northeastern Poland. In the eleventh through to the thirteenth centuries, the area regularly changed hands between the Piast princes and the Rus princes.

"All members of the local community were buried in the study graveyard - both poor and rich, including the elite. Funeral rites were common to all. Each of the deceased was placed in a large burial structure, the edges of which was marked by big boulders," explained Dr. Michał Dzik from the Institute of Archaeology, University of Rzeszów, who heads the excavations in Sasiny.

The graves examined by archaeologists have almost rectangular outlines. The space surrounded by boulders, some of which weigh over half a ton, was filled with several layers of unworked stone, which covered the deceased, who was placed in a wooden coffin or covered with a shroud. Structures of this type have extensive size - on average 5 by 3.5 m.

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Beneath This Medieval German Town Lie Over 25 Miles of Forgotten Tunnels

O the surface, Oppenheim looks like your typical German town resting along the banks of the Rhine River. But there's more to Oppenheim than beer halls and a Gothic-style cathedral from the Middle Ages. Beneath its narrow cobblestone streets lies something deeper—an entire labyrinth of tunnels and cellars.

“The town is practically honeycombed with cavities,” Wilfried Hilpke, a tour guide with Oppenheim’s tourism office, tells Smithsonian.com.

Hilpke should know. For the past ten years, he’s spent much of his time leading hour-long hardhat tours of Oppenheim’s elaborate tunnel system, taking visitors through a journey that covers just a fraction of the 25 miles of known tunnels residing beneath the surface. (It’s believed that there could be more than 124 miles of tunnels underneath the town, which is located 30 miles southwest of Frankfurt. However, many sections remain uncharted; they are thought to lead to private cellars beneath residents’ homes.)

Not only are the Kellerlabyrinth tunnels long in distance, but their history is equally deep. According to Hilpke, some of the oldest tunnels date back to 700 A.D. The tunnels got their start as food and wine storage cellars, and workers carved out the bulk of them using pickaxes and shovels during the 1600s, when residents were in need of extra storage space and channels to transport goods like wine. The tunnels took on a secondary purpose when the city's inhabitants used them to hide from Spanish troops during the Thirty Years' War. (They also used them to store Katharinenkirche cathedral’s stained glass windows to protect them during that war's bombardments.)

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Mary Rose shipwreck skulls go online in 3D

For the first time, skulls and other artefacts from the 1545 wreck of Henry VIII's warship the Mary Rose are being exhibited online as 3D reconstructions.

Researchers from Swansea University unveiled the scans to coincide with theBritish Science Festival, taking place in the Welsh city this week.

Some of the virtual objects are public while others are for research purposes.

The idea is to see how much can be learned about the lives of the ship's crew, just from their digitised bones.

Richard Johnston, a materials engineer at Swansea, said the project would test the scientific value of digital archaeology - and the world's burgeoning collection of cyber-artefacts.

"Lots of museums are digitising collections, and a lot of the drive behind that is creating a digital copy of something," Dr Johnston told journalists at a press briefing in London.

"We're going to challenge the research community to see if they can actually do osteological analysis.

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American student finds 12th century Irish brooch on a Galway Beach

McKenna McFadden, an Irish American film and television major at New York University, is in Dublin for the summer with an NYU program. She was walking on the shore of Oney Island in Connemara in the west of Ireland this week when something sitting in the sand caught her eye.

Little did she think it would be a rare artifact from the 12th century.

The NYU Dublin group was being led on a tour of the island by the Connemara-based archaeologist Michael Gibbons.

As McFadden told IrishCentral, “I had been looking at some rabbit burrows with my friend while on a tour of the island lead by archaeologist Michael Gibbons. When stepping back from the burrows, I looked down and saw the back of the brooch and picked it up.

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History of Danish royal castle 'to be rewritten'

Denmark's biggest royal castle, Vordingborg, is set for an updated history after an archaeological dig shed new light on a key figure in its past.

The castle, located on the southern coast of Zealand facing across the Baltic Sea towards Germany, was originally built in the 12th century by King Valdemar the Great. 

 

Valdemar used it as a base for raids on Germany and, later under Valdemar's son Valdemar II the Victorious, Estonia.

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