Xylinna

According to a SWI report, researchers have discovered the remnants of Roman walls in the foothills of the Alps while excavating a gravel pit in present-day Cham, a municipality in central Switzerland's canton Zug. Constructed some 2,000 years ago, the walls once surrounded a series of Roman buildings. The excavation also unearthed fragments from a plaster wall; iron nails; gold fragments of what may have been jewelry; and everyday items including bowls, millstones, glassware, crockery, and amphoras. The rare find, which the Office for the Preservation of Monuments and Archaeology called “sensational,” is the first in the area for nearly a century. The purpose of the building complex, which likely spanned more than 5,000 square feet, remains unknown. Further research will aim to ascertain its role in Roman society, whether a villa, an inn, a temple, or another type of building.

What ancient site features the earliest city gate? In Israel, at least, that would be the Early Bronze Age site of Tel Erani. During a salvage excavation of the site by the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), archaeologists discovered the impressive stone gateway built into the city’s mudbrick fortification wall. Dating to around 3300 BCE, Tel Erani’s city gate is now the oldest ever found in Israel, making it several hundred years older than the gate from Tel Arad, another Early Bronze Age city. But why did Erani’s residents need the gate in the first place?

Taking advantage of the cool morning before the intense heat wave that is coming.

AGRIGENTUM, SICILY—According to a statement released by the Sicilian Region Institutional Portal, an excavation led by archaeologist Maria Concetta Parello at House VII b in Sicily’s Valley of the Temples has uncovered a votive deposit containing at least 60 terracotta figurines, oil lamps, small vases, bronze fragments, and bones. The deposit was found above a destruction layer attributed to the burning of the Greek city in 406 B.C. by the Carthaginians. Parello and her colleagues will try to determine if the objects were left by residents who returned to their ruined city.

TOKTAMYS, KAZAKHSTAN—The Miami Herald reports that a 4,000-year-old stone structure has been unearthed in northern Kazakhstan’s Kyrykungir monumental complex. “The steppe pyramid is built with great precision,” said Ulan Umitkaliyev of Eurasian National University. “It is a very sophisticated complex structure with several circles in the middle.” A large black stone with a flattened side sits at the end of each exterior wall, he added, while the walls are decorated with images of horses and other animals. Horse bones have also been found nearby, suggesting that the building may have been linked to a horse cult, Umitkaliyev explained. Pottery, gold earrings, and other jewelry have also been uncovered at the site.

A father will ask a judge Monday to dismiss his case in which authorities say he helped his son obtain a gun license three years before the younger man fatally shot seven people at a 2022 Fourth of July parade in suburban Chicago.

As a new pipeline cuts its way through the Balkans, archaeologists in Albania are grabbing every opportunity to expose the country’s history—from the Neolithic to the present.

In modern Albania, the mélange of historical cultures is packed so densely they often seem to collide. The national E852 highway follows the same bank of the Shkumbin River as an ancient highway, the Via Egnatia, which was first traveled by Roman soldiers around 200 B.C. The road was modernized and maintained for centuries thereafter, and it became the main thoroughfare between Constantinople and the Adriatic, facilitating communication and trade between Rome and the eastern lands of the empire. Today, luxury Mercedes swerve between transcontinental bicyclists taking in the lush Mediterranean landscape and donkey carts hauling towering piles of forage. The route winds gently past medieval Ottoman Turkish bridges and white obelisks from the Communist era immortalizing partisan battles fought during World War II. Scrappy tobacco fields and mounds of hay and cornstalks line the route, planted and stacked by hand, much as they have been for centuries.

This primary ancient east-west artery of the Balkan Peninsula parallels, just to the south, another major European infrastructure project, one being built today: the Trans Adriatic Pipeline. The project, known as TAP, is laying 545 miles of pipe through northern Greece and Albania and under the Adriatic Sea, connecting existing Italian and Turkish pipelines to deliver Caspian gas to Europe by 2020. Perhaps counterintuitively, the massive construction project looks set to give an enormous boost to the study and preservation of Albania’s cultural heritage. During the Cold War, the hard-line Stalinist regime kept the country one of the world’s most isolated, and now this Maryland-sized country of three million is one of Europe’s poorest.

TAP’s resources are enormous by local standards—and could turn out to be the single greatest injection of money and know-how for archaeological exploration ever seen in Albania. The overall budget for TAP is $5.3 billion and about a quarter of the pipeline’s total length will sit in Albania. Lorenc Bejko, a prehistorian by trade who is the head of the archaeology department at Tirana University and a senior cultural heritage adviser for TAP in Albania, estimates that ordinarily the annual spending by all Albanian institutions combined on archaeological fieldwork doesn’t surpass $100,000. According to the project agreement, all management of the impact on Albania’s cultural heritage—including construction monitoring, excavation, preservation, development of management plans, scientific analysis, and even scientific publications—is controlled by Albanian government institutions and paid for by TAP. These activities are worth millions of dollars.

The odd geographical focus of the intensive TAP-funded archaeological work—a lateral route across the country 133 miles long, 124 feet wide, and typically a foot deep—coincides with the so-called right-of-way zone where the pipe will be buried. A rich variety of unrelated and unexpected ancient sites is being uncovered there: Neolithic settlements from Europe’s earliest farmers, along with Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman sites. Turan, a site used for almost 2,000 years, yielded one of the oldest known cemeteries in Albania, dating back to 700 B.C. Ottoman cemeteries have also been found. And a picturesque hilltop settlement near the village of Peshtan, inhabited from the early Byzantine to the late Ottoman periods, has a cobbled street connecting a Turkish bath, a sixth-century Christian church, and several substantial houses with views of the valley below.

Supermarket shelves were bare in Kagoshima as Typhoon Khanun made a U-turn back to Japan's Amami Region on Saturday, 5 August.

Archeologists and palaeontologists say legislation needed to protect major finds championed by David Attenborough

Leading British archaeologists and palaeontologists are warning that one of the nation’s most significant palaeolithic sites is under threat because there is not enough legislation to protect it.

They are calling for changes to the law amid fears that crucial evidence at a site in the Cotswolds could be lost to the UK for ever.

BARCELONA, SPAIN—According to a Science News report, more than 2,500 stone and shell beads, two amber beads, a double-holed stone pendant, and a mother-of-pearl ring have been recovered from a child’s grave at Ba’ja, a farming village in what is now southern Jordan that was occupied between 7400 and 6800 B.C. Archaeologist Hala Alarashi of the Spanish National Research Council and her colleagues have reconstructed a necklace from these artifacts based upon their positions in the grave, and microscopic analysis of the wear on the beads’ openings: the beads were found on the child’s upper body; the pendant was positioned behind the neck; and the mother-of-pearl ring was positioned on the chest. Perforations in the ring suggest it held strings or cords for seven rows of beads that connected to the pendant. “This imposing necklace was made to be buried with a child who had important social status,” Alarashi said. “We don’t know why this particular child was special.”

STIRLING, SCOTLAND—BBC News reports that a man digging a pool in his backyard in central Scotland unearthed the skeletal remains of a dolphin estimated to date back to 8,000 years ago, when the area was covered by an inland sea. “Our earliest ancestors would have been walking the shoreline every day for food such as seaweed and shellfish and if a seal, a whale, or a dolphin washed up it would be carved into almost immediately,” said archaeologist Murray Cook, who excavated the bones. A tool made from a piece of antler was found near the dolphin remains, suggesting that hunter-gatherers had hacked into the carcass. Cook and his team have not yet found the tip of the antler, which he thinks had been discarded. Andrew Kitchener of National Museum Scotland added that the dolphin may have been female, based on its size, and its teeth are worn, suggesting that it may have been older at the time of death. The bones will be radiocarbon dated.