An international team of archaeologists claims to have unearthed the 2000-year-old birthplace of the Roman emperor, Vespasian, north of the Italian capital. Vespasian ruled the Roman empire in the first century A.D. and was behind the construction of the Colosseum, one of Italy's most popular landmarks. Archeologists believe they have located his birthplace in the Falacrinae valley near the hill town of Cittareale, 130 km northeast of Rome. "Ancient Roman historian Suetonius says Vespasian was born in the Falacrinae valley area. Field surveys and information from locals have told us tell us this must be Vespasian's birthplace," one of the project's directors, British archaeologist Helen Patterson told Adnkronos International (AKI). Vespasian was the ninth Roman emperor, who reigned from 69-79 AD. He was believed to come from humble beginnings and founded the short-lived Flavian dynasty after the civil wars that followed Nero's death in 68 AD. During recent excavations, the archaeologists uncovered sumptuous marble floors and mosaics at the site of the 3,000-4,000 square metre Villa of Falacrinae, Patterson said. The team of 30-60 archaeologists recovered pots, numerous coins, ceramic and metal artefacts from the site which is 820 metres above sea level, overlooking the surrounding Falacrinae valley. The archeologists are hoping to recover more items in fresh excavations in July and August, Patterson said. Archaelogists from the British School at Rome and the University of Perugia used geophysical surveys to give them an X-ray image of the buried building, Patterson explained. [...]

"Rising and falling sea levels over relatively short periods do not indicate long-term trends. An assessment of hundreds and thousands of years shows that what seems an irregular phenomenon today is in fact nothing new," explains Dr. Dorit Sivan, who supervised the research. The sea level in Israel has been rising and falling over the past 2,500 years, with a one-meter difference between the highest and lowest levels, most of the time below the present-day level. This has been shown in a new study supervised by Dr. Dorit Sivan, Head of the Department of Maritime Civilizations at the University of Haifa. "Rises and falls in sea level over relatively short periods do not testify to a long-term trend. It is early yet to conclude from the short-term increases in sea level that this is a set course that will not take a change in direction," explains Dr. Sivan. The rising sea level is one of the phenomena that have most influence on humankind: the rising sea not only floods the littoral regions but also causes underground water salinization, flooded effluents, accelerated coastal destruction, and other damage. According to Dr. Sivan, the changing sea level can be attributed to three main causes: the global cause – the volume of water in the ocean, which mirrors the mass of ice sheets and is related to global warming or cooling; the regional cause – vertical movement of the earth's surface, which is usually related to the pressure placed on the surface by the ice; and the local cause – vertical tectonic activity. Seeing as Israel is not close to former ice caps and the tectonic activity along the Mediterranean coast is negligible over these periods, it can be concluded that drastic changes in Israel's sea levels are mainly related to changes in the volume of water. [...]

Dublin's Northside is revealing its own Viking past with the first evidence of 11th-century Dubliners choosing to settle on the north shore of the Liffey emerging in the past week. Clear signs of a late-11th century – ie Viking – house have been found at a site in the Smithfield area owned by the Office of Public Works (OPW). Excavation works, commissioned and funded by the OPW, have been under way at Hammond Lane, off Church Street, since last year. Some 17th- and 18th-century artefacts have been found since then, while evidence of a “substantial Viking house” was uncovered there last week, said excavation director Colm Moriarty. National Museum director Pat Wallace said the great significance of the find lay in the location of the house north of the Liffey. The find would be of even greater importance if it could be demonstrated the house was part of a neighbourhood and not just stand-alone. “If it can be established that there was a Hiberno-Norse suburb north of the Liffey, that would be hugely significant,” said Dr Wallace. Eleven archaeologists working onsite have dug down to reveal “latrines and ditches” as well as the holes in the ground into which hazel or silver-birch posts would have been thrust to make the “walls” of the house. Mr Moriarty was yesterday able to point out where the 11th-century inhabitants would have entered the 7m by 5.5m dwelling, where they would have slept and, pointing at a discoloured patch of earth, where their hearth would have been. “It’s possible they were involved in working with antlers, making combs and that sort of thing. We have found pieces of chopped and worked antlers. They could then maybe have sold them out on the street at the front of the house.” [...]

Part of an ancient Roman law code previously thought to have been lost forever has been discovered by researchers at UCL's Department of History. Simon Corcoran and Benet Salway made the breakthrough after piecing together 17 fragments of previously incomprehensible parchment. The fragments were being studied at UCL as part of the Arts & Humanities Research Council-funded "Projet Volterra" – a ten year study of Roman law in its full social, legal and political context. Corcoran and Salway found that the text belonged to the Codex Gregorianus, or Gregorian Code, a collection of laws by emperors from Hadrian (AD 117-138) to Diocletian (AD 284-305), which was published circa AD 300. Little was known about the codex's original form and there were, until now, no known copies in existence. "The fragments bear the text of a Latin work in a clear calligraphic script, perhaps dating as far back as AD 400," said Dr Salway. "It uses a number of abbreviations characteristic of legal texts and the presence of writing on both sides of the fragments indicates that they belong to a page or pages from a late antique codex book - rather than a scroll or a lawyer's loose-leaf notes. "The fragments contain a collection of responses by a series of Roman emperors to questions on legal matters submitted by members of the public," continued Dr Salway. "The responses are arranged chronologically and grouped into thematic chapters under highlighted headings, with corrections and readers' annotations between the lines. The notes show that this particular copy received intensive use." [...]

A University of Alabama archaeologist has contradicted a report he signed last year claiming a stone mound in Oxford was likely made by humans about 1,000 years ago. The Anniston Star reports that Robert Clouse told the Oxford city council Tuesday that erosion and other natural forces likely created the mound. Clouse heads the Office of Archaeological Research at the University of Alabama and the University of Alabama Museums. Clouse was answering questions about the mound behind the Oxford Exchange and the apparent removal of another mound at the historic Davis Farm site. [...]

Unidentified tomb raiders hit more than 10 ancient tomb sites Monday in east Jiangsu Province, using bulldozers, and stealing most of the articles they unearthed, in an unprecedented sacking of the country's cultural relics, local archaeologists said. The incident came almost a month after the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences claimed a major discovery of the tomb of Cao Cao, a renowned warlord and politician in the 3rd century AD, in central China. Although the authenticity of Cao Cao's tomb in Anyang, Henan, remains in question, the discovery seems to have reactivated interest in archaeology across the nation, with television programs about antiquities attracting enthusiasts. Pieces of coffins made of valuable and rare Nanmu wood, as well as pottery and iron items, were seen scattered across an area of 1,000 square meters at the ravaged tomb site, located in Gucheng town in Gaochun county of Nanjing, the provincial capital, adjacent to the construction site of an expressway. Judging from some of the items left by the robbers, Puyang Kangjing, a history scholar at the local museum, said Wednesday that the tombs date from the Han Dynasty (206 BC-220 AD). "The coffins were made with high-quality and rare wood, which indicates that the owners of the tombs were nobles," Puyang was quoted as saying by the Nanjing-based Yangtze Evening Post. The bulldozer raid was the first of its kind and the most destructive in the country, an unnamed archeologist with the Nanjing Museum was quoted by the paper as saying Wednesday. [...]

A clever bit of detective work by US scholars and scientists has proven that one of the jewels of the University of Chicago’s manuscript collection is, in fact, a skilled late 19th- or early 20th-century forgery. Although speculation as to the authenticity of the Archaic Mark codex has been rife for more than 60 years, prior to this definitive research many believed it was an early record (possibly as early as the 14th century) of the Gospel of Mark and the closest of any extant manuscript to the world’s oldest Greek Bible—the fourth-century Codex Vaticanus. The earliest record of Archaic Mark dates to 1917 when it was listed among the possessions of recently deceased Athenian antiquities dealer and collector John Askitopoulos. In September of 1935, Askitopoulos’s nephew, Gregory Vlastos, contacted University of Chicago biblical scholar Edgar Goodspeed asking if the school wished to purchase the manuscript. The 44-page codex, measuring 11.5 x 8.5cm, was acquired by the university in 1937 for an undisclosed sum. The ongoing debate as to the codex’s authenticity re-ignited in 2006 with its digitisation, giving international experts an opportunity to examine the work closely for the first time. Beginning in 2007, Margaret Mitchell, Alice Schreyer and Judith Dartt from the university collaborated with research microscopist Joseph Barabe from the Illinois-based lab McCrone Associates, and manuscript conservator Abigail Quandt from the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, to perform a cross-discipline, in-depth analysis of the codex. [...]

Dead men can indeed tell tales, but they speak in a whispered double helix. Consider an older gentleman whose skeleton lay in one of more than 200 tombs recently excavated at a 2,000-year-old cemetery in western Mongolia, near China’s northern border. DNA extracted from this man’s bones pegs him as a descendant of Europeans or western Asians. Yet he still assumed a prominent position in ancient Mongolia’s Xiongnu Empire, say geneticist Kyung-Yong Kim of Chung-Ang University in Seoul, South Korea, and his colleagues. On the basis of previous excavations and descriptions in ancient Chinese texts, researchers suspect that the Xiongnu Empire — which ruled a vast territory in and around Mongolia from 209 B.C. to A.D. 93 — included ethnically and linguistically diverse nomadic tribes. The Xiongnu Empire once ruled the major trading route known as the Asian Silk Road, opening it to both Western and Chinese influences. Researchers have yet to pin down the language spoken by Xiongnu rulers and political elites, says archaeologist David Anthony of Hartwick College in Oneonta, N.Y. But the new genetic evidence shows that the 2,000-year-old man “was multi-ethnic, like the Xiongnu polity itself,” Anthony remarks. This long-dead individual possessed a set of genetic mutations on his Y chromosome, which is inherited from paternal ancestors, that commonly appears today among male speakers of Indo-European languages in eastern Europe, central Asia and northern India, Kim’s team reports in an upcoming American Journal of Physical Anthropology. The same man displayed a pattern of mitochondrial DNA mutations, inherited from maternal ancestors, characteristic of speakers of modern Indo-European languages in central Asia, the researchers say. [...]

The archaeological discoveries of the excavation expeditions working at 17 archaeological sites in Aleppo city (north Syria) contribute to highlighting Aleppo's role in the human civilization during various eras. Chairman of the Ruins Excavation Section in Aleppo Ruins and Museums Department Youssef Kanjo pointed out that the Syrian-Japanese joint expedition working in Didarieh Cave, northern Aleppo, unearthed lots of stony tools dating back to the Yabroudi civilization. He added that excavation works included the part returned to the Musterian Civilization, as hundreds of flint and bony tools were used by the Neanderthal Man, to whom the Musterian Civilization belongs. The Lebanese-Syrian expedition working in al-Nabi Huri, in Ephreen area, discovered the city's fence during the Byzantinean and Islamic eras. Kengo pointed out that the Syrian-Polish expedition working in Tel al-Qaramil, north Aleppo, discovered a circular bridge and number of circular adjoining houses and tombs dating back to the Bronze era. The Syrian-French joint expedition working in Qinesreen site, South Aleppo accomplished an archaeological survey for the site and documented all the Islamic and classical ruins in the archaeological village of al-Aeis in preparation to start the excavation works in the Islamic castle. The excavation works uncovered a Factory for glass manufacturing, Kenjo went on. [...]

Fragments of prehistoric ostrich eggshells estimated to be 25,000 years old and earthen dice belonging to the Kushan period are the latest additions to the treasure trove of archaeological objects discovered in Bundi district of Rajasthan. The findings are set to throw a new light on the hoary past of the Hadauti region which is believed to have sustained an ancient civilisation. Amateur archaeologist Om Prakash Sharma alias Kukki, who has made the spectacular discoveries, was honoured at the Republic Day ceremony of the State Government’s Directorate of Archaeology at Albert Hall Museum here on January 26. Mr. Kukki – a barely literate grocer with a passion for the artefacts of yore – has discovered rock paintings belonging to Mesolilithic-Chalcolithic age and numismatic objects and tools of copper age and the Mauryan and post-Gupta period in the vast hilly tracts of Bundi, Kota and Bhilwara districts during the past two decades. Mr. Kukki, who brought the rare findings with him, told The Hindu here that he stumbled upon the ostrich eggshells in the ravines of Nangli river, 35 km from Bundi, about three months ago. These eggshells most probably belong to a single egg as they were collected from a small area and are similar in colour, thickness and morphology. [...]