Displaying items by tag: excavation

Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) yesterday unveiled a large, 1,700-year-old mosaic floor featuring intricate patterns and images of animals, uncovered in the city of Lod, about nine miles southeast of Tel Aviv. The discovery, made last year during excavations from June through November, occurred when archaeologists were preparing the site to build a visitors center to display the famous Lod Mosaic, according to a release published by the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The Lod Mosaic, which measures 600 square feet (~55 square meters) and has recently been on view in museums from the Louvre to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, served as the living room floor for the same ancient villa that housed the recently exposed work, which archaeologists believe decorated its courtyard.

A trove of 2,000 delicate gold spirals that date back to the Bronze Age was recently discovered in Denmark -- and archaeologists are trying to figure out what the ancient coils were used for.

The 3,000-year-old spirals are made of thin, flattened gold wire and were found during an excavation in the town of Boeslunde, on the Danish island of Zealand.

Each tightly wound coil is about one inch long. All together, the gold spirals weigh more than half a pound.

The renowned Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York purchased a collection of 4,000-year-old Egyptian artifacts found a century ago by a British explorer, averting a plan to auction the antiquities that had drawn criticism from historians.

The Treasure of Harageh collection consists of 37 items such as flasks, vases and jewelry inlaid with lapis lazuli, a rare mineral. Discovered by famed British archaeologist Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie, the relics date to roughly 1900 B.C., excavated from a tomb near the city of Fayum. Portions of the excavated antiquities were given in 1914 to donors in St. Louis who helped underwrite the dig.

A 2,000-year-old trove of rare bronze coins from a Late Second Temple Period Jewish settlement was discovered in Israel, the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) announced today.

The discovery was made after pottery shards discovered several months ago, during construction to widen the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv Highway, led archaeologists to continue their excavation.

"The hoard, which appears to have been buried several months prior to the fall of Jerusalem, provides us with a glimpse into the lives of Jews living on the outskirts of Jerusalem at the end of the rebellion," said IAA excavation directors Pablo Betzer and Eyal Marco in a press release.

A battered pot found in a garage in Cornwall, broken in antiquity and broken again and mended with superglue some 5,500 years later, was treasure – but the scruffy little cardboard label it held is now unlocking a lost history of finds from excavations in Egypt scattered across the world in the late 19th century.

The pot came with an odd family legend that back in the 1950s it was accepted in lieu of a fare by a taxi driver in High Wycombe. Alice Stevenson, curator at the Petrie Museum in London, which among its 80,000 objects has the original excavation records and hundreds of pieces from the same Egyptian cemetery, believes the story is true and may even have identified the mysterious passenger.

The Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio returned a ceramic water vase, which depicts the Greek god, Dionysus turning pirates into dolphins, to the Italian government on Tuesday, January 9, 2013. The jug, which dates back to the sixth century BC, was likely looted from Italian soil years ago.

The Toledo Museum of Art purchased the jug in 1982 from art dealers who used falsified documents to hide the object’s dishonest past. Investigators revealed that the jug was smuggled out of Italy after it was illegally excavate sometime before 1981.

The United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency announced that the Estruscan black-figure kalpis, which is valued at $665,000, was handed back to Italian officials following a ceremony held at the museum. While Italy currently holds reign over the work, the jug will remain on view in the museum’s Libbey Court until it leaves for Rome in late summer of this year.