In the late 1800s, Westminster Abbey clergy stumbled upon a mysterious sarcophagus. The lid was decorated with an 11th-century Anglo-Saxon cross, but the base had a fourth-century Roman funeral inscription. For nearly 150 years, the tomb has baffled experts, but the abbey's consulting archaeologist may have finally figured out who was buried there, according to a new study.

Westminster's chief mason unearthed the stone sarcophagus in 1869, but when experts investigated it, they discovered that the burial had been looted earlier that century. Experts also noticed that the carved decoration on the side of the sarcophagus was stylistically Roman, with a Latin inscription that can be translated as "To the memory of Valerius Amandinus. Valerius Superventor and Marcellus made this for their father." But an enormous medieval cross had been carved into the lid of the sarcophagus, suggesting that the tomb had been reused to bury an important religious figure hundreds of years later.

The mystery of the medieval individual buried in a Roman sarcophagus remained unsolved for 150 years, as no one thought that any bones were left inside. But when the stone coffin was opened for conservation in 2016 and a full skeleton was discovered, clues to the identity of the deceased finally came to light, Warwick Rodwell, the consultant archaeologist for Westminster Abbey, wrote in a study published Wednesday (Oct. 21) in the Journal of the British Archaeological Association.

Although the skeleton had been disturbed over the years, with a hole accidentally made in the skull and arm and leg bones mixed up, it was clear that the person was male, middle-aged, and of average height, bioarchaeologist James Langthorne of Pre-Construct Archaeology wrote in a 2016 report. The man also had some evidence of osteoarthritis, two healed rib injuries and gout. The bones were carbon-dated to between 987 and 1052, confirming that the Roman-era sarcophagus was reused in the Middle Ages.

"This brings us to the final question of importance: who was he?" Rodwell wrote in the study. Despite the lack of grave goods, which may have been stolen in the early 19th century, "he was almost certainly an abbot" who was given a dignified burial in a stone sarcophagus with a large cross, Rodwell wrote.

Based on the birth and death dates of the abbots of Westminster and their tenure as clergy, Rodwell narrowed the candidates down to Wulfsige (abbot from 988 to 993), Ælfwig (abbot from 993 to 1020) and Wulfnoth (abbot from 1020 to 1049). Given that Wulfsige left Westminster to become a bishop elsewhere, he was likely not buried in the abbey.

"Consequently, we have two viable contenders for the occupant of the sarcophagus," Rodwell wrote. "The fact that Ælfwig was already a monk of Westminster might favour him."

Although the final resting place of Ælfwig may have been found after a millennium, some questions remain unanswered.

For example, it is unclear why an 11th-century abbot was buried in a recycled fourth-century Roman sarcophagus. The reuse of Roman coffins is extremely unusual, Rodwell noted in the study, and nothing comparable to this sarcophagus has ever been found. One explanation for the reuse may rest with the Latin inscription, whose first word — "memoriae" (to the memory) — suggests that Valerius Amandinus was an early Christian himself. This Roman may have been a significant figure in Roman London, Rodwell wrote, but "unfortunately, nothing is known about his career."

Experts are also unsure where the Roman sarcophagus came from. It was made from limestone sourced from Oxfordshire, a county in the South of England. But perhaps the coffin was originally buried in a Roman mausoleum and they were unearthed and moved at some point, Rodwell noted. But as Rodwell pointed out in the study, "there could be a villa and its cemetery somewhere in the vicinity of Westminster Abbey, awaiting discovery."

The sarcophagus is currently on display in the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Galleries at Westminster Abbey.

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Archaeologists have unearthed a Roman military camp in Spain, where they found fragments of weapons and metal tacks from soldiers' shoes. The camp was used during the Cantabrian Wars fought by Emperor Augustus as he expanded the Roman Empire in the first century B.C.

The fortified military camp is made up of an earthen platform roughly 39 feet (12 meters) wide, which is surrounded by a stone perimeter wall about 5 feet (1.5 m) thick, according to a translated statement. Uncovered during excavations earlier this year, the camp is situated about one-third of a mile (500 m) from where an Iron Age settlement was once inhabited by the Cantabri people, a group of Celtic tribes that lived among the Cantabrian Mountains in modern-day northern Spain.

The Cantabri fiercely resisted Roman rule for a decade, but in 19 B.C., they were conquered by the military commanded by Emperor Augustus. The Cantabrian Wars marked the end of local control over the territory, as the Iberian Peninsula then came under control of the Roman Empire.

"It's not easy to find a camp associated with a hill fort in this condition," Eduardo González Gómez de Agüero, an archaeologist at the University of León who co-directed the excavation project, said in the statement.

Among the well-preserved remains at the camp were metal weapon fragments and small iron tacks known as hobnails, which were hammered into the bottom of Roman soldiers' leather military sandals to help provide traction on rocky and muddy terrain. These objects are evidence that the Roman military was prepared to attack and subdue the Iron Age community, according to the statement.

The archaeologists also uncovered evidence of a major fire that destroyed most of the pre-Roman settlement, including two temples. González Gómez de Agüero suggested that the Romans may have deliberately set the fire as part of their conquest.

"It's not just about defeating the enemy, but about humiliating them, erasing their identity, and breaking their connection to the land," he said in the statement.

Researchers are still working on establishing the chronology of the Romans' final attack on the Cantabri and want to understand if the settlement was destroyed in a single event or over time. Previously, another research team found 66 Roman camps in northern Spain, showing the immensity of the empire's attacks against the Cantabri.

The latest find is helping researchers understand the scale and location of Rome's fight for control of the Iberian Peninsula.

"It is an important step in understanding how the conquest was carried out on the Cantabrian slope of León, an area where it was necessary to link the Roman camps with Iron Age settlements," Carlos Fernández Rodríguez, an archaeologist at the University of León, said in the statement.

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Aqueducts are some of the ancient Romans' most prominent surviving archaeological remains. These aqueducts relied on gravity to bring down the water to cities gradually. But some, such as the aqueduct at Aspendos in Turkey, had sections where they had to go uphill. So how did the Romans get water to flow upward?

The Romans used a few methods, including siphons and various water-lifting devices, experts told Live Science.

Inverted siphons

One strategy was a system called an inverted siphon (sometimes simply called a siphon).

At Aspendos, in southern Turkey, there is a second-century-A.D. Roman aqueduct with inverted siphons that scholars have reconstructed with a virtual modeling simulation. To get water through a valley, the Romans built a "header tank" on one end of the valley and a slightly lower "receiving tank" (or "outlet tank") on the other side. In the valley, they constructed two towers between the tanks, Paul Kessener, a researcher in the Department of Language and Culture Studies at Radboud University in the Netherlands, noted in an article published in 2000 in the Journal of Roman Archaeology.

As water dropped down a steep hill, the resulting pressure pushed it up the first tower before dropping it steeply down the other side, with the force allowing it to climb the second tower. The water eventually reached the receiving tank on the other side of the valley and continued toward the city of Aspendos.

It was important to prevent air pockets from forming as the water went through the inverted siphons. The header and receiving tanks were relatively large, allowing air bubbles to escape, Giovanni De Feo, a professor of industrial engineering at the University of Salerno in Italy, noted in an email.

"As the flow entered a relatively large chamber, its velocity decreased, allowing air bubbles to rise naturally to the water surface and escape through the open top of the structure," De Feo explained. This reduced the risk of air pockets forming.

The Romans tried to avoid using inverted siphons, said Charles Ortloff, a research associate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago who has a background in both engineering and history. When "Roman engineers encounter a valley, rather than construct a siphon, they [preferred] to build a bridge with a top channel to cross a valley," Ortloff said in an email. One example of this is at the Segovia aqueduct in Spain, which has a stunning bridge that still survives today.

Roman water-lifting devices

While the Romans used inverted siphons to move water upward in an aqueduct, they employed other devices to push water out.

Perhaps the best known of these devices is the Archimedes screw, which was sometimes used to help lift water from rivers to fields. (It was allegedly designed by Archimedes, a Greek inventor who lived during the third century B.C. However, it might have actually been invented at an earlier time, noted historians Stephanie Dalley and John Peter Oleson in a 2003 paper.) When "turned by use of animal power, [it] can effectively raise water from lower river heights to higher land area heights," Ortloff said.

The Archimedes screw "consisted of a wooden shaft that had [curves] of thin and flexible willow or wicker branches one stuck on top of the other, so that an endless screw was created," the Kotsanas Museum of Ancient Greek Technology's website notes. This screw was placed within a wooden pipe, and the "device was placed in the water with an inclination of 30 degrees," the museum representatives wrote. As the screw was rotated, it lifted the water.

Water wheels were also used to lift water, including in Roman mines. "The water wheel is a device that raises water and that is made up of several buckets that are fastened to a big wheel," scientists wrote in a 2024 paper. This "kind of wheel resembles a carriage wheel but it is larger and features buckets to catch water in addition to its larger size," they explained.

Another device, sometimes known as Ctesibius' pump, "was hand-moved, operating a wooden lever with a swinging motion," the scientists wrote. It had two cylinders connected to a central chamber through pistons, and the driven water exited through a nozzle connected to the central chamber.

Whatever method was used, the Romans would not let an uphill climb stop them from bringing water where they wanted it to go.

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Archaeologists have discovered a temple dedicated to the Roman war god Mars in the wooded foothills of the Taunus mountains in Germany. The temple was part of a military settlement that was built in the third century to defend the border of the Roman Empire against Germanic tribes.

The Roman military constructed thousands of forts across Europe, northern Africa and western Asia while expanding the empire, and most of these fortifications had an adjacent settlement, called a "vicus," that was occupied primarily by merchants, families and other civilians.

Since 2024, archaeologists have been excavating the Kapersburg Roman fort and its adjacent vicus in Hesse, roughly 16 miles (26 kilometers) north of Frankfurt, according to a Sept. 25 translated statement from the Hessen State Office for Monument Preservation.

One of the highlights of the current excavation is the unexpected discovery of a Roman temple, Kai Mückenberger, an archaeologist with Hessen Archaeology, a part of the Hesse State Office for Monument Preservation, said in a translated video. "Inside the temple, we found several fragments of a dedicatory inscription," he said. Experts have already translated a portion of the inscription, which mentions that the temple was dedicated to Mars, the Roman god of war.

"We also have the remains of a Mars [statue]," Mückenberger said, as well as a statuette of "a winged figure holding a palm branch and laurel wreath," which is likely the ancient Roman goddess Victoria, a personification of victory in battle.

When archaeologists first excavated the Kapersburg fort near the turn of the 20th century, they discovered that it was built in the early second century, likely under either Emperor Trajan, who ruled from A.D. 98 to 117, or Emperor Hadrian, who reigned from A.D. 117 to 138 and expanded the Roman Empire further into northern England, building Hadrian's Wall. The Kapersburg fort was used by a unit of Roman soldiers and cavalry for about a century and a half, until around A.D. 275.

Although the fort's defensive structures and some of its walls have been visible since antiquity, practically nothing was known about its nearby vicus prior to the excavations that began in 2024, according to Mückenberger.

"The astonishing thing is the exquisite preservation of the archaeological layers that start right beneath the forest floor," Mückenberger said. These layers, which include burnt material, almost never survive in agricultural areas but have been well preserved at the vicus. "This is an incredible learning process and a gain in knowledge for us," Mückenberger added.

During their excavations, the research team discovered far fewer houses than they expected. However, they found much more evidence of craft activities, such as blacksmith pits and ovens for drying wheat and baking bread.

"These are all very technical elements related to local services, indicating that we're in a kind of intermediate area not directly adjacent to the fort itself, but perhaps more like the fort's craft area," Mückenberger said.

The temple and votive statues provide new insight into the Roman world of beliefs on the border of the empire, according to the statement. But when the fort was no longer useful, the Romans leveled the camp and replaced it with residential buildings, the archaeologists discovered.

Mückenberger and his team plan to continue their excavation of the site next year.

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Archaeologists excavating a Paris hospital's courtyard, a stone's throw from Notre-Dame, have discovered the first evidence of a Celtic fort that Julius Caesar tried to conquer in 52 B.C. The ancient walls show evidence of a violent fire, seemingly confirming the claim that the Celtic group who lived there, known as the Gauls, burned down their own town so that it wouldn't fall into Caesar's hands.

"The wall's architecture, with its large blocks and interlocking beam system, immediately led us to believe it was a wall of Gallic tradition," Dorothée Chaoui-Derieux, chief curator of heritage at the Île-de-France Regional Archaeology Service, said in a translated statement. Traces of fire and first century B.C. artifacts further suggested the archaeologists had finally found material evidence of Lutetia, a Celtic settlement mentioned in Caesar's Gallic Wars.

In the first century B.C., Lutetia was a Celtic pre-Roman settlement, known as an "oppidum", in what is now Paris. Lutetia was the capital city of the Parisii tribe, who lived along the River Seine. As part of the Gallic Wars, which ran from 58 to 50 B.C., Julius Caesar and his troops fought the Battle of Lutetia in 52 B.C. The Romans won a decisive victory, but the Gauls burned Lutetia and cut the bridges so that Caesar could not take the town. As a result, the ancient fort had never been found.

But in February, a team of archaeologists began excavating in the courtyard of the Hôtel-Dieu, which is Paris's oldest working hospital. On the small Île-de-la-Cité island in the middle of the Seine, close to Notre-Dame, the archaeologists discovered a 65-foot (20-meters) stone and timber wall typical of Celtic fortifications. Charred facing, burnt seeds and a burned wooden building discovered nearby suggested the site had been destroyed by a fire.

"The initial results of carbon-14 dating of the wooden elements suggest a date range between 200 and 10 B.C. Furthermore, a Gallic spearhead was found at the foot of the wall," Chaoui-Derieux said.

These new discoveries provide solid archaeological evidence that Lutetia was indeed centered on the island in the Seine and that its occupants burned it down, as Caesar noted in his Gallic Wars more than two millennia ago.

"This discovery fills an archaeological gap. For centuries, the location of Lutetia has been debated," Stéphane Deschamps, regional curator of archaeology at Île-de-France Regional Archaeology Service, said in the statement. "Today, with this wall and its context, we may hold the key to the mystery."

But the remains of the wall and other artifacts are extremely fragile because of their exposure to fire, according to the statement. The wall cannot be fully preserved, so archaeologists will create a replica using 3D photogrammetry to ensure the discovery is accessible to everyone.

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A metal detectorist in the west of Germany has discovered one of the largest hoards of Roman silver coins ever found in that country from the reign of the Emperor Hadrian.

The pile includes more than 900 silver denarii — the denarius was the standard coin of the early Roman Empire — and weighs almost 7 pounds (3.1 kilograms).

The stash was discovered about a year ago in a field near the small city of Wesseling, a few miles south of Cologne, according to a translated statement from Germany's Rhineland regional government. It's now on display at the Rhineland Regional Museum in Bonn (LVR-Landesmuseum Bonn).

Archaeologists think the hoard was buried at the time of the Emperor Hadrian, who ruled from A.D. 117 to 138, because the most recent coin was minted in 124 or 125.

But the coins span more than three centuries: the oldest was minted in 148 B.C., during the time of the Roman Republic; while most of them are from the time of the Flavian emperors — Vespasian and his sons, Titus and Domitian — from A.D. 69 to 96.

Silver signal

The statement praised the metal detectorist, Oliver Riedl, who found the hoard and stopped digging after unearthing 15 of the coins. At that point, his metal detector signaled that something much larger was hiding underground.

"It was clear to me that there was something bigger in the ground here," Riedl said in the statement. "I therefore immediately informed the office."

Riedl is licensed by the state to use his metal detector and has been trained by regional archaeological authorities, the statement said. (Illegal metal detectorists also operate in Germany, but are known to often disrupt the archaeological value of their finds).

Archaeologists from the Rhineland regional government soon investigated the find and excavated the entire hoard of 934 Roman silver coins. The block of earth that contained the coin hoard was removed whole and X-rayed before it was opened, the statement noted.

Erich Claßen, the head of archaeology for the Rhineland regional government, said it seemed that the original owner collected most of the coins in about A.D. 100, but didn't actually bury them until Hadrian's time.

"We can only speculate about the motives, but very likely someone wanted to keep this money safe," he said in the statement. "Banks did not exist at that time."

But whoever buried it never came back. "It is possible that the owner died beforehand without being able to pass on the knowledge of the coins," Claßen said.

Buried treasure

Marjanko Pilekić, a numismatist, or coin expert, at the German Historical Museum in Berlin who wasn't involved in the find, said it was significant that the hoard was unearthed just inside the northern frontier of the Roman Empire demarcated by the Roman limes, which ran along the Rhine nearby.

He told Live Science in an email that the location suggested when the hoard had been purposefully buried: "In this case, we can cautiously assume that the hoard was buried not long after the most recent coin was minted," Pilekić said.

Outside the Roman Empire, however, in the Barbaricum – the "barbarian" regions beyond, according to the Romans — such hoards of coins were often buried much later, he said.

While its historical value is priceless, the worth of such a hoard during the second century A.D. would have been considerable: 300 denarii was the yearly pay of a Roman legionary at the time of Hadrian, of which around half was deducted for food and equipment, regional archaeologist Rahel Otte, who led the excavation, said in the statement.

This means that a legionary "would have had to save all his available money for about six years to accumulate the Wesseling treasure find," she said.

She added that it was unclear who had buried the hoard, but it may have been someone who lived on one of the Roman estates in the area.

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The long-lost words of ancient philosophers may finally be revealed nearly 2,000 years after the violent eruption of Mount Vesuvius scorched and buried them, thanks to a heavy metal that was used in the ink that penned them, a new study finds.

The new research investigates the lead-enriched ink within some of the nearly 2,000 papyrus scrolls, which were found at a villa in the ancient town of Herculaneum in the 1750s. In a new paper, a team created modern scrolls with leaded ink, scorched them and found that they could read the text after using several techniques, including X-ray technologies and artificial intelligence (AI).

"It's amazing what you can get electrons to do," Douglas Seiler, a research affiliate of the University of California, Berkeley and a co-author of the study, said in a statement about the new method.

Over the past few years, other researchers have digitally opened and decoded some of the scrolls from the Herculaneum villa, which was likely owned by Julius Caesar's father-in-law. These results have helped reveal the writings of ancient philosophers, largely Epicureans and Stoics, with one section even describing Plato's final burial place.

But scientists still wrestled with using X-rays to read the scrolls, since, in many cases, both the papyri and the ink written on them are carbon-based. However, some of these papyri, scientists have learned, contained leaded ink. The new study, published Wednesday (Sept. 16) in the journal PLOS One, suggests that researchers should first scan the scrolls for leaded ink and then use their new technique to read more of these long-lost texts.

This method could help improve text-detection algorithms to identify writing on ancient papyrus pages, they noted. And, in the long run, it may help to protect the scrolls.

"This provides a low-risk method to develop algorithms without endangering the priceless artifacts," the team wrote in the study.

Virtually unrolling a scroll

When Mount Vesuvius erupted in A.D. 79, it buried Herculaneum under 70 feet (20 meters) of volcanic rock and ash.

Along with the 2,000 people who died at Pompeii and Herculaneum from this natural disaster, many of the scrolls housed at the Herculaneum villa were carbonized, or essentially turned into charcoal, trapping their writings in brittle rolls of papyrus that are nearly impossible to read without destroying the scroll itself.

But, given that some of the ink used in the scrolls contained lead, Seiler and his colleagues decided to do a little experiment. They created a fake papyrus scroll with lead-based ink and "carbonized" it to try matching the conditions of the scrolls found at Herculaneum.

Next, the researchers used X-ray fluorescence, which determines the elements in a material by how they interact with X-rays, to determine that these scrolls did, in fact, contain ink with varying levels of lead. Following that, they used X-ray tomography, a way to make a 3D image using X-rays, with custom-made software to re-read some of the text they had produced on their scroll.

Thanks to their technique, the researchers found that they could read the lead-based ink writings in the scrolls, even with minuscule levels of lead. While not all the writings could be deciphered, the method was able to detect differences between the text and the papyrus it was written on.

This technique, if used on other Herculaneum scrolls, could give these ancient writings a "higher probability of being successfully read," they wrote in the study.

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The saying that "all roads lead to Rome" may be famous, but a new study finds it's far from true. Extensive new research of the Roman Empire's road system reveals that several other Roman cities were better connected than the Eternal City was during antiquity.

Major cities like Antioch, Ancyra (modern-day Ankara) and Byzantium in what is now Turkey, as well as Corinth in Greece, were "better located than Rome" for those traveling by land, the team wrote in a paper published Tuesday (Sept. 15) in the journal Nature Communications.

At its height in A.D. 117, the Roman Empire covered almost 2.1 million square miles (5.5 million square kilometers) around the Mediterranean Sea, occupying much of Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, the team noted in the study.

For years, the scientists have been creating a vast digital atlas called "Itiner-e" of nearly 186,000 miles (300,000 kilometers) of Roman roads. For the new study, they calculated how well Roman cities were connected to the road system.

In fact, the empire's "most important intermediary route" by land identified in the study didn't even run through Rome.

"It follows the North African and Levantine coast past Antioch and near Ankara, crosses over to Europe at Constantinople, and moves through the Po Valley and Milan into France," study co-author Tom Brughmans, a professor of classical archaeology at Aarhus University in Denmark, told Live Science in an email.

The other well-connected cities had a bevy of reasons for their numerous roads. For instance, Corinth was better connected to the road network because the roads that ran through it linked the Greek Peloponnesian Peninsula to the rest of Greece, and Ancyra was better connected because it was a vital transportation hub for Anatolia.

Rome's unique location is likely the biggest reason why it wasn’t as well connected to the road system as these other cities.

Brughmans noted that the "Italian Peninsula is an appendix to the empire's road network, and Rome is halfway down this appendix." And when "we consider all movement within the entire Italian Peninsula, we were shocked to discover that the most central road actually follows the opposite Adriatic coastline, bypassing Rome altogether," Brughmans added.

The study also found that when the shape of the land allowed it, Roman roads tended to be straight, but they were not as straight as modern-day roads.

Today, "modern road building avoids sharp turns and aims to build as straight roads as possible by strongly modifying the terrain to facilitate faster travel by car, which is made possible by modern surveying and construction methods," the team wrote in their paper.

Sea and river connections

Although the new research sheds light on road connections, it's important to remember that road travel wasn't the only means of transport in the Roman Empire. In fact, the researchers noted that Rome may have had a more significant position for sea and river transportation than it had for road transportation.

Although the study didn't look at waterways, Rome's central location in the empire meant that it would have been an important hub of water transport, the team wrote in the study.

"Rome's central location is not due to its roads, but its physical location in the centre of the Mediterranean, on the nexus of major shipping lanes," Brughmans explained.

The team said future studies should examine sea and river transport and integrate their findings with the team's Roman roads study. When considered together, road and waterway routes may help researchers better understand Roman transportation networks.

Pažout, A. et al. (2026). Network science reveals the structure and lasting impact of the Roman road system. Nature Communications, 17(9551). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-75453-3

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Nearly two millennia ago, a wealthy Roman commissioned an intricate, multicolored floor mosaic that depicted two beloved household animals: a cat named Emerald and a dog named Ocean. The mosaic was a key feature of a villa, which archaeologists recently unearthed from beneath the ancient city of Adramytteion on Turkey's Aegean coast.

Within the Roman villa, which has been dated to the late second to third centuries A.D., archaeologists discovered three halls surrounding a central atrium. In one room, which likely functioned as the villa's main reception hall, archaeologists found a colorful mosaic with 15 separate panels depicting living and mythological creatures.

In a study forthcoming in the Journal of Mosaic Research, archaeologist Hüseyin Özgen, head of the Adramytteion research team at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, wrote that the 15 panels are centered around what appears to be a depiction of Medusa, while the named cat and dog may preserve the memory of household creatures.

Özgen began excavating at Adramytteion in 2012, but he and his team discovered the Roman villa only recently and excavated it in 2025 and early 2026. In the Roman period, Adramytteion was a provincial capital within Asia Minor and a prime trading spot due to its location at the head of a gulf on the Aegean Sea. The impressive villa included three mosaic-paved halls, a number of secondary rooms, and a network of pipes and drains that may have connected to a latrine.

Visitors approaching from the courtyard of the villa would have been greeted by the largest, most elaborate mosaic in the residence, according to Özgen. Located in the middle of the room, the mosaic measures about 16.4 by 11.8 feet (5 by 3.6 meters) and contains 15 panels arranged in three rows. Most of the panels depict birds, fish and felines, but two mythologically inspired panels include a gorgon (possibly Medusa) and a winged horse (possibly Pegasus). Ancient artists used white, black, red, orange, yellow, pink, burgundy, blue, turquoise and green tiles to create the intricate design.

Only two of the animals depicted in the mosaic are named. As someone entered the room, the first mosaic panel they would have seen to their left was a pale cat seated on a blue-green cushion, Özgen wrote in the study. Above the cat are the Greek letters ΖΜΑΡΑΓΔΙΝ (Zmaragdin), meaning emerald. The relaxed cat sitting on a cushion suggests that Emerald may have been a pet rather than a stray.

One possible explanation for Emerald's name may be a link to the desert of Roman Egypt, where emeralds were mined in antiquity; the villa owner may have been a merchant with North African connections.

On the right side as someone entered the room was a mosaic panel depicting a running or leaping dog. This animal is labeled with the Greek letters ΩΚΕΑΝΟΣ (Okeanos), meaning ocean. Adramytteion was a harbor city, so Ocean's name may have been bestowed due to his surroundings, according to Özgen.

Emerald and Ocean were likely familiar to the villa's residents, even if they weren't specifically pets, Özgen wrote, and their depictions in the mosaic may have functioned as familiar signs of ownership and household identity.

Research at Adramytteion by Özgen and the project team is ongoing.

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The Romans are well known for their aqueducts, which brought water to their cities and settlements.

These aqueducts sometimes ran for very long distances. For instance, the aqueduct of Valens, which brought water to the city of Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul), was 250 miles (400 kilometers) long, according to a statement from Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz.

The aqueducts also lasted a long time; their remains are some of the most prominent Roman architectural finds visible today. All of this demonstrates the Romans' engineering prowess. So how did the Romans build such large and long-lasting aqueducts?

Preparing the route

First, the Romans would select a source of water for the aqueduct, with springs being a popular choice. The aqueducts had to be designed so water would flow toward the city or settlement. The successful building of the aqueducts "was accomplished by an ever slight incline downwards from the spring to its end source," such as Rome, Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow, a classics professor and chair emerita at Brandeis University in Massachusetts, told Live Science in an email.

Roman surveyors had to design a route carefully. "To choose a route with the necessary gradient, Roman surveyors would have either used the libra or the dioptra," Joseph Lewis, an archaeologist at the University of Cambridge, told Live Science in an email.

The dioptra was shaped like a disc with a sighting bar in the middle. It could be suspended from a stand, and the surveyor could look through the sighting bar at rods in the ground to help determine their elevations. "Surveyors would sight through the sighting bar toward surveying staves to measure differences to elevation," Lewis said.

The exact design of the libra is unclear, but we know that it had a plumb bob that was suspended in the air and the surveyor could compare it to rods in the ground to help determine differences in ground height. "Surveyors would set the libra up along proposed routes for the aqueduct and look forward and backward against calibrated staves," Lewis explained, noting that this allowed them to determine differences in ground height.

Building a long-lasting aqueduct

The Romans used a form of concrete that tended to last much longer than modern-day concrete. Roman concrete used pozzolan, an ashy substance, that was combined with lime and water to form a durable concrete that hardened when exposed to water.

"Roman concrete certainly played an important role, especially in bridges, arcades, and other structural elements," Giovanni De Feo, a professor of industrial engineering at the University of Salerno in Italy, said in an email.

But this wasn't the only factor that allowed Roman aqueducts to last such a long time.

"I believe their remarkable preservation results from a combination of factors," De Feo said. For example, the Romans were careful to select routes that followed stable geological formations.

Regular maintenance that, in many cases, continued into the Middle Ages also helped Roman aqueducts survive the test of time, De Feo noted. This means that they tried to avoid volcanoes and other landscapes that were unstable.

Aqueducts did not always run aboveground; sometimes, they had lengthy underground portions in areas where the landscapes made it difficult to place it aboveground. Some "aqueducts had hardly any stretches above ground outside the city, while others ran on arches for a considerable distance," Gerda de Kleijn, a researcher at Radboud University in the Netherlands, wrote in her book "The Water Supply of Ancient Rome" (J.C. Gieben, 2001).

As the water neared the city, it would sometimes go into pools that helped remove dirt and other visible pollutants. "Water would pool into the basin, sediment would sink to the bottom, then the water would continue from there on its course to the distribution tank," Harry Evans, a professor emeritus of classics at Fordham University, said in an email.

The number of workers required to build an aqueduct depended on its size and timeline for completion. The Hadrianic aqueduct at Athens, which runs for about 12.4 miles (20 km), could have been completed in 15 years by a team of around 500 workers, researchers estimated in a 2022 paper.

Maintaining the aqueduct

After an aqueduct was built, regular maintenance kept it in good shape. Cees Passchier, head of tectonophysics at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in Germany, has studied a Roman aqueduct at Divona in France. In a 2023 study, Passchier and colleagues found that carbonate would have built up on the aqueduct over time. Maintenance workers "partly scraped away" the carbonate before replastering the aqueduct, Passchier told Live Science in an email. At some other aqueducts, they wouldn't bother scraping but would "simply plaster over the carbonate without ever cleaning anything," he said.

A sizable number of workers would have been needed to keep aqueducts functional, but it varied based on the aqueduct's size. For "a small place like Divona, a workforce of a dozen people would probably have been enough," Passchier said. "We know that in Rome, there was a staff of a few hundred people to keep the aqueducts working."

Even after the Roman Empire collapsed, many of its aqueducts survived, as some were used and maintained into the Middle Ages and even into modern times. One of the aqueducts, the Aqua Virgo, built in 19 B.C., is still bringing water to Rome today.

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Archaeologists excavating in eastern Serbia have discovered the remains of a lavish and uniquely constructed Roman bath that once belonged to an emperor. The suite of rooms ‪—‬ which included heated floors, three bathing pools and a sauna ‪—‬ was uncovered at the bottom of a tower within an imperial palace, a design archaeologists had never seen before in the Roman Empire.

The bath complex, known in Latin as a balneum, was found at the archaeological site of Vrelo-Šarkamen, a monumental fortified residential complex that was built in the early fourth century and was occupied by Maximinus Daza (or Daia), who was Roman emperor from 310 to 313. Archaeologists have been excavating at Vrelo-Šarkamen on and off for decades, and the latest discovery was made by a research team from the Institute of Archaeology, an independent research institution in Serbia, according to a Sept. 3 statement.

Galerius Valerius Maximinus, born in what is now Serbia and originally named Daza, was one of the four Roman "tetrarchs." In A.D. 293, Emperor Diocletian essentially split the Roman Empire into two halves — Eastern and Western — and each was administered by a senior emperor and a junior ruler. By 305, the rulers of the Roman Empire were Constantius and Galerius as senior emperors and Severus and Maximinus Daza as junior rulers, but the tetrarchy had begun to fall apart. Maximinus claimed the title of senior emperor in 301 but lasted only three years. He died in 313 after losing a civil war against his rival, Licinius.

The new excavations at Maximinus Daza's imperial residence have revealed that the palace was even more complex and luxurious than previously thought, according to the statement.

Maximinus' palace had a monumental tower in the southwest corner. But archaeologists were surprised to find a circular bath complex on the lowest level of the tower, as most ancient balnea were oriented linearly, with rooms in a row. This bath area had a domed ceiling with six windows, which shows a high level of engineering knowledge, according to the statement.

The balneum was split into two sections: one for equipment needed to run the baths and one for bathing and relaxing. Within the equipment room, archaeologists found the furnace that heated the bath's floors. They also discovered the base for a copper boiler that would have been used to heat up bath water. However, the copper boiler itself is now missing.

Within the suite of rooms that the emperor used, archaeologists found three bathing pools or tubs, along with a sudatorium, the Latin word for a steam bath or sauna.

According to the statement, "the complex was not simply a space intended for personal hygiene, but a carefully designed private bath intended for high-status residents of the palace, in which architecture, technical infrastructure and comfort formed a single functional whole."

Researchers will continue to explore the bath complex to better understand how the rooms were structured and how Emperor Maximinus and his family accessed it.

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Archaeologists in Bulgaria have discovered a human skeleton inside a giant Roman jar. It's likely that the individual sought shelter in the vessel during an enemy attack over 1,600 years ago but died as a fire swept through the area.

The team unearthed the gigantic jar in a Late Roman turret, or small tower, in the Roman colony of Deultum on Aug. 10. It's unclear which battle led to the individual's death, but Deultum faced many attacks from East Germanic tribes and Huns in the fourth and fifth centuries, lead excavator Lyudmil Vagalinski, an archaeologist at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, told Live Science in an email.

The individual's remains were found with two iron knives and a belt inside the container, a type of jar known as a dolium. These huge vessels were the largest type of pottery in antiquity (from roughly the eighth century B.C. to the fifth century A.D.) and were used to store goods such as olive oil and wine. The largest dolia could hold more than 260 gallons (1,000 liters), although the surviving lower part of the newfound dolium was smaller, measuring approximately 3 feet (1 meter) in diameter, Vagalinski said.

Even though Vagalinski and his colleagues had been excavating the turret, which is the northern turret of Deultum's western Roman gate, they weren't expecting to find human remains there, according to Standart News, the Bulgarian outlet that first covered the finding.

"We were surprised," Vagalinski said in an email. It's very rare for archaeologists to discover human remains inside the cities of antiquity except in the case of "extraordinary circumstances" ‪—‬ like earthquakes, enemy attacks or volcanic eruptions, he said. Even in these cases, survivors would search for their dead to bury them beyond the city walls, but they often didn't know that there were dead bodies under the ruins.

The recent discovery seems to represent one of those "extraordinary circumstances," Vagalinski said. The team found a significant amount of burned materials around the dolium, including ashes and coals; broken bricks, tiles and shards; blackened walls; melted glass fragments; and bones from domestic animals. The likely scenario is that, upon hearing of an imminent attack, people brought their livestock into the fortress. The archaeologists also found many bronze coins that were probably lost in the chaos.

The individual, presumably a young man, was likely part of this tumult and climbed into the dolium to hide or seek shelter, Vagalinski said. And while it's unknown how the fire started, the presence of ashes under the skeleton in the dolium indicates that the individual went inside after the fire had already begun, Vagalinski said.

The team's preliminary analysis dates the event to approximately A.D. 400, though they'll have a more precise date after they process the rest of their field data, according to Vagalinski.

The young man was likely hiding from the raging fire in the empty dolium and held an iron knife between his legs to defend himself in case the attackers found him, Vagalinski explained. He had a second knife in his belt.

"In any case, he made no attempt to get out of the ceramic vessel," Vagalinski said. The team determined this based on the individual’s position, similar to that of a sleeping man. "After the attack, the inhabitants of the city leveled the ruins of the tower and covered them with a new, higher floor." They did not know that a fellow citizen was lying at the bottom of the dolium.

The skeletal remains have been moved to Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria, where they will be analyzed by a physical anthropologist, according to Vagalinski. Next summer, the team will head back to Deultum to try to unearth the entire western Late Roman gate, which dates to approximately A.D. 300. The researchers are "eager to reveal its whole plan and proper chronology," Vagalinski said. They also aim to complete the investigation of the gate's northern turret, where they found the dolium.

Earlier this year, the team discovered an older latrina, the Latin word for toilet, dating to between the second and third centuries, near the gate.

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A cave in eastern Spain is revealing new clues about the ritual lives of Roman women, after archaeologists documented more than 120 Latin inscriptions — the highest number known anywhere in the Roman Empire — at an underground sanctuary. Five of the inscriptions mention a previously unknown goddess referred to simply as "the Lady."

Researchers unearthed the inscriptions during a 2026 excavation at Cova de les Dones (Cave of the Women), near Valencia on Spain's east coast. The discovery significantly expands the number of known writings from the site from 15 initially documented in 2024. The inscriptions mostly date to the first and second centuries A.D. and were found on the walls and ceilings of a deep cave chamber, which the researchers call the "Roman Sanctuary."

"The fact that the texts are concentrated in a specific and delimited area of ​​the cave, away from the entrance, confirms that it is an organized cult," Sergio García-Dils, an archaeologist and speleologist at the Seville National University of Distance Education in Spain, said in a translated statement.

The researchers think the cave hosted a dedicated cult centered on a mysterious goddess whom worshippers called Domina, meaning "the Lady."

Who is "the Lady"?

The new inscriptions shed some light on the identity of the mysterious goddess. Five of the 120 inscriptions refer to Domina, while three of those include the name "Malaci," which may be an epithet for the goddess.

"This goddess had a specific aspect, perhaps related to water, the definitive interpretation of which we are currently working on," Silvia Alfayé, a professor of ancient history at the University of Zaragoza in Spain, said in the statement.

The Roman Sanctuary chamber of the cave features small natural pools, called gours, which collect groundwater. Visitors appear to have deposited offerings in these pools, but whether these were intended for "the Lady" or for other deities remains a mystery.

Evidence of a goddess-worshipping cult

The researchers also found chalice-shaped vessels, two rings, a bracelet, ceramic fragments, plant remains and other archaeological materials in the cave that point to women playing an active role in the cult's rituals.

Several inscriptions contain female names, while archaeologists found numerous spindle whorls associated with textile-making that were often connected with ancient women. The combination of the inscriptions and artifacts suggests women may have participated directly in ceremonies or offerings at the cave, according to the statement.

More inscriptions remain to be deciphered and may reveal additional information about the mysterious goddess and her worshippers.

The new finds add clues to ancient activity inside Cova de les Dones, which has a much older archaeological history. Archaeologists previously identified more than 100 Paleolithic paintings and engravings in the cave, some dating back more than 24,000 years.

"Each new discovery suggests that Cova Dones has been a landmark for the human groups that inhabited this territory for millennia, perhaps due to the permanent presence of water, the characteristics of the underground landscape, or its easy access," the project coordinators said in the statement.

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BERLIN — A Roman-era mass grave discovered underneath a soccer field near Vienna holds the skeletons of young men from all over the Roman Empire. And many of them suffered injuries to the groin before they died, archaeologists have found.

The grave, which held at least 129 people buried in an "extremely disorganized" manner, was excavated in 2024 and has been dated to the first to second centuries A.D. A new analysis is confirming what archaeologists initially suspected: These are likely the remains of Roman-era war dead.

"This is a spectacular find," Sheridan Strang, a bioarchaeologist with the archaeology firm Novetus, told Live Science. Strang presented new work on the skeletons on Aug. 6 at the 25th European Paleopathology Association meeting. The work is not yet peer reviewed.

The mass grave was discovered in Hasenleitengasse, a neighborhood in the outskirts of Vienna, which in Roman times was known as Vindobona. Archaeologists estimated that all 129 skeletons were males between the ages of 18 and 35. They did not find any typical grave goods in the burial but did discover a few weapons. At least two-thirds of the people buried in the mass grave had evidence of violent trauma inflicted around the time of death.

"We determined that these individuals were most likely soldiers, and they died from some kind of mass violence event, either a battle or a military campaign," Strang said in a research presentation attended by Live Science. "But we have no other evidence of a battle in this area around this time."

The Roman military camp of Vindobona was established in the late first century A.D. as part of the province of Pannonia. Situated on the Danube River, Vindobona was an important outpost that helped defend the border of the Roman Empire from Germanic tribes such as the Marcomanni. While historians know that battles were fought near Vindobona during the Marcomannic Wars (circa 166 to 180), nothing in the historical or archaeological records suggested there was ever a battle at Hasenleitengasse.

When Strang and colleagues investigated the traumatic injuries on the skeletons, they found evidence of sharp trauma, such as from swords or daggers, all over the skeletons, and blunt trauma mostly on the skulls. But projectile trauma was largely confined to the groin area.

The most likely scenario for these pelvic injuries is an attacker on the ground using a throwing lance and targeting a gap in an enemy's armor as he rode horseback.

"We have one individual where the lance head was still inside the pelvis when we excavated him," Strang told Live Science. "The people who caused these injuries were aiming for these sensitive areas," she said.

The Hasenleitengasse mass grave is an important site for understanding projectile weapon use, Patrick Randolph-Quinney, a biological anthropologist at Uppsala University in Sweden who was not involved in the research, told Live Science. The fact that projectile trauma was focused on the groin and lower limbs "tells us about a possible lack of armor and protection in those areas — but also that the attackers knew how to incapacitate based on soft-tissue anatomy," he said.

But with no historical records of a specific battle and no archaeological evidence other than the skeletons, the researchers are now trying to figure out who the combatants were.

"We don't know if they were Romans, if they were the Marcomanni, or another Germanic tribe that was in the area," Strang said.

Preliminary DNA analysis of 25 of the skeletons confirmed that they were all chromosomally male. Additionally, the DNA revealed that those 25 individuals had diverse ancestry. Strang said that some of the men came from the Italian peninsula, others from mainland Europe, and three from the eastern Mediterranean and the Levant, a part of western Asia.

"These individuals may have been Roman military personnel," Strang said. "But they might not all be Romans. There's a chance that it is a commingled grave, with Romans and another Germanic tribe."

Further research on the skeletons is ongoing, Strang said. "Now that we have the remains, we can look at health, diet, and disease, and we can answer questions that were previously unknown from the archaeological record."

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BERLIN — Nearly four dozen skeletons recovered from a deep well in the Croatian city of Osijek may be the remains of people who perished during the historic Plague of Cyprian that ravaged the Roman Empire in the mid-third century A.D.

"We have a whole bunch of these used Roman-period wells that were dug in antiquity," Mario Novak, a bioarchaeologist at the Institute for Archaeological Research in Zagreb, told Live Science. "They basically used these dried-up wells just to throw people in — either from battle or from epidemics."

Novak presented new research on the enigmatic burial Aug. 6 at the 25th European Paleopathology Association meeting in Berlin. It has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal.

The burial was excavated in 2008 near a Roman necropolis in Osijek, which was founded by Emperor Hadrian in A.D. 133. At the time, the city was part of the province of Pannonia and named Mursa. The city of Mursa was important in Roman times because soldiers stationed there helped protect the Danube and the limits of the Roman Empire, but much of the ancient city still lies unexcavated beneath modern Osijek.

Novak and his team previously found two wells full of young male skeletons that had suffered violent injuries around the time of their deaths. This led the researchers to conclude that the men may have been involved in the Battle of Mursa in 260.

But the newly analyzed skeletons were very different from the previous mass burials, Novak said in his presentation. At least 43 people were buried in the well, and the dead included adults and children of both sexes. None of them had any major injuries.

"I would say this is a typical demographic cross-section of a civilian population. So nothing resembling those two battle-related mass burials," Novak said. "Our working hypothesis is that these individuals might be victims of a plague."

Historical records mention one major epidemic in the middle of the third century — the Plague of Cyprian. The disease outbreak first affected Roman troops on the Danube and likely caused mass mortality events in various parts of the Roman Empire. Experts don't yet know what caused this plague, but hemorrhagic fever and smallpox are possible contenders.

"This provides some really interesting data," Patrick Randolph-Quinney, a biological anthropologist at Uppsala University in Sweden who was not involved in the project, told Live Science. "These weren't really mass graves — instead, the bodies were dumped into a series of pre-existing wells at the site."

The skeletons show evidence of non-life-threatening conditions like osteoarthritis on the vertebrae and dental cavities, Novak said. He also found a couple of possible cases of tuberculosis and scurvy. But so far, the skeletons have not revealed their cause of death.

"Obviously, harder data are needed to better contextualize this finding," Novak said. Results from DNA analyses are forthcoming, he said, which may confirm whether the people were hastily-buried locals rather than Roman soldiers who were conscripted from all over the Roman Empire.

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Ancient slingstones found in northeastern Spain may be evidence of a local uprising against Roman rule in the first century B.C.

Archaeologists think the lead sling "bullets" were fired by Roman soldiers after an ambush orchestrated by the local Indigenous Ceretani (also spelled Cerretani) people, who by this time had spent almost 200 years resisting Roman expansion in Iberia.

The findings, which were unearthed during an archaeological survey of the area, reinforce that "the Roman conquest of the Iberian Peninsula was neither a brief nor a peaceful process," researchers explained in a statement from the Autonomous University of Barcelona.

The ancient Roman historian Cassius Dio (who lived from around A.D. 150 to 235) wrote that the Ceretani revolt took place in 39 B.C., but it was generally thought to have occurred farther west. The new finds, however, pinpoint an ancient Roman military camp in what's now Cerdanya, a region of the eastern Pyrenees on the Spanish side of the modern border with France. At the time, this location was in Ceretani territory.

Roman expansion

The archaeological team found the sling bullets last year among the remains of the camp at Collet de Jovell, an alpine pass in the region. The bullets were poured from lead (it was easier than collecting stones), and two were emblazoned with the letters CND, which stood for the Roman governor of the province of Hispania at that time, Gnaeus Domitius Calvinus. These letters help date the ambush to exactly 39 B.C., when he was in office.

The archaeologists also unearthed the distinctive iron studs that Roman legionaries wore on their sandals, called clavi caligae; Roman fibulae, or brooches for fastening clothing; and several Roman coins that reinforced the team's dating of the site.

The Romans started expanding in Iberia, known to them as Hispania, after first landing on the Mediterranean coast in 218 B.C., during the Second Punic War with Carthage. But they were opposed by the Ceretani and other Indigenous peoples.

The two sides battled for centuries. But the Ceretani revolt in 39 B.C. failed to oust the invaders and was followed by severe Roman repression of the local people, according to the statement.

The Romans suffered, too ‪—‬ the governor ordered that some of his troops be punished for running away when the Ceretani ambushed the camp.

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Archaeologists in Slovakia have uncovered a large Roman military camp likely used by Marcus Aurelius' troops during conflicts with Germanic tribes in the late second century. The "extremely rare" camp came as a surprise to archaeologists, as it holds the hastily buried remains of numerous soldiers in unusual graves, including wells.

Remains of the 18.2-acre (7.4 hectare) camp were found near the town of Šurany in southwestern Slovakia, according to a translated July 17 statement from MH Invest, which excavated the area along with the Institute of Archaeology at the Slovak Academy of Sciences (SAS).

"We have a unique opportunity to explore practically an entire Roman marching camp, which is extremely rare in the European context," Matej Ruttkay, director of the SAS Institute of Archaeology, said in the statement. "We are clearly investigating a place that disappeared immediately after the military conflict between the Romans and the Germans."

Between A.D. 166 and 180, the Romans fought a series of battles against a Germanic people called the Marcomanni, who lived north of the Danube River along the border of the Roman Empire in what are now Slovakia and the Czech Republic. Marcus Aurelius, who reigned as Roman emperor from 161 to 180, commanded troops in the Marcomannic Wars with the goal of defending and securing Rome's border against barbarian invasions. But the wars ended upon Marcus Aurelius' death, when his son Commodus negotiated a peace with the Marcomanni, according to third-century Roman historian Cassius Dio.

The newly discovered Roman military camp had clear defensive characteristics, including five entrance gates, fortifications, and a curved ditch-and-rampart system typical of marching or legionary camps, according to the statement. The Šurany camp is only the second Roman military installation ever found in western Slovakia; the first camp, discovered in 2024 by SAS archaeologists, is thought to be where Marcus Aurelius wrote part of his Meditations.

The Šurany camp surprised archaeologists with a large number of skeletons — and parts of skeletons — buried in ditches, wells and hastily dug shallow graves, according to the statement.

"Our preliminary findings indicate that in most cases these are Roman soldiers," Marek Vojteček, an archaeologist at the SAS Institute of Archaeology, said in the statement. "Numerous components of Roman military equipment and weaponry were also found with the skeletal remains, such as spears, arrowheads, parts of helmets, segmented and scale armor, legionary brooches, coins, and the characteristic 'caligae' military sandals, from which iron nails on the soles have been preserved," he said.

X-ray analysis of blocks of clay revealed the intact sandal nails, which are now stored at the SAS Institute of Archaeology's specialized laboratory for further analysis. "It is literally a miracle to see the original footwear of a Roman soldier and even to be able to determine its size," Michal Cheben, an archaeologist at the SAS Institute of Archaeology, said in the statement.

The unusual burials raise important questions about the use and abandonment of this Roman military camp, according to Cheben, including whether the soldiers died from combat injuries or disease and why the bodies weren't looted before being thrown into storage pits and wells. "Laboratory analyses and further genetic and anthropological research may provide answers," Cheben said.

Because the camp was so large and the artifacts so numerous, a comprehensive analysis of the site will take several years and will involve international experts in carbon dating, soil analysis, isotopic analysis and ancient DNA, according to the statement.

"This is a long-term process, so many results will only become known in the coming years," Ruttkay said.

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The face of a young woman crowned with a laurel wreath, buried in elaborate clothing and unusual cork sandals, has appeared nearly 1,700 years after her death.

She is one of 16 people from Aquincum, a Roman-era city in present-day Hungary, whose faces have been reconstructed for "Once We Were Like You," a new exhibition at the Aquincum Museum in Budapest. The display pairs skulls excavated in and around the ancient city with scientifically informed approximations of how their owners may have looked in life.

Six of the reconstructions are hyperrealistic silicone models, complete with artificial eyes, human hair, eyebrows, eyelashes and, in some cases, beards. The exhibition, which runs through Oct. 31, includes men, women and a child who lived during the region's period of Roman rule.

"The face is the most important feature for recognizing a person," Emese Gábor, a forensic facial reconstruction specialist who sculpted the silicone faces, told Live Science in an email. Although a skull cannot reveal every detail of a person's appearance, reconstruction lets museum visitors encounter the faces as those of "a real human being rather than as skeletal remains," she said.

Rebuilding a Roman face

Aquincum stood on the Danube frontier of the Roman Empire in what is now Budapest. The city was home to a diverse population in the first through fourth centuries, and genetic and archaeological analyses of the individuals in the exhibition point to connections with regions including present-day Italy, Scotland and Syria, as well as Sarmatian groups from the Eurasian steppe and Celtic communities that lived in the region before Roman rule.

The remains of those who lived here have also been unearthed, and continue to be discovered today during the excavation of cemeteries," according to a statement from the museum.

Creating a reconstructed face begins with a high-resolution 3D CT scan of the original skull. Specialists then produce an exact 3D-printed replica, allowing experts like Gábor to work without repeatedly handling or disturbing the ancient remains.

"The latest scientific advances — including 3D scanning, CT imaging, archaeogenetic (ancient DNA) analysis and facial approximation research — are incorporated whenever possible," she said.

"If a hyper-realistic reconstruction is required, I create a mould and cast the face in coloured silicone, finishing it with real human hair, eyebrows, eyelashes and, where appropriate, a beard," she said.

Ancient DNA can sometimes provide additional clues about pigmentation, including probable eye, hair and skin color. But the results are still approximations, not portraits. For instance, hairstyle, expression and many details of the person’s appearance are usually more speculative.

The woman with the laurel wreath

Of all the people she reconstructed, Gábor said she found it especially difficult to forget the woman known as the Jablonka Road mummy.

The woman's skeleton was relatively well preserved, but the soft tissue on her face had decayed, leaving only the skull. A laurel wreath still rested on her head, and, according to Gábor, her burial contained fine clothing, a spindle for weaving, bird-shaped cork sandals and a painted male portrait that had been placed near her feet. Archaeologists have suggested that the portrait may have represented her husband or father, although his identity is unknown.

"Based on these details, the archaeological context and the anthropological data, it was the archaeologists who pieced together her story while I reconstructed her face," Gábor said. "That was very moving."

Other individuals selected for the exhibition include those of a young girl who died in childhood and a woman interpreted as a nurse or healer who was buried in a children's cemetery. Some of the other reconstructions include a construction worker, a military officer and a blacksmith.

Two women appear to have met particularly violent or punitive ends. They were buried face down with their legs bound together, Gábor said. The exhibition's interpretation associates one woman with an accusation of witchcraft and the other with poisons, although such details are historical interpretations rather than evidence-based findings from the burials.

"Every reconstruction is a journey," Gábor said. "As I shape each face, I find myself reflecting on that person's life again and again, and by the end, they no longer feel like anonymous remains, but like real people."

Analyses of the skeletons suggest that many of the individuals endured strenuous physical labor, periods of hunger and chronic inflammation. This evidence led museum curators to conclude that many represented the less wealthy inhabitants of Roman society — people whose names and experiences were unlikely to appear in surviving written histories.

For Gábor, the physical reconstructions offer something that a digital image cannot: Visitors can stand face-to-face with a life-size person, walk around the model and study it from different angles. Her hope is that this encounter encourages visitors to think beyond the scientific data and imagine the full lives that once surrounded the excavated bones.

"When you see a face, you don't just see bones in a display," Gábor said. "You see a person — someone who was born, who grew up, who worked, who loved, who laughed, who struggled, who fought with challenges, who raised children. Some were sick. Not everyone died of illness. Some died in accidents. Some through violence. And eventually, all of them died. That sense of shared humanity helps spark empathy."

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Female farm managers are hidden in plain sight in ancient Roman texts, mentioned in laws, literature and grave inscriptions across five centuries. Modern historians have generally assumed they were housekeepers, in charge of domestic tasks and household meals, and segregated from the productive business of the farm.

My new paper, published in the Journal of Roman Archaeology, challenges this assumption.

In fact, there is evidence to suggest that many Roman female farm managers supervised wine production and other processes vital to farming and profits.

A false lead

A farming manual written by the Roman writer Lucius Junius Moderatus Columella in the 1st century CE is a window to the roles of the female manager.

An upper class landowner himself, Columella lists the responsibilities of farm managers, who were probably enslaved. The male manager was termed the vilicus, and the female manager the vilica, terms derived from their roles at the "villa".

But many historians reading this text have been side-tracked by a false lead: Columella begins his section on the vilica with a long quote from the Greek philosopher Xenophon, who wrote in Athens more than four centuries earlier.

The "natural" role of women, according to Xenophon, was to work indoors. Therefore in his discussion, the ideal upper-class married woman is depicted staying inside her town house to supervise the domestic work of the slaves.

The Greek writer is not discussing farm workers. In fact, Columella says four times that these ideas are not his own, but those of Xenophon, writing long ago.

Columella lists a completely different set of responsibilities for the vilica on a Roman farm: most importantly, the making of wine and olive oil, which were highly valuable commodities — the backbone of landowners' profits.

In his description of the vilica's duties, Columella includes the extraction of the juice from grapes during the harvest; adding flavorings and preservatives such as salt, wormwood, fennel or boiled grape-juice; and overseeing successful fermentation into wine.

According to Columella, the vilica also managed the processing of other farm products to make them long-lasting and profitable, such as turning inedible olives into olive oil for sale.

From archaeology we know that production of wine or oil, using huge machines in substantial buildings, could reach 50,000 to 100,000 litres per year, or even more. The vilica was therefore responsible for overseeing large-scale work essential to the operation of the estate.

Calling on the gods

Correct sacrifices to the gods were seen as vital to the success of the farm. Archaeology has uncovered altars for offerings in Roman wine-making buildings.

Wine-making in the Roman world was a precarious process, due to uncontrolled temperatures, bacteria or oxygenation. Wine could easily go moldy or turn into vinegar.

A striking element of Columella's account is that he includes carrying out offerings to avert such a disaster in his instructions for the female farm manager.

Looking for more clues

Other texts contain barely more than a mention of the vilica, revealing only her presence.

But we can still put together some clues.

Legal writings on inheritance, quoting the 1st century BCE jurist Trebatius, include her in the instrumentum fundi — whatever (including enslaved personnel) is required for productive work, gathering and preserving produce of the estate.

Another aristocratic landowner and writer, Cato the Elder, living two centuries before Columella, lists both the female and the male farm manager as essential staff for a vineyard or olive farm.

He devotes only one small section to outlining the female farm manager's tasks, but a close look shows these are not predominantly domestic. Cato includes keeping poultry and processing of seasonal farm products. Although he does include supervision of cleaning, this could refer to maintenance of work spaces such as stables and wine making buildings, an integral part of estate management – and also listed by Columella among the vilica's duties.

Cato also gives the vilica the responsibility for making sacrifices to the gods for the success of the farm. She must regularly offer garlands at the altar "for abundance", he writes.

A Roman mosaic showing estate work in different seasons depicts a scene of sacrifices for abundant crops to the god Jupiter (in his Celtic form as a sky and weather god). A woman is shown holding an offering of garlands, just as Cato instructs. Beside her are a jug for wine offerings and a male figure.

Perhaps this mosaic shows the vilica and vilicus, both essential to the success of annual harvests. While such images of female figures are rare, one fragmentary wall painting from Rome shows a female overseeing wine-making workers, just as Columella describes.

This combined body of evidence suggests we should expand outdated understandings of the roles that Roman women played in farm production, the dominant sector of ancient economies.

No vilica has left us an account of her work in her own words. But by paying careful attention to the evidence, we can hear an echo of her voice.

This edited article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Nearly 2,000 years ago, Mount Vesuvius buried a vast collection of scrolls in ash and scorched them into solid black lumps. Now, without unrolling them, researchers have virtually read two of them —‬ and uncovered what may be a work by a well-known Stoic philosopher.

The breakthrough comes from the Vesuvius Challenge, an international research effort to digitally read the scrolls that were preserved when Pompeii and Herculaneum were buried by ash and pumice in A.D. 79. Papyrologists, who study and preserve the ancient manuscripts, announced June 25 that they had digitally unwrapped the surviving portion of one scroll, known as PHerc. 1667, revealing roughly 5 feet (1.5 meters) of continuous Greek text across 20 columns. Researchers also recovered more than 70 columns of text from a second scroll, PHerc. 172.

"For nearly two millennia, many of these texts have been physically preserved but intellectually inaccessible," Brent Seales, Vesuvius Challenge co-founder and a computer scientist at the University of Kentucky, said in a statement. "Today ‪—‬ after years of interdisciplinary work combining advanced imaging, artificial intelligence, academic research and an innovation contest ‪—‬ we are finally able to read them."

Over the past few years, Seales and his team have used a synchrotron to essentially X-ray inside the scrolls and detect the ink ancient Romans used to write. The letters are then studied by papyrologists, who translate the text.

Part of PHerc. 1667 was physically opened in the 1980s, but overlapping layers obscured the writing so badly that the scroll was given a readability score of zero, Federica Nicolardi, a papyrologist at the University of Naples Federico II, said in the statement.

The handwriting and text of PHerc. 1667 suggest the scroll dates to the second or third century B.C., making it one of the oldest scrolls in the Herculaneum collection. This early date means it could not have been authored by Philodemus of Gadara, the first-century-B.C. Epicurean philosopher whose writings dominated the Herculaneum library.

Experts think the text reads more like a Stoic treatise on ethics and human behavior, and it specifically mentions Aristocreon, the nephew and pupil of the influential Stoic philosopher Chrysippus. Very little of Chrysippus' own writing has survived, so if the attribution holds up, it would be a significant addition to the historical record of early Stoic thought.

In a separate discovery, researchers identified a new book title within scroll PHerc. 139. The end of the scroll references Philodemus' eighth book of "On Gods." While this treatise had previously been known to exist, the new discovery reveals the work extended across at least eight volumes. Experts plan to reexamine other texts in the Herculaneum collection for additional volumes that may belong to the same series.

More than 600 Herculaneum scrolls remain unopened. It's thought that the villa was once owned by the father-in-law of Julius Caesar.

How much do you know about the Roman town destroyed by Mount Vesuvius? Find out by taking our Pompeii quiz!

A new episode of "Almost History," the alternate-history podcast from All About History, explores one of the biggest "what-ifs" of the ancient world: What if Carthage had defeated Rome during the Punic Wars?

The episode is hosted by Emily Staniforth, a staff writer at All About History, a sister publication of Live Science. It features historian and archaeologist Eve MacDonald, a senior lecturer in ancient history at Cardiff University in the U.K. and author of "Carthage: A New History of an Ancient Empire" (W. W. Norton & Co., 2026). Together, they examine how close Carthage came to changing the course of history and what the modern world might look like if one of Rome's greatest rivals had emerged victorious.

"Carthage ha[d] enormous resources, because to even be in the fight for as long as they were is extraordinary," MacDonald said in an interview. However, despite Carthage's capabilities, they were always fighting an uphill battle, she noted.

"I always think the Romans were probably never going to go away," MacDonald said.

Tactics and turning points

The Punic Wars, fought between the Roman Republic and Carthage from 264 to 146 B.C., transformed the ancient Mediterranean. Although Rome ultimately prevailed and went on to build one of history's largest empires, victory was far from guaranteed. During the Second Punic War, the Carthaginian general Hannibal famously marched elephants across the Alps and inflicted devastating defeats on Roman armies, bringing the republic to the brink of collapse before Rome eventually recovered.

In the podcast, MacDonald discusses the political and military turning points that could have tipped the balance in Carthage's favor. The conversation also explores how a Carthaginian victory might have altered trade, culture and the distribution of power across Europe and the Mediterranean, offering listeners a glimpse of an alternate version of world history.

"I think that's one of the things that we would appreciate more now: As much as the Greco-Roman history of the Mediterranean is part of the Western world, so too is all of Carthage, Phoenicia and Numidia" in northern Africa, MacDonald said. "But we haven't got those tales anymore for us to understand."

The episode is part of "Almost History," a series inspired by All About History magazine's long-running "What If" feature. Each installment invites historians to examine pivotal moments from the past and consider how different outcomes might have reshaped history. Recent episodes have tackled questions such as What if D-Day had failed? and What if the Bolshevik Revolution had never succeeded?

You can listen to "What If Carthage Won the Punic Wars?" on Acast and other major podcast platforms.

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Ancient Roman transportation engineers built a vast network of roads that stretched across Europe, North Africa and parts of the Middle East. This complex road system was a key to travel and trade in the Roman Empire, and many of the centuries-old streets had a reputation for being extremely straight, although not all of them were.

For instance, Via Appia (Appian Way), which connected Rome to the port of Brundisium in southern Italy, was more than 300 miles (500 kilometers) long, and sizable parts of it were straight. Another Roman road, Stane Street in southern England, was built to connect London to Chichester. Much of the road, which stretches roughly 57 miles (92 km), is straight. The Middle East also had straight Roman roads, including a coastal avenue from Antioch, Turkey, to what is now Gaza.

A recent mapping project was able to map about 186,400 miles (300,000 km) of roads and more are probably undiscovered. But how did the Romans avoid unnecessary twists and turns to ensure straight streets? The answer may lie in three surveying instruments the Romans used.

Surveying roads

In some instances, the Romans built on top of older roads that existed before they conquered an area. Their "road network incorporated older roads from a broad range of different societies and polities," Marion Kruse, an associate professor of classics at the University of Cincinnati, told Live Science in an email.

But when the Romans built new roads, they used a few different tools to help plan them.

"Three instruments were used consistently by Roman road builders: the dioptra, the groma, and the chorobatus [or chorobates]," Adriana Panaite, a researcher at the Vasile Pârvan Institute of Archaeology in Romania who has studied Roman roads extensively, told Live Science in an email.

While the dioptra is known from ancient texts, no example of it has ever been found in an archaeological dig, according to M.J.T. Lewis, who was a historian at the University of Hull in the U.K. In his book "Surveying Instruments of Greece and Rome" (Cambridge University Press, 2001), Lewis noted that the design of the dioptra varied considerably. The different designs tended to include a stand and a disc-shaped base with a tube-shaped sighting instrument attached. An ancient surveyor could look through the tube and see a distant object without extraneous light interfering, allowing for a better view.

The chorobatus was used to measure horizontal planes. Around 20 feet (6 meters) long, the chorobatus was a beam of wood on legs and looked like a small table, Lewis wrote. It likely had small weights hanging from it to show that the beam was level. No ancient example of the chorobatus has survived, and the exact design and way it was used are unclear. Ancient texts indicate that it acted as a builder's level that could help set up level points and determine elevations.

But the most important tool Roman surveyors used was the groma, Joseph Lewis, an archaeologist at the University of Cambridge who has conducted extensive research on Roman roads, told Live Science in an email. The "groma was the principal tool of the mensor ‪—‬ the land surveyor ‪—‬ when planning long, straight alignments," he noted. "These alignments were then often used when constructing roads across gentle terrain."

The groma, also called a gruma or croma, consisted of a vertical pole with a horizontal X-shaped cross on top and four small weights hanging down from strings at the ends of the crossbeams, Lewis said. The groma was most useful for establishing right angles.

Multiple Roman surveyors could use the weights on their poles to ensure any road they were building was going in the right direction.

"A surveyor at one end will direct other surveyors to move their poles until they are in line with one another," Lewis explained. "Once the direction had been established, Roman surveyors observed the landscape and adjusted the course of a road to accommodate/avoid obstacles such as steep sections which would have posed difficulties for wheeled vehicles, locations to ford rivers, or to connect pre-existing settlements."

However, the techniques used to build roads throughout the Roman Empire probably varied somewhat, meaning experts "should be cautious about assuming that there was a single 'Roman' technique for road building," Kruse said. He noted that the Roman Empire covered a vast area and lasted for a long period of time.

"It seems safe to assume that practices varied across time and space," Kruse explained.

Not all roads were straight

One reason for the variation in Roman roads was likely the diversity of the laborers who built them. "In all likelihood, road-building work was done by a mix of soldiers, slaves ‪—‬ especially prisoners ‪—‬ and free locals called upon to help as part of a 'corvee' obligation imposed by their local community on Rome's instructions," Richard Talbert, a professor emeritus of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told Live Science in an email. But paid laborers were probably used for some skilled tasks, such as building bridges, Talbert said.

While Roman roads have a reputation for being precisely laid out and straight, not all of them were.

"It is commonly mentioned that Roman roads were exceptionally straight. This is partially true: The Romans had engineers and a large labor force that in some cases managed to modify the landscape to enable straight roads," Tom Brughmans, a classical archaeologist at Aarhus University in Denmark who is part of a team that helped create an updated map of the Roman road system, told Live Science in an email.

"We believe that the Romans preferred relatively straight roads in places where there was very little friction offered by the topography," such as flatland areas, Brughmans said. But in areas with more difficult terrain, such as mountainous regions, the roads would often not run straight.

Brughmans said he expects "future research will show that, in general, [Roman roads] are less straight than modern roads, given the need for motorized vehicles to avoid sharp turns when driving at speed."

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A clandestine excavation on the outskirts of Rome has brought to light a "splendid villa" that may have belonged to a member of the Antonine imperial family, according to archaeologists with the Special Superintendency of Rome. The remains of the first-century villa, which was previously unknown to archaeologists, include frescoed walls and mosaic floors that showcase the elite social status of the owners.

The villa was discovered at Castel di Guido, a village about 12 miles (19 kilometers) west of the ancient city walls of Rome. In ancient times, the area was known as Lorium, and it was frequented by prestigious Roman families, including the Roman emperors Hadrian, Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius.

In February, the local police were alerted to illegal excavations at Castel di Guido on government-owned land, according to a June 15 translated statement from the Italian Ministry of Culture's Special Superintendency of Rome. The unauthorized excavations had been undertaken with a backhoe, which made deep cuts into the villa and left huge piles of dirt.

Superintendency archaeologists led by Alessia Contino carried out emergency excavations to document and stabilize the architecture at the site.

"Thanks to the local report and prompt intervention, it was possible to identify part of a large, previously unknown Imperial-period villa and uncover a splendid array of decorations, as well as the discovery of a statue in fine white marble," Contino said in the statement.

The excavation revealed the atrium at the entrance of the villa, two rooms decorated with frescoes and mosaics, and several other spaces related to the agricultural activities of the large, rural house. The villa was likely built in the early first century and abandoned in the third century.

The atrium's central impluvium — a marble basin in the center of many ancient Roman houses that collected rainwater from an opening in the roof — was surrounded by a floor decorated with bands of black-and-white botanical and geometric mosaics. The rear wall of the room, about 5 feet (1.5 meters) of which was still preserved, was painted red as part of a fresco that featured multicolor panels with human figures and botanical elements.

Surrounding the large room were four smaller ones, three of which still have preserved mosaic floors. One room includes nine black-and-white geometric panels, another includes black octagons on a white background, and the third has black rectangles.

Within the villa's central basin, archaeologists found a broken statue, about 31 inches (80 centimeters) tall, depicting a bearded man wearing a short tunic and carrying a basket with birds and fruit. The statue may represent Silvanus, the Roman deity of woods and other uncultivated lands, who watched over domesticated flocks of animals. Silvanus was also a companion of Bacchus (known in Greek as Dionysus), the god of wine and ecstasy.

The scale of the villa and the quality of the mosaics and frescoes suggest that the villa's owners were Roman aristocrats and may have even been members of the imperial family, according to the statement. In the Roman Empire, elite families like the Aurelii and the Arrii — the paternal and maternal families of Antoninus Pius, who reigned from A.D. 138 to 161 — lived in Lorium. Ancient sources suggest that Antoninus Pius spent his childhood in Lorium, built his imperial palace there, and died there at age 74.

Lorium was also frequented by Emperor Hadrian, who adopted Antoninus Pius to make him his heir, and by Marcus Aurelius, who was Antoninus Pius' nephew, adopted son and son-in-law. Because of Lorium's strong connection to the Antonine imperial dynasty, numerous villas and ancient estates have previously been discovered in the region.

But the newly uncovered villa "is another important piece of the puzzle," Contino said, "opening up new perspectives for understanding and preserving our history-rich territory."

Further work on the villa and its artifacts will help archaeologists date the building more accurately and work out whether it was abandoned when the imperial household was relocated out of Lorium, according to the statement.

Although work on the villa has not been completed, the public has a chance to visit the newly excavated villa and its mosaics on June 20 through a free archaeological hike and guided tour organized by the Special Superintendency of Rome.

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Archaeologists have discovered thousands of preserved shoes at Vindolanda, an ancient Roman fort along Hadrian's Wall. But this one is quite possibly the world's oldest example of a shower shoe.

The "bath clog" — which consists of a wooden platform sole and a leather upper — was a version of the kind of slip-on shoe people today wear in locker room showers or at a nail salon to avoid issues like foot fungus. But the Romans wore the platform clogs — which they called "sculponeae" in Latin — to protect themselves from the hot, slippery floors of the bath house.

Roman bath houses were communal gathering places, according to English Heritage, a historic trust that conserves artifacts and heritage sites. A bather would undress then move from a cold room to a warm room to a hot room, then back to the first room for a cold plunge. One of the most important inventions in Roman bathing was the hypocaust system, which involved stoking a furnace underneath a raised floor to heat the warm and hot rooms and their baths. This radiant heat system also made the floor incredibly hot to the touch.

Because Roman shower shoes were made from perishable materials, the oldest and best-known examples come from Vindolanda, a Roman fort in Northumberland, England, where organic remains have been preserved in oxygen-free layers of mud. Archaeologists have found over 5,000 Roman shoes at Vindolanda — around 50 of which are bath clogs, according to Elizabeth Greene, an archaeologist at the University of Western Ontario in Canada.

Most of the bath clogs feature a wooden platform 1 to 2 inches (2.5 to 5 centimeters) high and a leather strap across the top. According to Greene, some of the clogs were plain and others were decorated with geometric patterns or representations of toes cut into the surface.

Whether or not the Vindolanda bath clogs are the world's earliest shower shoes is up for some debate.

Archaeologists have found much earlier examples of sandals, including King Tut's, dated to 3,300 B.C. in Egypt, for example. And the Etruscans had metal-framed sandals as early as the sixth century B.C., Elizabeth Semmelhack, the director and curator of the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto, Canada, told Live Science. "But they were not for bathhouse wear."

Two wood-soled children's shoes were discovered in 2025 at Isarnodurum, a Roman-era archaeological site in France that slightly predates Vindolanda. If these are confirmed to be bath clogs, they would be the oldest ones in the world.

One research angle Greene is pursuing is questioning whether bath clogs were only used in bathing. A few centuries after the Romans left Europe, medieval people invented similar looking footwear that functioned as a type of overshoe (a shoe strapped or worn over another shoe) to protect their feet from mud, water or snow on the ground. Some of the wooden clogs found at Vindolanda may have served an overshoe purpose — or they could have pulled dual-duty two millennia ago as shower shoes and overshoes.

This bath clog from Vindolanda can be seen from now until September 2027 at the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto as part of their Unearthing Vindolanda exhibit.

For more stunning archaeological discoveries, check out our Astonishing Artifacts archives.

For years, students at a high school just steps from the Colosseum in Rome have spun tales of mysterious rooms hidden underneath the gymnasium floor. Now, it turns out those rumors have more than a grain of truth to them.

Students on several clandestine explorations happened upon an ancient structure beneath their school. Upon notifying their teacher, who notified the authorities, archaeologists arrived to take a more detailed look. Following an excavation earlier this year, archaeologists have announced that the dark corridors and dimly lit chambers actually belonged to a luxurious second-century villa.

The Liceo Scientifico Cavour (Cavour Scientific High School) is located in a building near the Colosseum that originally housed a Catholic missionary congregation. When the missionaries' headquarters were constructed in the late 19th century, early archaeological exploration of the foundation revealed part of a "domus" — a large ancient Roman house. This neighborhood is incredibly important in Roman history, as figures such as Cicero, Pompey and Octavian (later known as Augustus) lived there, but is not well-understood archaeologically because of all the modern buildings on top of the ancient layers.

Claudia Marino, a history and Latin teacher at the high school, reported the students' discoveries in the subterranean tunnels to the Special Superintendency of Rome, but crews did not begin excavating the site until January 2026. The discovery was presented to the public on May 28 by Marino and Filippo Coarelli, an archaeologist at the University of Perugia in Italy.

The rooms preserved under the high school's gym are part of a mid-second-century house that, based on an inscription found in the late-19th century excavation, was likely owned by a member of the Umbrius family. Little is known about this family, but the Umbrii may have originally come from Samnium, a region of south-central Italy not far from Pompeii, where Mt. Vesuvius famously erupted in A.D. 79. For now, the house is being called the Domus Liceo Cavour (the House of the Cavour High School).

Archaeological excavation revealed figurative and floral frescos on the walls and stucco decorations along the ceiling vaults of the villa. In one room, archaeologists discovered a mosaic with large, irregularly shaped tiles — a style fashionable among elite Romans in this time period. They also found much more recent graffiti made by students, tourists and other subterranean explorers in the 20th century.

Only a portion of the Domus Liceo Cavour has been explored so far, as it extends far beneath the school, but additional excavation may be carried out in the future. The school and the archaeological superintendency plan to work together to eventually open up the site to visitors, potentially with students as guides.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 10:25 a.m. EDT on June 5 to note that Mount Vesuvius, and not the city of Pompeii, erupted in A.D. 79.

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The Romans controlled much of Britain for nearly 400 years, but they left relatively little genetic evidence of their occupation, new ancient-DNA research reveals.

Instead, the Roman occupation, from A.D. 43 until about 410, seems to have changed the culture of their Britannia province, with most people native to Britain converting to Imperial Roman ways.

A preprint of the study was posted to the bioRxiv server April 29 and has not been published in a peer-reviewed journal yet. Some experts agree with the conclusions, but others are cautious.

However, some of the study's findings agree with the results of earlier genetic studies of the Germanic migration into Britain, Duncan Sayer, an archaeologist at the University of Lancashire in England, told Live Science.

"These results absolutely confirm the data we've had previously," said Sayer, who was not involved in the study.

For their investigations, the researchers looked at the genomes of more than 1,000 individuals who had been buried in Britain between 2550 B.C. and A.D. 1150. They found that Roman DNA — identified as having ancestral origins "outside Britain" — accounted for only about 20% of the genetic profile of individuals buried in Britain during its Roman era. By comparison, in the later Anglo-Saxon era, DNA from "Germanic" sources accounted for about 70% of the genetics of people buried there at that time.

These findings indicate that the native British interbred surprisingly little with people from elsewhere in the Roman Empire but often interbred with people of Anglo-Saxon origin, Sayer said.

"In the Roman period, although people are settling in Britain, it's not in quite the same way as Germanic speakers [Anglo-Saxons] are in the fifth and sixth centuries," James Gerrard, an archaeologist at Newcastle University in England who was not involved in the research, told Live Science.

The team who worked on the latest study said they also found very little genetic evidence of the later Viking Age in the North of England, when most of that region followed Danish traditions and was called the Danelaw: only about 4% of the genetic profiles of people buried in England at this time showed they had Iron Age Scandinavian ancestry, they reported.

Meanwhile, ancestries from Central and Southern Europe rose from the eighth century onward that signified more people migrated into England during the medieval period, the team wrote in the preprint.

Cultural transformation

The authors noted that "previous DNA sampling from Roman Britain has been relatively small-scale and regionally or context specific" and suggested that their "dataset bridges this gap."

But Gerrard, who was not involved in the study, cautioned that the new research might not give an accurate picture of Britain's genetic history.

To begin with, while the new study examined the DNA extracted from 1,039 people buried in Britain between the Bronze Age and medieval times — a span of roughly 3,700 years — only about 200 were from the Roman period.

This is a small sample size compared with archaeological investigations in Britain, where the origins of several thousand people buried during the Roman period have been examined over decades, he said.

In addition, the burials in the new research tended to be from cities, rather than from the countryside, where intermarriage rates may have differed. The results of the study might have also been skewed because the Roman presence would have been greater in the North of England, where many troops were stationed at camps, and in the East of England, where Roman urban settlements were more common, he said.

"We have a problem, I think, of whether ancient DNA is representative of the whole population," Gerrard said.

Celtic women

The Romans invaded and annexed most of Britain at the command of Emperor Claudius in A.D. 43, although his great-great-granduncle (by adoption) Julius Caesar led two short-lived invasions in 55 and 54 B.C. The Roman occupation ended in about A.D. 410, when Roman troops guarding the northern frontier were recalled to the continent to defend Roman territories against Germanic invasions.

Although the study found relatively little genetic evidence of the Roman occupation, the researchers noted that the Romans seemed to have had a marked effect on burial practices. Pre-Roman burials in Britain were often grouped by matrilineal relationships, perhaps reflecting the traditionally Celtic importance of women as the heads of their families, and the researchers found evidence that this practice continued for a time in the West of England — a native stronghold. Under this cultural tradition, women were relatively empowered and stayed in their ancestral homes, and the men they married moved into their communities.

But the DNA extracted from the remains in Roman-era cemeteries in Britain showed no such patterns, the researchers said, which might reflect traditional Roman patriarchal practices.

The authors of the new research declined a request from Live Science to comment, noting that they wanted to wait until the paper is published in a peer-reviewed journal before talking with the media.

What do you know about the Empire's conquest of the British Isles? Find out with our Roman Britain quiz!

A man who died in Pompeii during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79 had a medical kit with him when he perished, a new analysis of his body cast reveals.

The medical kit indicates that he was probably a physician — a "medicus" in Latin.

The man was one of 13 people who died while taking shelter in a Pompeii vineyard later called the "Garden of the Fugitives." But instead of finding refuge, the group was overcome by an explosive burst of deadly gas, likely carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide, and ash from the volcano, which killed thousands of people in Pompeii and the nearby town of Herculaneum.

Pompeii was discovered in the 16th century, but most of the scientific work at the Roman seaside city was done more recently. In 1961, plaster casts were made of the voids left in the ash by the bodies of the volcano's victims in the Garden of the Fugitives ‪—‬ some of the roughly 104 plaster casts of victims made at Pompeii.

New examinations show that the man had been carrying surgical instruments and other "tools of his trade," according to a translated statement from the Italian government archaeological park that runs the site. But it's not known whether the man planned to treat people affected by the eruption or if he was hoping to escape the disaster.

"This man brought his tools with him to be ready to rebuild his life elsewhere, thanks to his profession, but perhaps also to help others," Gabriel Zuchtriegel, director of Pompeii Archaeological Park, said in the statement.

Destructive eruption

The eruption of Vesuvius killed about 2,000 people in Pompeii and nearby towns, although archaeologists now think many others escaped. The event has been studied extensively, in part because of the remarkable preservation of many features of Roman life under the layers of ash. Witnesses also made written accounts of the eruption.

According to the statement, a small case made from "organic material" (possibly leather) was found within one of the plaster casts made when the Garden of the Fugitives was excavated in 1961. However, the case's contents had remained a mystery until now.

The new investigation, which used X-ray and CT scans, revealed that the case contained several small, metal instruments thought to be surgical tools as well as a tablet made from slate, which was probably used for preparing medicines. (Ingredients like honey, wine, vinegar and plant extracts were common.) The case was locked with a mechanism based on a toothed wheel.

These findings suggest the man was a medicus trained in medicine and surgery, the statement said. Educated Greek slaves sometimes had this role but by the time of the Vesuvius eruption — when Titus was the Roman emperor — medicine had a higher status (Julius Caesar granted Roman citizenship to all physicians in 46 B.C.).

The practice of medicine was valued by wealthy Romans, but the last resort of surgery entailed serious risks — there were no antibiotics and no modern anesthesia, and patients often died from infections. In addition, the causes of illnesses were not well understood — diseases like malaria were thought to be caused by "bad air" (under the Greek "miasma" theory), and Roman medical treatments often dealt with supposed curses and malign spirits.

Other artifacts found with the victims of Mount Vesuvius include house keys and oil lamps, and some people were killed while carrying precious jewels and coin "treasures" away from the eruption. The victim thought to be a medicus was also carrying a small fabric bag of bronze and silver coins, the statement said.

How much do you know about the Roman town destroyed by Mount Vesuvius? Find out by taking our Pompeii quiz!

An elaborate Roman-era coffin containing the remains of a woman who appears to have been buried with gypsum and exotic resins has been discovered in the city of Colchester in the U.K.

"This is one of the most fascinating Roman burials we have worked on in Colchester in recent years," Adam Wightman, director of archaeology at Colchester Archaeological Trust, said in a statement. The combination of the coffin, grave goods and scientific evidence make it a compelling burial, he said.

The elite Roman woman was in her late 20s or 30s when she died, and she lived at a time when the Roman Empire controlled England. Exactly when she was buried is unclear, but it was likely during the late Roman period, which lasted from roughly the late third century to early fifth century A.D., archaeologists said in the statement.

"The high-status woman was buried in a decorated lead coffin accompanied by a rich group of grave goods," according to Colchester Archaeological Trust. "She was buried with objects including jet hairpins, a group of rare glass flasks, and other grave goods. This indicates a carefully staged and richly furnished burial."

The woman was also buried with exotic resins, including frankincense, dried sap from trees in the Boswellia genus, many of which grow in Africa, the Middle East and India. Frankincense can be burned as incense and was thought to have medicinal properties.

Her coffin also had gypsum, meaning the woman's body may have been covered in liquid gypsum, a plaster-like paste, before her burial. "This suggests usage of valuable imported substances in the treatment of the body after death," according to the statement.

In Roman Britain, elite individuals sometimes had liquid gypsum poured on them after they died. In cases where the gypsum is well preserved, it can leave a haunting image of the deceased. In one case, the outline of a deceased baby was preserved in a liquid gypsum burial found in York.

"Over decades of working with Colchester Archaeological Trust on excavations of the Roman burial grounds around the Roman town, this is certainly the most spectacular I have seen," Robert Masefield, the archaeology director at Tetra Tech Consulting Limited, the company the carried out the excavation, said in the statement. "The young woman was clearly cherished by her family and by her community."

The burial was discovered in 2023 when archaeologists were excavating the site of a defunct hospital that was being redeveloped for housing but only recently announced by Colchester Archaeological Trust. The coffin and its contents will be put on display at Colchester's Roman Circus Visitor Centre starting May 16, 2026.

What do you know about the Empire's conquest of the British Isles? Find out with our Roman Britain quiz!

In 1868, soldiers from an Imperial Prussian Army regiment discovered a hoard of dozens of ancient silver artifacts while constructing a new shooting range near the city of Hildesheim in central Germany. The Hildesheim treasure included elaborate and expensive tableware, including the Athena bowl, that may have belonged to Publius Quinctilius Varus or another Roman military commander who fought against Germanic tribes in the first century.

The Athena bowl, also called the Minerva bowl after the goddess's Roman name, is one of four bowls in the hoard with an ornate central emblem. According to the Altes Museum in Berlin, which has the Hildesheim treasure in its collection, the silver Athena bowl is roughly 10 inches (25.3 centimeters) in diameter and weighs a hefty 4.4 pounds (2 kilograms) ‪—‬ about as much as a 9-inch (23 centimeters) cast-iron skillet.

Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom and youth, is seated on a rock with a shield under her arm and a plumed helmet on her head. Her famous aegis (shield) hangs like a sash to protect her while she gazes behind. In front of Athena is a rock encircled by an olive wreath, with her sacred owl perched atop. While most of the bowl is silver, there are gold accents on her dress, aegis and owl, as well as on the two rock formations, according to archaeologist Gertrud Platz-Horster.

The Athena emblem was likely crafted in the second century B.C., according to the Altes Museum, and a new bowl was created for the emblem in the first century A.D. Many of the Hildesheim treasure vessels had traces of wear and repair, according to Platz-Horster, which suggests that the tableware was collected over time.

Given the first-century date for the hoard and its discovery in central Germany, some experts think the tableware once belonged to an important Roman military commander, who may have hidden it from the enemy. (Or the hoard may represent booty that the Germanic tribes stashed after stealing it.)

Perhaps the most famous Roman general fighting Germanic tribes under Emperor Augustus was Publius Quinctilius Varus, who lost three entire Roman legions at the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest in A.D. 9. The Roman historian Suetonius reported that Augustus was so upset about the loss that he yelled, "Quintili Vare, legiones redde!" — meaning "Quinctilius Varus, give me back my legions!" After the loss, Varus died by suicide rather than facing his ruined political career, and Augustus ended his campaign of expansion into Germany.

Regardless of whether the Athena bowl belonged to Varus, the Hildesheim treasure is renowned for being the largest collection of Roman silver found outside the imperial frontier.

For more stunning archaeological discoveries, check out our Astonishing Artifacts archives.

Urine and fecal residue encrusted on the inside of ancient Roman chamber pots unearthed in Bulgaria has revealed the world's oldest known evidence of humans infected with the Cryptosporidium parasite, which causes acute gastrointestinal distress.

In the first century, the Romans established a province called Moesia Inferior in the Balkan Peninsula, which includes the modern country of Bulgaria. Roman legions were tasked with defending the imperial border from the Goths, primarily from a fortress called Novae (near present-day Svishtov) and a town known as Marcianopolis (modern-day Devnya). While excavating at Novae and Marcianopolis in Bulgaria, archaeologists recovered four chamber pots, whose long-dried contents have revealed new information about health and disease in the Roman Empire.

In a study published April 3 in the journal npj Heritage Science, researchers detailed their analysis of the mineralized deposits of urine and feces that they scraped from the sides and bottoms of the ceramic pots.

Using ELISA (short for "enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay") ‪—‬ a laboratory test that can detect bacteria, parasites and viruses in a sample of bodily fluid ‪—‬ the researchers identified three pathogens in the chamber pot samples: the protozoan Entamoeba histolytica, the parasite Cryptosporidium parvum, and the tapeworm Taenia. All three pathogens infect the human gut and can cause gastrointestinal distress, including diarrhea and stomach pain.

Previous ancient-parasite studies have shown that Roman soldiers on the frontiers of the empire dealt with intestinal worms and the parasite Giardia, as did people living in the city of Rome. However, the new study has identified Cryptosporidium for the first time in an ancient Roman context, and it is the earliest known evidence of human Cryptosporidium infection in the world.

"The evidence of Cryptosporidium comes from two separate chamber pots from Novae," study first author Elena Klenina, a historian at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poland, told Live Science in an email. "The parasite's presence across distinct contexts suggests the infection may have been relatively widespread within that community."

C. parvum (often dubbed Crypto, for short) is a parasite that infects dozens of species of domesticated and wild animals, the researchers wrote in the study. When those infected animals contaminate soil or water, the infection can spread to humans. But because Crypto generally causes mild symptoms, the first human cases of the disease were not identified until 1976. Since then, researchers have been investigating the origin of this organism.

Archaeologists in Mexico found Crypto in preserved human feces dated to around A.D. 700, which led some experts to propose that the parasite originated in the Americas. But because the remains of a 5,000-year-old goat (Myotragus balearicus) from the western Mediterranean tested positive for Crypto, Klenina and colleagues suspect that it may have first started infecting humans in Europe rather than in the Americas.

It's unclear how the Romans living at Novae picked up the parasite, but the researchers think the infected individuals might have been drinking contaminated water supplied by an aqueduct in the rural countryside. When infected with any of the three pathogens the researchers identified, the ancient Romans may have dealt with severe diarrhea and thus had to use chamber pots in the middle of the night rather than the more sanitary public latrines and bathhouses that were open during the day.

Analyzing ancient bodily fluids is important for understanding health and disease in the Roman Empire, the researchers noted in the study, and chamber pots present a wealth of information on these topics.

"This type of research poses no significant health risk to archaeologists," Klenina said. "The biological material we analyze is extremely old and typically no longer viable or infectious."

From Augustus to Nero, see how much you know about ancient Rome's famous leaders with our Roman emperor quiz!

A chance discovery of a broken bronze cup in Spain has revealed a 1,900-year-old depiction of Hadrian's Wall and forts in England, a new study reports. The multicolored vessel was likely crafted as a memento of a soldier's time defending the frontiers of the Roman Empire, the study authors said.

The cup was discovered in Berlanga de Duero, a municipality in central Spain, nearly 1,200 miles (2,000 kilometers) from the storied Roman defensive wall that protected the northern frontier of the empire in the second century. The hemispheric "Berlanga Cup" is about 4.5 inches (11.4 centimeters) wide and around 3.2 inches (8.1 cm) tall. It features colorful enameled designs and a Latin inscription that mentions four forts.

"The cup is a small representation of a functional vessel called a Roman trulla — a bronze or clay cup with a handle used to drink water," Jesús García Sánchez, an archaeologist at the Archaeological Institute of Mérida in Spain and co-author of the new study, told Live Science in an email. "It is not only crafted with metals, but also expensive enamels, and later on customized. It is definitely not an industrial product."

In the study, published April 23 in the journal Britannia, García Sánchez and colleagues wrote that, while similar cups have been discovered in the past, the Berlanga Cup is the only one that refers to forts on the eastern side of Hadrian's Wall. The four forts mentioned in the inscription are Cilurnum (now called Chesters), Onno (now called Halton Chesters), Vindobala (now called Rudchester), and Condercom (now called Benwell). Each fort is depicted on the cup as a series of four squares and two half-moons that represent either turrets or the fort's gateway. Below the schematic forts are two bands of designs inset with red, green, turquoise and navy-blue enamel.

An analysis of the cup revealed it was bronze — largely copper and tin — with a substantial addition of lead that likely came from mines in northernEngland. These findings strongly suggest the cup was made by a local artisan near Hadrian's Wall between A.D. 124 and 199, the researchers said. But how the cup ended up in Spain is a bit of a mystery.

The modern municipality of Berlanga de Duero was likely the ancient settlement of Valeranica in Roman times. Archaeological excavation in the area revealed fragments of Roman pottery and masonry walls, which were potentially part of a rural villa used between the first and fourth centuries. The Berlanga Cup may have been acquired by someone who lived in Valeranica and was a soldier in a Roman auxiliary unit of Hispanic origin known in historical records as the Cohors I Celtiberorum.

"This contingent was made up of troops from Celtiberia, precisely the area where the piece in question was found," the researchers wrote in the study, and "was stationed near Hadrian's Wall during the reign of Emperor Trajan" (who ruled from A.D. 98 to 117). After soldiers served in the Roman military, many returned to their original homes and brought back mementos of their time in service.

The Berlanga Cup "could have been a souvenir acquired by a veteran before his return home, purchased with the aim of remembering his time and service at one of the monumental forts of the Empire," the researchers wrote. Alternatively, the cup may have been bestowed on a soldier as recognition of distinguished service or a particularly brave act.

Either way, the fact that the memento was shaped like a simple trulla — an object soldiers used every day for eating and drinking — and not like a weapon suggests it was meant to remind veterans of the camaraderie they experienced while living along Hadrian's Wall, the researchers wrote.

What do you know about the Empire's conquest of the British Isles? Find out with our Roman Britain quiz!

Before construction workers began building a new cricket pavilion in Lewisvale Park, just east of Edinburgh, Scotland, in 2010, archaeologists were called in to survey the area. In their brief dig, the excavators discovered a unique Roman-era altar that had once been used to worship the sun god in a mysterious, male-only ritual.

The Altar to Sol was found in two pieces. Made of buff sandstone, it originally stood around 4 feet (1.23 meters) tall. Four female busts representing the seasons grace the top of the monument. In the middle, a face representing the sun god Sol rises from the monument, inscribed within an incised circle. The eyes and mouth of the humanlike face and the six rays of Sol's crown have been pierced so that the altar could be illuminated from behind. Traces of red paint were found on the front of the altar, and the two sides feature carved laurel wreaths.

Based on the inscription, the altar appears to have been dedicated by a soldier named Gaius Cassius Flavianus, who may have been in command of the Roman military base in Inveresk, Scotland. In A.D. 142, the fort at Inveresk was established along the Antonine Wall, where Roman soldiers were sent to protect the northernmost frontier of the Roman Empire.

According to National Museums Scotland, which recently acquired the Altar to Sol along with a second altar that honors the god Mithras, these monuments would have been focal points for worshippers participating in secret religious ceremonies. The mythical Mithras was born from a rock and was often depicted slaying a bull. Sol played an important role in the Mithras cult and was sometimes equated with Mithras.

Temples to Mithras, called Mithraea, were always situated underground, and only men were allowed to join the mysterious cult, which purported to celebrate the triumph of light over darkness and goodness over evil.

"In the dark of the temple, you would see the rays and the eyes of the sun god glaring at you," Fraser Hunter, curator of Iron Age and Roman archaeology at National Museums Scotland, explained in a video. The altars to Sol and Mithras are unique in Scotland and point to the beliefs of soldiers stationed along the Antonine Wall. Mithras and Sol gave soldiers "a sense that there was a purpose to the world and that there was a life after death," Hunter said.

The rare carved altars will be on display at National Museums Scotland starting Nov. 14.

For more stunning archaeological discoveries, check out our Astonishing Artifacts archives.

For the first time ever, an image of a Roman woman battling a beast in an arena has been identified.

While ancient texts say that some women battled beasts in the arenas of the Roman Empire, this is the first visual evidence that this occurred, according to a new study published March 22 in The International Journal of the History of Sport. The women who battled beasts were known as venatrices or huntresses.

In the Roman Empire, beast hunters put on shows in arenas, where they would battle wild animals, such as boars and bears. Unlike gladiators, they fought beasts rather than people. The newly analyzed drawing, on a third-century mosaic, shows a topless huntress fighting a leopard with a whip.

The mosaic was found in Reims, France, in 1860. Most of it was destroyed during bombing in World War I, but there is a surviving drawing illustrated by Jean Charles Loriquet, the archaeologist who discovered the mosaic. Loriquet published the drawing in his 1862 book, but it has received minimal scholarly attention, Alfonso Mañas, a sports researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote in the new study.

The mosaic shows a mix of beasts, beast hunters and gladiators, each of which is surrounded by diamond- or square-shaped decorations that archaeologists call "medallions." Dating to the third century A.D., it was found in a house that likely belonged to a wealthy individual who sponsored beast-fighting shows held in arenas, Mañas told Live Science in an email.

The mosaic was probably on the floor of the feasting hall "so that the guests of the host could admire the mosaic during the banquet," Mañas said.

Originally, researchers weren't sure if the individual was female, so they identified the figure as an "agitator, an inexistent arena role, or a paegniarius, a kind of clown with a whip," Mañas wrote in the study. But there are several clues that the person is female and a huntress, Mañas said. An agitator is a person who supposedly used whips to encourage the beasts to fight, however there is no solid evidence that this position existed. A paegniarius fought with a whip and a stick and wore an armguard. The fact that the woman doesn't have a stick or armguard indicates that she is not a paegniarius.

Mañas said that there is no doubt that this depicts a woman, noting that the drawing shows that the person has sizable breasts.

As for her role, Mañas thinks she was a beast hunter, rather than a prisoner condemned to death. A prisoner condemned to death would be given no weapon and would often be tied up. This woman holds a whip and doesn't seem to be restrained.

Is the drawing accurate?

Most of the mosaic was destroyed in World War I, so it's impossible to verify if Loriquet's drawing is accurate, Thomas Scanlon, a professor emeritus of classics at the University of California, Riverside who was not involved with the study, told Live Science in an email.

Scanlon praised the journal article but wasn't convinced about the identification. "The article is well documented, but my concern is that the actual mosaic is not extant, but was destroyed in WWI, so the images are from an old [drawing] which may not be reliable in detail," Scanlon said.

In his article, Mañas tried to address this problem by comparing the drawing of the mosaic with a small piece of the mosaic that survived the bombing and is currently in the Musée Saint-Rémi. The surviving fragment appears to closely match the drawing, Mañas wrote.

Alison Futrell, a professor of history at the University of Arizona, found the article convincing. "I agree with the author," she told Live Science in an email, adding that "I think that women were regular participants in arena events and that they're underrepresented in surviving textual and visual evidence."

Topless beast hunter

We don't know the huntress's name or much else about her. She may have volunteered to be a beast hunter, or she may have been convicted of a crime that did not warrant execution, and instead was sentenced to be trained and perform as a beast hunter, Mañas wrote in the article.

Although this is the only surviving image of a Roman huntress, there are at least two known surviving sculptures of female gladiators. Those images also depict the women topless and without helmets to help show that they are women.

Like the female gladiators, it seems female beast hunters would "always fight topless, with bare breasts, because [otherwise] spectators from the stands would have had problems to notice that they were actually women, and [to] arouse an erotic effect on those spectators, to excite them sexually, was one of the aims sought by their performance," Mañas wrote in the article. The women would have had to be of low social status since it would have been unacceptable for a woman of higher status to appear topless in the arena, Mañas said.

The bottom half of the female beast hunter is not shown in the drawing; it may have been destroyed already when Loriquet found the mosaic in 1860. Therefore, it is unclear if she competed completely nude or wearing something like a loincloth, Mañas noted.

The mosaic dates to the third century, while historical records indicate that female gladiators were banned throughout the Roman Empire in A.D. 200. This suggests that this ban did not affect female beast hunters, Mañas said.

While female gladiators tended to be controversial in the Roman world because many people felt that fighting another person should be restricted to men, the idea of women hunting beasts was less controversial, Mañas said. The Roman goddess Diana engaged in hunting, he added, which made the idea of women hunting beasts more acceptable to Romans.

Roman emperor quiz: Test your knowledge on the rulers of the ancient empire

Two massive Iron Age hoards of burned metal weapons, vessels, and chariots or carts, found in the north of England, may have been part of a royal funeral, possibly for a queen, archaeologists say.

A metal detectorist found the hoards in 2021 near the village of Melsonby in Yorkshire and alerted archaeologists. Excavators discovered two separate deposits with a total of more than 950 artifacts, including iron "tires" for wooden wheels, a cauldron, an ornate wine-mixing bowl and ceremonial spearheads.

Together, the two deposits represent one of the largest Iron Age hoards ever found in Britain. Now, a new study, published March 17 in the journal Antiquity, suggests the hoards may have been used in the funeral of an Iron Age leader, before being deliberately burned, damaged and buried.

"It is clear that Melsonby was not a burial [because] we have no evidence of a body," study co-author Tom Moore, an archaeologist at Durham University in the U.K., told Live Science in an email. "So our question is — why deposit this material?"

Moore and his colleagues think the size of the Melsonby hoards and the large number of expensive artifacts indicate they were part of an elite funeral held by the Brigantes, a powerful tribe of Iron Age Britons of mainly Celtic origin.

The Brigantes ruled the nearby Stanwick royal site, a few hundred feet away from the location where the hoards were found. At that time, Stanwick was a fortified village that the Romans called an "oppidum"; they were typically built by Celts on hilltops or other defensive areas.

Burnt artifacts

Moore said burning or destroying objects had been a key practice in many prehistoric funerals.

"Much of the material … was burnt to high temperatures — enough to melt copper alloy and silver," he said. "At this time, cremation was becoming a popular funerary rite for elites in parts of Britain." No signs of a burial had been found nearby, but the remains could have been buried elsewhere.

The exact reason for the hoards' burials, however, may never be known. "There are several possibilities for that event," Moore said, "but a funeral of an important leader seems one of the most likely."

The researchers used radiocarbon dating to determine that the artifacts originated in the first century B.C., while their style and decorations, including coral from the Mediterranean Sea, indicate that the elites at Stanwick had connections with the European mainland.

The Brigantes were allies of the Romans after their conquest of much of Britain after A.D. 43. Roman sources after A.D. 69 said the Brigantes were then ruled by a queen named Cartimandua, a "client ruler" and ally.

But the researchers think the hoards date to several generations before that and may have been used in a funeral for one of Cartimandua's royal ancestors. (Royal power among the Brigantes seems to have passed from mother to daughter, so it is likely that some of Cartimandua's ancestors were also ruling queens.)

Four-wheeled carts

A key discovery was that the Melsonby hoards contained several strange, U-shaped iron brackets, which have been found in continental Europe but not in Britain. The brackets have now been identified as parts of four-wheeled carts, which the Iron Age Britons used alongside their two-wheeled chariots, according to the study authors. This indicates the Britons had connections with other Celtic groups on the European continent.

"The fact that we have elements which can only be ascribed to such vehicles … is a first for Britain," Moore said. "Why we have never found them before is a mystery."

Melanie Giles, an archaeologist at the University of Manchester who wasn't involved in the Melsonby study but is excavating a chariot funeral from about the same time in Wales, said the chariot in Wales and the artifacts in the Melsonby hoards have several things in common. For one, "They're sharing the same style of Celtic art," Giles said.

In both cases, the Celtic motifs seemed to have been exaggerated, which may have been a sign of Celtic opposition to Roman expansion on the European continent, Giles proposed. "Some people think this is a kind of resistance to the Romans," she said. "It's people celebrating their Celtic art and being a bit more 'in your face' about it."

Celtic quiz: Test your knowledge about these fierce tribes once described by Julius Caesar

Small iron nails laid across three skeletons' chests preserve an unusual detail about ancient Roman burial practices: 1,800 years ago, someone tried to protect the living from the dead.

The discovery of nails in burials "is a practice well documented in the Roman period and in later phases," Diletta Menghinello, an archaeologist with the Italian Ministry of Culture's Special Superintendency of Rome and the leader of the excavation project, told Live Science in a translated email.

Menghinello and colleagues were working in the vast Ostiense necropolis in the heart of Rome when they discovered three burials with nails that had been placed deliberately over the chest, according to a March 4 translated statement from the Special Superintendency of Rome.

The Ostiense necropolis was initially excavated in 1919, but new archaeological work ahead of housing construction exposed another part of the cemetery on Via Ostiense, near the Basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls. The newly uncovered site is helping clarify how burial customs changed across centuries as the Ostiense necropolis expanded, Menghinello said.

"In antiquity, the sides of the road were occupied by a vast Roman necropolis" with several different tomb types, Menghinello said, dating to between the second century B.C. and the fourth century A.D. But the precise boundary of the necropolis is still not fully known, she said. The skeletons buried with nails were found in simple graves, likely dating to the third and fourth century A.D.

But the purpose of the nail is something of a mystery.

"Its function has been interpreted in different ways," Menghinello said, noting that the nail may have been used for symbolically "fixing" the dead from returning to haunt the living. If the body wasn't fixed, it was thought that the dead could become a "revenant," or a revived corpse common in folklore.

But the practice may have been meant to protect the deceased person as well. When used in an apotropaic practice — one meant to ward off harm — the nail became a type of talisman to protect the dead individual from the perils of the afterlife or to protect the tomb from being disturbed, Menghinello said.

The nail ritual "would therefore have served to preserve the body from potential violators of its final resting place, protect the deceased from malevolent forces and, at the same time, safeguard the surviving relatives from the possible return of the dead among the living," Menghinello said.

Roman emperor quiz: Test your knowledge on the rulers of the ancient empire

The tradition of depicting emperors on horseback as a symbol of leadership was common in ancient Rome. But only one equestrian statue of a pagan Roman emperor has survived into the present: the larger-than-life-size bronze depiction of Marcus Aurelius, who reigned from A.D. 161 to 180.

Housed in the Capitoline Museums in Rome, the statue towers 13.9 feet (4.24 meters) above the ground. Part of the Antonine dynasty, Marcus Aurelius presided over the Roman Empire at the end of the Pax Romana, a 200-year period of relative peace. However, there was still unrest, with ramped-up Christian persecution. And the Roman army under Marcus Aurelius fought numerous wars on the outskirts of the empire. It's thought that when Rome's forces returned home during his reign, they brought the "Antonine plague" with them, leading to an outbreak from 165 to 180 that killed over 5 million people.

According to the Capitoline Museums, the equestrian statue was likely erected in 176 to commemorate Marcus Aurelius' victory over Germanic and Sarmatian tribes in the Marcomannic Wars, but it is possible it was erected in 180, shortly after his death.

Marcus Aurelius is depicted in a very specific pose called "adlocutio" — raising his right arm to show he is in the middle of giving an address to his troops. But unlike many other "adlocutio" sculptures that depict leaders wearing armor and carrying weapons, this equestrian statue shows Marcus in another light: Absent this military garb, he is portrayed as a bringer of peace rather than a victorious general. He also rides the horse without the help of stirrups, an invention that had not yet been introduced to the West by Central Asian horseback-riding peoples.

Although at least two dozen giant bronze equestrian statues — also called "equi magni" — are known to have decorated the public squares of ancient Rome, none of the other equestrian statues of pagan emperors survived, likely because they were melted down in the late Roman Empire or early Middle Ages for coins or other sculptures.

But the statue of Marcus Aurelius survived this purge, possibly because he was mistaken for Constantine the Great, the Roman emperor who legalized Christianity during his reign from 306 to 337. While both of these emperors are typically depicted with curly hair, Marcus Aurelius was also notable for wearing a full beard, which signified his intelligence and his role as a philosopher king. Marcus' "Meditations" — a collection of his personal thoughts on self-improvement and other Stoic philosophy ideals — are still read today.

The location of the Marcus Aurelius equestrian statue was first recorded in the 10th century, when historical records mentioned it in the Lateran Palace, which was originally a Roman structure but was later used as the main residence of the popes for 1,000 years. In the 16th century, the statue was moved to the Capitoline Hill in Rome, and Michelangelo was commissioned to refurbish the statue and to redesign the Piazza del Campidoglio.

Today, the equestrian statue is kept in the Capitoline Museums, while a replica made in 1981 stands in the middle of Michelangelo's piazza.

For more stunning archaeological discoveries, check out our Astonishing Artifacts archives.

Archaeologists in Scotland have discovered the remains of a Roman "fortlet" that was built beside a massive wall that ran across Scotland.

Known as the Antonine Wall, the defensive border separated what is now southern Scotland, which had been conquered by the Romans, from the unconquered northern Scotland. The 38-mile-long (62 kilometers) wall was made largely of turf, or earthen materials, and its construction started in A.D. 142 on the orders of Roman emperor Antoninus Pius (reign A.D. 138 to 161) following the Roman conquest of southern Scotland.

The wall had a series of forts, fortlets, camps, bathhouses and a military road that enabled Roman troops and their supplies to be quickly moved. The wall was abandoned by 165 after the Roman military retreated back to Hadrian's Wall in northern England.

The newly discovered fortlet dates to the mid-second century to the mid-third century A.D., radiocarbon dating revealed. It was built on the southern side of the Antonine Wall in the town of Bearsden, about 5 miles (8 km) northwest of Glasgow, and spans the gardens of three private residences on an "area of high ground right next to the Antonine Wall," archaeologists from Guard archaeology said in a statement. "It had commanding views over the landscape, particularly to the north, which was beyond Roman control."

The fortlet also had a good view of a nearby Roman fort and could potentially have signalled the garrison if they spotted an enemy force. Most fortlets along the Antonine Wall could house between 20 and 50 soldiers at a time, the team noted.

Archaeologists initially discovered the fortlet in 2017 in the backyard of a private residence that was having an archaeological survey done ahead of construction work. The team later conducted a larger excavation and recently published the findings in the journal Archaeology Reports Online.

The fortlet was built on a stone base, the archaeologists wrote in the journal article. There was also a ditch located just outside the fortlet that may have helped defend it.

Guard Archaeology created a digital reconstruction of the fortlet, which shows two buildings that could house a small garrison of Roman troops along with two watchtowers and a series of ditches and walls to protect them.

The fortlet would likely have been "an integral part of the Roman Wall defences which included forts and fortlets along its length" the archaeological team wrote in the journal article.

Roman Britain quiz: What do you know about the Empire's conquest of the British Isles?

An intriguing coin deposited into a bus driver's till in England in the 1950s turned out to have ancient origins: It was minted 2,000 years ago in what is now southern Spain. Now, more than 70 years later, the grandson of the former transport cashier has donated the mysteriously acquired coin to a museum.

The cashier, James Edwards, worked for Leeds City Transport and was tasked with gathering and counting fares from bus and tram drivers. Whenever he discovered fake or foreign coins, he would bring them home for his grandson, Peter.

"Neither of us were coin collectors, but we were fascinated by their origin and imagery — to me, they were treasure," Peter Edwards said in a March 9 statement.

But one particular coin intrigued Peter, whose research into the designs on the coin revealed that it was minted more than 2,000 years ago in a Phoenician settlement called Gadir (now known as the city of Cádiz) in Spain's Andalusia region.

Gadir was founded by the Phoenicians, who also settled Carthage in what is now Tunisia, as their earliest colony in Western Europe in the 12th century B.C. Gadir came under Carthaginian control after the First Punic War in the early third century B.C. and then under Roman rule less than a century later.

The front side of the bronze coin bears the visage of the god Melqart — a Phoenician god who was the chief deity of Gadir, Carthage and Tyre — wearing the lion-skin headdress of Hercules. On the back of the coin are two bluefin tuna (Thunnus thynnus), likely a reference to the importance of the fishing industry in Gadir.

How the coin ended up in Leeds is unclear, but "it was not long after the war, so I imagine soldiers returned with coins from countries they had been sent to," Edwards said.

Edwards has donated the coin to the Leeds Museums and Galleries so experts can study it as part of the museum's collection of ancient currency. Kat Baxter, the curator of archaeology and numismatics for the museums, confirmed in the statement that the coin is around 2,000 years old and was minted in Gadir.

"Museums like ours are not just about preserving objects, they're also about telling stories like this one and inspiring visitors to think about the history that's all around us, sometimes in the most unlikely of places," Leeds City Councillor Salma Arif said in the statement.

"My grandfather would be proud to know, as I am, that the coin is coming back to Leeds," Edwards said. "However, how it got there will always be a mystery."

Archaeology Fragments Quiz: Can you work out what these mysterious artifacts are?

The mysterious Roman-era burial rite of pouring liquid gypsum over the dead wasn't limited to elite adults as previously thought; it was also performed on children, including babies as young as 1 month old, researchers have found.

The finding contradicts Roman-era legal sources who wrote that infants under 12 months old were not supposed to be mourned at all, according to two blog posts published by the Seeing the Dead project, a collaboration between the University of York and the York Museums Trust. Their team is investigating the discovery of children among the rare "gypsum burials" found in York, in northern England.

Liquid-gypsum burials have long confounded researchers. The enigmatic practice involved placing the deceased in a stone or lead sarcophagus and then pouring liquid gypsum over them. The plaster-of-paris-like substance hardened over their bodies, preserving traces of high-status clothing. But new research found that even the youngest members of ancient society were mourned.

"Infants were the most vulnerable members of Roman society," Maureen Carroll, a Roman archaeologist at the University of York, wrote in a Feb. 18 blog post, particularly given the high infant mortality rate of around 30%. But even though historical records say babies younger than 1 year old were not to be mourned because infant deaths were commonplace, Carroll has found that these restrictions applied only to public mourning.

"They had no bearing on sentiments such as grief or the sense of loss felt and expressed by the surviving family in private," she wrote.

Among the more than 70 gypsum burials Carroll has studied, at least seven belonged to children, including three infants under 4 months old. The practice of liquid-gypsum burial seems to have been reserved for the Roman elite in York, and it was usually employed on adults. Infants were more often buried in large jars called amphorae; ceramic tile boxes; or small, wooden coffins.

One remarkable infant burial was found in 1892 during the construction of the York Railway. The newborn, just 1 or 2 months old, was covered with a cloak of purple-dyed wool decorated with gold thread and tassels, before being placed in a lead sarcophagus and covered in liquid gypsum.

Although nothing remains of the infant's bones today, impressions of the brilliant purple-and-gold cloak can still be seen. This is the only gypsum burial with dyed fabric ever found, Sarah Hitchens, an archaeological textile expert at the University of York, wrote in a Feb. 23 blog post.

"It is likely that the purple textile was made from an animal fibre such as wool," Hitchens wrote, and the cloak was likely draped over the infant's body as a burial shroud.

Chemists on the project team are now analyzing the hardened gypsum covering to glean more information about Romano-British burial practices.

"We are testing the gypsum casing for evidence of aromatic substances, such as frankincense or mastic," dried tree sap and resin, respectively, Carroll told Live Science in an email. They also plan to test the purple dye to determine whether it came from murex, a type of snail from which the ancient Romans extracted a natural reddish-purple dye. The gold threads will be analyzed as well, Carroll said.

Other liquid-gypsum burials found in York include a child of about 4 months old discovered wrapped between the legs of two adults. It's unclear if these three people constituted a family, "but it is evident that they were closely associated in life and in death," Carroll wrote.

In another case, a girl who was between 7 and 9 years old when she died was buried with an array of gold, silver, copper, jet, glass and coral jewelry. Two pairs of boots and a pair of sandals were discovered near her feet, and the bones of what was likely a pet chicken were found in her coffin as well.

"The 3D scan of her body visible under a shroud or sheet reveals how frail and thin she was, perhaps pointing to a protracted illness before her death," Carroll wrote.

These lavish burials of infants and children discovered in York show that Roman legal texts, which were written primarily by older men, did not reflect the reality of life and death in Roman Britain.

"It all certainly suggests that children this young were valued and cared for, unlike the age-old notion that Romans did not care when their infants died because infant mortality was high," Carroll said. "Utter nonsense!"

Roman Britain quiz: What do you know about the Empire's conquest of the British Isles?

A long-standing mystery about when an ancient European "princess" buried in a log coffin died has finally been solved, a new study reports.

The woman's wooden coffin was initially found in the village of Bagicz in northwestern Poland in 1899, after it fell from an eroding cliff. Archaeologists nicknamed her the "Princess of Bagicz" because of her unique burial style and well-preserved artifacts. Over the decades, researchers determined that she had died in Roman times, but analyses gave conflicting dates spanning nearly 300 years.

Log coffins are rarely discovered in archaeological excavations, since they disintegrate over the years. The one found in Bagicz is the only preserved wooden sarcophagus of its kind from the Roman Iron Age, researchers wrote in a study published Feb. 9 in the journal Archaeometry. The Bagicz burial is exceptional, the researchers wrote, because the coffin and lid were carved from a single tree trunk. The coffin likely survived into modern times thanks to its location in a wet, humid environment.

Inside the coffin, which came from a larger cemetery associated with the Wielbark culture related to the Goths, was the skeleton of an adult woman who was buried on a cowhide along with a bronze pin, a necklace of glass and amber beads, and a pair of bronze bracelets.

An archaeological examination of the style of the grave goods in the 1980s suggested that the Princess of Bagicz died between A.D. 110 and 160. But in 2018, a carbon-dating analysis of the woman's tooth produced a date of between 113 B.C. and A.D. 65, which would make her significantly older than the artifacts buried with her.

To resolve this discrepancy, a team of researchers led by Marta Chmiel-Chrzanowska, an archaeologist at the University of Szczecin in Poland, dated the log coffin itself using dendrochronological analysis, which involves counting the tree's rings. They collected a small core of wood from the coffin and compared the growth rings to established chronological sequences from northwest Poland.

"The estimated felling date of the oak used for the coffin was calculated as 120 AD," the researchers wrote in the study. "It is likely that the coffin was crafted immediately after felling."

Given that the woman's grave goods and coffin are from the same time period, the radiocarbon date from her tooth is likely incorrect, the researchers concluded, and it was potentially thrown off because of the woman's diet or the water sources she drank from during life.

Radiocarbon dates can be thrown off by up to 1,200 years if the organic sample comes from a marine organism rather than a terrestrial one, scientists have learned, because the carbon stored in the oceans is older than the carbon found on land. This is known as the marine reservoir effect and results in marine organisms appearing to be older than they actually are when they are carbon dated. Similarly, eating a significant amount of seafood can throw off a human's carbon date by dozens or hundreds of years. This might have happened in the case of the Princess of Bagicz.

"The burial provides rare insight into wooden coffin preservation in the Wielbark culture, offering valuable data on funerary practices and environmental conditions that allowed for the exceptional survival of organic materials," the researchers wrote.

Although the mystery of the Princess of Bagicz's date of death has been solved, there is still more to learn about her and her culture.

"The woman did not exhibit any paleopathologies that could indicate the cause of death," Chmiel-Chrzanowska told Live Science in an email, but she did have osteoarthritis, which may have been from work-related overuse, given her young age of 25 to 35 when she died. Her osteoarthritis also suggests that the woman was a typical representative of the Wielbark culture rather than a princess, Chmiel-Chrzanowska wrote in a previous study.

"Next week, I am going to Warsaw for DNA testing" to learn more about the woman, Chmiel-Chrzanowska said. DNA analysis was previously attempted on the skeleton, but it was not successful. "We will attempt to drill into the skull in such a way as to obtain material from the temporal [skull] bone, without the need to damage it," she added.

Roman emperor quiz: Test your knowledge on the rulers of the ancient empire

While walking their dogs along a cliff-flanked Scottish beach after an intense storm, a couple stumbled upon a series of unusual markings on the damp ground — patterns that looked like ancient human and animal footprints.

Their discovery sparked an archaeological race against the clock to document and study the prints before they disappeared into the surf.

"It's very rare that you get involved in a genuine archaeological emergency where, if we didn't do it very, very quickly, the whole site would be gone," Kate Britton, an archaeologist at the University of Aberdeen, said in a video about the find.

On the beach at Lunan Bay in eastern Scotland, locals Ivor Campbell and Jenny Snedden — along with their dogs Ziggy and Juno — spotted a fresh layer of clay in the storm-damaged dunes with what appeared to be prints. They notified Aberdeenshire council archaeologist Bruce Mann, who brought in Britton and her team to excavate the newly uncovered site before it was lost forever.

The team of archaeologists worked in wind gusts up to 55 mph (88.5 km/h), racing to document the prints as the site was eroded with each high tide. They used drones, cameras and, later in the lab, 3D modeling software to record images of the archaeological site. They also used plaster to create molds of some of the better-preserved prints, which were made by barefoot humans and several animals, including red deer (Cervus elaphus) and roe deer (Capreolus capreolus), according to the statement.

"I'd never seen a site like this in Scotland," Britton said. "It was just immediately clear that this was something special."

Underneath the prints, the archaeologists found a layer of charred plant remains. They carbon-dated the plants to 2,000 years ago, during the late Iron Age.

"The late Iron Age dates are in keeping with what we know about the rich archaeology of nearby Lunan Valley," Gordon Noble, an archaeologist at the University of Aberdeen, said in the statement. "It's very exciting to think these prints were made by people around the time of the Roman invasions of Scotland and in the centuries leading up to the emergence of the Picts."

The Lunan Bay site "tells us how this now sandy beach was once a muddy estuary and that humans were using this environment, perhaps for hunting deer or to collect wild plant foods," William Mills, an archaeologist at the University of Aberdeen, said in the statement.

Britton and her team excavated the site for two days, recording as much as they could. When they returned a week later, the prints were completely gone.

"Footprints that represent actions of people over minutes, thousands of years ago, were destroyed within days," Britton said.

Although the Lunan Bay site is unique in Scotland, Britton said, "what it does mean for us now is there could be potentially other sites like this out there."

Roman Britain quiz: What do you know about the Empire's conquest of the British Isles?

A group of people living in the far southern reaches of Greece's Peloponnesian Peninsula have been genetically isolated for over a millennium and can trace their roots back to the Bronze Age, an analysis of their DNA reveals.

A new genetic study shows that this group, known as the Deep Maniot Greeks, are paternally descended from ancient Greeks and Byzantine-era Romans. Long-term genetic isolation and strict patriarchal clans likely contributed to the unique genetics of the Deep Maniot Greeks over the past 1,400 years, according to the study authors.

The Mani Peninsula is the middle of three peninsulas that extend south from mainland Greece. In ancient times, the area was part of the Laconia region, which was dominated by the city-state Sparta in the seventh century B.C. Much of the Greek Peloponnese region experienced demographic upheaval as Slavic peoples invaded in the sixth century A.D. However, the Mani Peninsula was spared, and the Deep Maniots who lived in the far southern part of the peninsula became geographically and culturally isolated from the rest of Greece.

In a study published Wednesday (Feb. 4) in the journal Communications Biology, researchers analyzed the DNA of more than 100 living Deep Maniots and discovered that they represent a "genetic island" due to long-standing isolation.

"Our results show that historical isolation left a clear genetic signature," study lead author Leonidas-Romanos Davranoglou, a zoologist at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, said in a statement. "Deep Maniots preserve a snapshot of the genetic landscape of southern Greece before the demographic upheavals of the early Middle Ages."

During Europe's Migration Period (circa A.D. 300 to 700), which is sometimes called the "Barbarian Invasions," various groups of people — including Germanic tribes, the Visigoths, the Huns and early Slavs — moved throughout the continent. This resulted in numerous waves of migration, only some of which were historically documented. Ancient DNA research has begun to tease out these Migration Period population waves.

But these Migration Period movements did not seem to affect the Deep Maniots, according to historical, linguistic and archaeological evidence. So Davranoglou and colleagues turned to DNA analysis of modern Maniots to investigate why.

The researchers looked at genetic markers on the Y chromosomes (which are passed down from father to son) of 102 people with Deep Maniot ancestry on their paternal side, as well as mitochondrial DNA (passed down from mother to child) sequence data from 50 people with maternal Deep Maniot ancestry.

The DNA analysis revealed that Deep Maniots have an extremely high frequency of a rare paternal lineage that originated in the Caucasus region around 28,000 years ago, the researchers wrote in the study. And when compared with the DNA of present-day mainland Greeks, the DNA of Deep Maniots lacked evidence of common lineages that came from Germanic and Slavic peoples during the Migration Period.

Taken together, these results suggest that genetic drift (a reduction in genetic variation due to a small population size) played an important role in shaping the paternal lineage of Deep Maniots, the researchers wrote, forming a kind of "genetic island." This island of paternal ancestry is rooted in the ancient Balkans and West Asia and is strongly linked to Bronze Age, Iron Age and Roman-period Greek-speaking populations, they noted.

Analysis of the maternal Deep Maniot lineages through mitochondrial DNA revealed a more complex genetic picture, however. The researchers identified 30 distinct maternal lineages in their population sample of 50 Deep Maniots. Most of those lineages have connections to Bronze Age and Iron Age people from Western Eurasia, but several appear to be Deep Maniot-specific, showing no close matches to other present-day European populations.

"These patterns are consistent with a strongly patriarchal society, in which male lineages remained locally rooted, while a small number of women from outside communities were integrated," study co-author Alexandros Heraclides, an epidemiologist at European University Cyprus, said in the statement.

Both the paternal and maternal DNA markers also show evidence of a founder effect, which happens when a new population is established by a very small subset of a larger population. The new population includes only the genes of its small number of founders and, over time, becomes distinct from the larger population.

The genes of present-day Deep Maniots reveal that there was a founder effect among their paternal ancestors around A.D. 380 to 670. As a result, over 50% of Maniot men today descend from a single male ancestor from the seventh century. There was also a founder effect among their maternal ancestors around 540 to 866, the team found, suggesting the number of both maternal and paternal lineages shrank around the same time.

The DNA study suggests that the Deep Maniot population "represents a snapshot of the genetic landscape of the Greek-speaking world prior to the demographic turmoil of the Migration Period," the researchers wrote.

"Many oral traditions of shared descent, some dating back hundreds of years, are now verified through genetics," study co-author and independent researcher Athanasios Kofinakos said in the statement.

A 2,200-year-old bone unearthed in Spain may be from one of Hannibal's war elephants that was deployed during the Second Punic War, a new study reports.

The baseball-size bone, found near the southern Spanish city of Córdoba, may be the only direct evidence of the Carthaginian general's war elephants, according to the study, which was published in the February issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports. Famously, 37 of these bellicose pachyderms trekked with Hannibal and his army for the length of Iberia, over the Pyrenees to southern Gaul, across the Alps and into Italy to attack Rome.

Until now, the strongest archaeological evidence of their march was what may be churned earth and other traces left by the giant beasts passing through an alpine pass on what is now the French and Italian border.

The bone "could prove to be a landmark," Rafael Martínez Sánchez, an archaeologist at the University of Córdoba and the study's first author, told Live Science. Until now, "there has been no direct archaeological testimony for the use of these animals," he said in an email.

The mysterious bone was unearthed in 2019 and initially perplexed scientists because it matched no native animal. It was recognized years later as an elephant's right carpal bone — the "ankle" of its right foreleg, which is equivalent to the wrist in humans. The researchers think this particular elephant was brought there as a beast of war by the Carthaginians.

Celtic stronghold

The bone was found during archaeological excavations at the site of a fortified Iberian village, in a layer of earth radiocarbon-dated to around 2,250 years ago — before the Romans took control of the region in about 150 B.C. The Romans called such fortified villages oppida; they were commonly used by the ancient Celts and were often built on hilltops, but this was in the defensible bend of a river.

Carthage, an ancient city state on the coast of what's now Tunisia, originated as a Phoenician colony and its fleet of warships was especially feared. But its armies were also powerful, and Carthage used war elephants in the first two Punic Wars against the Roman Republic, which were largely for control of strategic regions of the western Mediterranean.

It seems a Carthaginian army stationed nearby during the Second Punic War (218 to 201 B.C.) had been involved in a battle at the ancient fortified village near Córdoba — and that the elephant was killed in the fighting, the researchers wrote in the study.

Other signs of a military conflict at the site included 12 spherical stones the researchers think were ammunition for Carthaginian catapults.

It seemed most of the elephant's skeleton had rotted away, but the carpal bone had been protected by a collapsed wall, the researchers wrote. They do not rule out the possibility, however, that the bone had survived because it was taken as a souvenir, as it is small enough to carry.

Martínez Sánchez said it's not currently possible to determine if the animal was an Asian elephant (Elephas maximus indicus) — the species the Greek king Pyrrhus of Epirus (known for his eponymous "Pyrrhic Victory") had used against the Romans about 10 years before the First Punic War — or a now-extinct species of African elephant that the Carthaginians preferred for their war beasts.

Hannibal's march

The Carthaginian general and nobleman Hannibal Barca started his famous attack on Rome in about 218 B.C., leading his armies into Italy the long way through Western Europe. Most of his war elephants died while crossing the Alps, but Hannibal's armies were victorious against the Romans in Italy for many years.

Hannibal was recalled to Carthage in 203 B.C. to defend against Roman attacks there. But the Carthaginians ultimately lost their second war on Rome as they had the First Punic War more than 20 years earlier. (About 50 years later, Rome engineered a Third Punic War, which the weakened Carthaginians also lost and which led to their demise.)

The researchers stressed that the elephant that died near Córdoba could not have been one of the "legendary specimens" that crossed the Alps with Hannibal. However, the bone is a relic of the ancient Punic Wars for control of the Mediterranean and represents the "passage of the gigantic 'tanks of antiquity' through the [Iberian] peninsula," the researchers wrote.

In 1796, while scampering through fields behind his house in Ribchester, England, a young boy stumbled upon a hoard of over 30 metal artifacts in a hollow. The most unique and impressive item in the hoard was a bronze helmet with a face mask dating to the early Roman Empire.

The Ribchester Helmet entered the collection of the British Museum in 1813, where it has been on display ever since. The helmet consists of two main parts: a helmet bowl decorated with a martial scene, and a mask shaped like the face of a young man. Together, the parts of the mask weigh 2.9 pounds (1.3 kilograms). It is one of only three helmets with face masks ever found in Roman Britain.

The helmet bowl has been highly decorated with a scene of apparent combat between six cavalry and 11 infantry soldiers. Although the cavalry troops are outnumbered, they seem to have the upper hand, as two infantrymen lie dead. Two palmettes symbolizing victory are also depicted on the helmet bowl, in addition to a shield and spears signifying armor captured from the enemy. Holes in the nape of the neck suggest streamers were once attached to the helmet.

On the face mask, the young man has an expressionless and beardless visage. His hair curls turn into four serpents' heads — likely a visual reference to the myth of Medusa and the Gorgons, which has been found on other Roman military equipment. Atop the youth's hair rests a diadem in the form of the "corona muralis." This crown, shaped like a city wall, was one of the highest forms of Roman military decoration. But the mask has very small eye and nostril holes, making it impractical to wear in actual combat.

In a 2019 study published in the journal Arms & Armour, archaeologists Jamie Kaminski and David Sim explained the purpose of the Ribchester Helmet as special equipment worn during "hippika gymnasia" (cavalry tournaments), a type of military exercise that doubled as entertainment for troops and visiting dignitaries.

"The events included mock battles between the élite riders of the unit, in which both men and horses were bedecked in flamboyant suites of equipment often in the guise of Greeks, Trojans and Amazons," Kaminski and Sim wrote.

The helmet was likely being stored in a box or chest, along with the rest of the military equipment, for future use or for scrap purposes near the Roman fort of Bremetennacum Veteranorum, which was once located in the present-day village of Ribchester. The fort was abandoned in the late second century, and the hoard was likely forgotten until a curious young boy dug it up 17 centuries later.

For more stunning archaeological discoveries, check out our Astonishing Artifacts archives.

A medieval seal with a blood-red gemstone that was discovered in the U.K. is hiding an ancient secret, researchers have found.

A metal detectorist discovered the medieval seal in Gosfield, in the eastern county of Essex, in the fall of 2024. But a recent analysis of the seal by experts with the U.K.'s Portable Antiquities Scheme has revealed that the 800-year-old object prominently featured a 2,000-year-old Roman gemstone at its center.

"It's not common to have an object composed from two different time periods," Lori Rogerson, the finds liaison officer for Essex, told the BBC. "I thought it was a really special find."

The silver seal is just 1 inch (27.5 millimeters) long, and the entire keepsake weighs 0.23 ounces (6.44 grams), according to the entry for the artifact in the Portable Antiquities Scheme database. A loop attached to one end of the oval seal suggests it was suspended, perhaps on a necklace, rather than being a signet ring.

Around the bezel, there's a mirror-image inscription that reads "SECRETUM.RICARDI," meaning "Richard's secret" or the "secret [seal] of Richard," along with a cross pattée, a plus-shaped Christian symbol commonly used in medieval times by the Knights Templar.

The center of the Gosfield seal features a piece of carnelian, a brownish-red semiprecious stone, engraved with the image of a two-horse chariot. A charioteer stands on the back of the cart, holding the reins and a whip, suggesting he is competing in an ancient circus race. The carved gemstone dates to the late first century B.C. or early first century A.D., making it at least 1,200 years older than the metal seal matrix.

The mirror-image engraving and intaglio chariot design would appear the right way when Richard pressed it into wax as his seal.

Rogerson said Richard might have specifically chosen the Roman gemstone to show his knowledge of the classical world and his ability to procure something from a faraway place and time.

"It definitely would have been an indicator of the owner's social status," Rogerson told the BBC, "and indicated they were quite important — or saw themselves as quite important."

The Gosfield seal has been submitted for consideration as treasure under the U.K.'s Treasure Act of 1996, since it is made of silver and more than 300 years old. The Braintree Museum in Essex hopes to acquire the object following a treasure inquest.

Gold and gems quiz: What do you know about sparkly treasures made by nature?

Dark-brown flakes discovered inside a 1,900-year-old Roman glass vial are the first direct evidence for the use of human feces for medicinal purposes, a new chemical analysis reveals. The feces were mixed with thyme to mask the smell, and the concoction may have been used to treat inflammation or infection.

"While working in the storage rooms of the Bergama Museum, I noticed that some glass vessels contained residues," Cenker Atila, an archaeologist at Sivas Cumhuriyet University in Turkey, told Live Science in an email. "Residues were found in a total of seven different vessels, but only one yielded conclusive results."

In a study published Jan. 19 in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, Atila and colleagues detailed their analysis of the contents of one particular unguentarium, a small glass bottle used to hold perfume, oil or medicine. The glass vial had been sealed with clay in antiquity and was found in a tomb in the ancient city of Pergamon in western Turkey.

"When we opened the unguentarium, there was no bad smell," Atila said. During its stay in storage, however, "the residue inside it was overlooked. I noticed it and immediately initiated the analysis process."

The researchers used gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) to identify the organic compounds in the dark-brown residue they had scraped from inside the glass unguentarium. Two of the identified compounds — coprostanol and 24-ethylcoprostanol — are typically found in the digestive tracts of animals that metabolize cholesterol.

"The consistent identification of stanols — validated fecal biomarkers — strongly suggests that the Roman unguentarium originally contained fecal material," the researchers wrote in the study. Although they could not conclusively determine the origin of the feces, the researchers noted that the ratio of coprostanol to 24-ethylcoprostanol suggests it was human.

Another major discovery in the residue was carvacrol, an aromatic organic compound present in essential oils made from certain herbs.

"In this sample, we identified human feces mixed with thyme," Atila said. "Because we are well-acquainted with ancient textual sources, we immediately recognized this as a medicinal preparation used by the famous Roman physician Galen."

During the second and third centuries, Pergamon was known as a major center for Roman medicine, thanks to the physician and anatomist Galen of Pergamon, whose ideas would come to dominate Western medical science for centuries.

There were several popular feces-based remedies in Roman medicine that were meant to treat conditions ranging from inflammation and infection to reproductive disorders, the researchers wrote. In one example, Galen mentioned the therapeutic value of the feces of a child who had eaten legumes, bread and wine. But because ancient physicians knew their patients would reject foul-smelling medicines, they often advocated for masking them with aromatic herbs, wine or vinegar.

"This study provides the first direct chemical evidence for the medicinal use of fecal matter in Greco-Roman antiquity," the researchers wrote, as well as direct evidence that the stench of the excrement was masked with strong-smelling herbs. "These findings closely align with formulations described by Galen and other classical authors, suggesting that such remedies were materially enacted, not merely textually theorized."

Roman emperor quiz: Test your knowledge on the rulers of the ancient empire

Two elite tombs from the time of the Roman Republic more than 2,400 years ago have been unearthed near Via Pietralata in the northeast of modern Rome.

The buried chamber tombs were together in a funerary complex and near what seems to have been a shrine to the Greek demigod Hercules, who was a popular symbol of protection to the Romans. The excavations include a stretch of ancient roadway and two large monumental basins or tanks that were likely used in sacred ceremonies.

With these finds, Rome's suburbs "reveal themselves to be repositories of deep memories, still to be explored," Daniela Porro, the head government archaeologist for Rome, said in a translated statement.

Evidence of ancient occupation around Via Pietralata was found in the 1990s, and excavations of the area of the shrine began in 2022 under the direction of government archaeologist Fabrizio Santi. The area was outside the ancient Roman walls but it is now a suburb of the modern city.

The archaeological team has since discovered bronze coins that indicate the shrine was used between the fifth or fourth centuries B.C. — when Rome was supposedly a republic, although archaeologists don't agree on the dates — and the first century A.D., when Rome had become an empire.

Some media stories have claimed the finds included six bronze figurines of Hercules, but reports from the Italian Ministry of Culture do not mention any such findings. In fact, the shrine once had a central statue, but it is now missing, the statement said.

Ancient occupants

The tombs could be evidence that the area was occupied by a wealthy family group known as a Roman gens, Santi said in another translated statement. One of the newfound tombs contains a stone sarcophagus and three cremation urns, and the other contains an adult male skeleton.

The two stone basins or tanks were built more than 100 years later than the tombs. The largest was over 90 feet (28 meters) long, about 33 feet (10 m) wide, and about 7 feet (2.1 meters) deep, while the other was a little smaller but almost twice as deep.

"They could be structures connected to ritual or, less likely, productive activities or related to water collection," Santi said. "A thorough scientific study will allow us to contextualize these findings and understand their role within the ancient landscape."

The ancient road was a key element at the site, he said. It had led to a small cult building called a sacellum (Latin for "shrine") that was devoted to a god — probably the deified hero Hercules, whose worship was popular in that area.

Hercules was the Roman version of the Greek hero Herakles (or Heracles), who was said to be the son of the god Zeus (Jupiter to the Romans) and the mortal Alcmene. He was legendary for his incredible strength, and his worship as a symbol of protection and virtue was widespread in Rome for many centuries.

Roman emperor quiz: Test your knowledge on the rulers of the ancient empire

Archaeologists in Germany have discovered four Roman marching camps, dating to 1,700 years ago, along with a multitude of artifacts, including coins and old shoe parts.

During the third century A.D., the Roman Empire conducted several military campaigns into what is now Germany. Their goal was to expand Roman territory north along the Elbe River, which flows into the North Sea. But Germanic tribes resisted Roman occupation and contributed to an imperial crisis in the third century. Archaeologists have discovered evidence of Roman occupation in the form of military camps.

"Roman camps were highly standardized facilities," archaeologists from the State Office for Heritage Management and Archaeology Saxony-Anhalt, wrote in a statement. "The typical rectangular camp enclosure had rounded corners. From the gates, the main camp roads, laid out at right angles, led into the interior. At the intersection of these roads stood the headquarters building, the principia," the archaeologists wrote.

They noted that a "characteristic feature of marching camps is the so-called titulum — a segment of ditch with a rampart [defensive wall] located in front of the gate passages."

Two of the camps are located near the town of Aken; another camp is located near the town of Deersheim; and a fourth is located in the municipality of Trabitz, the statement said. The camps were discovered by amateur and professional archaeologists who used a combination of aerial and satellite imagery, as well as ground surveys and excavations to find and investigate the sites.

Metal detectors were used to help survey the camps, which led to the detection of more than 1,500 metal artifacts, many of them nails; some of them may have fallen off of sandals that Roman legionaries wore. Such nails, known as hobnails, likely provided traction for marching Roman legionary soldiers and auxiliaries.

The excavators also found coins that date to the second half of the second century and the early third century, discoveries that helped date the marching camps, the statement said. A number of radiocarbon dates confirmed this.

"Among the coin finds from Trabitz, a Caracalla denarius is the most recent discovery. It is therefore conceivable that the camp was established in connection with a campaign under [Roman emperor] Caracalla in 213 AD," the statement said. Historical records indicate that Caracalla's campaign in Germany was focused against a group referred to as the "Albanians" who may have lived along the Elbe River, the statement said.

Research into the marching camps is ongoing and may shed light on Caracalla's military campaign in Germany, the statement said.

Roman emperor quiz: Test your knowledge on the rulers of the ancient empire

"All I want is an income of 20,000 sesterces from secure investments", proclaims a character in a poem by Juvenal (first to second century A.D.), the Roman poet.

Today, 20,000 sesterces would be equivalent to about [Australian] $300,000 in interest from investments. Anyone would be very happy with this much passive annual income.

Like today, people in ancient times understood that investing money could help them consolidate and grow their wealth.

As the Roman novelist Petronius (first century A.D.) once wrote,

Whoever has money sails with a fair breeze, and governs his fortune as he wishes.

So, how exactly did ancient people invest their money?

A lofty house with hidden silver

In ancient Greek and Roman times, there was no stock market where you could buy and trade shares in a company.

If you wanted to invest your cash, one of the more popular options was to obtain gold or silver.

People did this to protect against currency fluctuations and inflation. They usually kept the metals either in bullion form or in the form of ware like jewelry. Storing these items could be risky and prone to theft.

The Roman poet Virgil (70 to 19 B.C.) describes the estate of a wealthy person that included "a lofty house, where talents of silver lie deeply hidden" alongside "weights of gold in bullion and in ware".

A talent was the largest unit of currency measurement in ancient Greece and Rome, equivalent to about 25 kg [55 pounds] of weighed silver.

Usually the metals were stored in a special vault or security cupboard.

The Roman writer Cicero (106 to 43 B.C.) recalls how a wealthy lady named Clodia would take gold (perhaps bars or ingots or plates) out of a security cupboard when she wished to lend money to someone. The gold could then be exchanged for coinage.

Market booms — and busts

The price of these metals could, however, occasionally be subject to unpredictable fluctuations and crashes in price, though less often than currency.

The Greek historian Polybius (c. 200 to 118 B.C.) says that when a new gold vein was discovered in Aquileia, Italy, only two feet deep, it caused a gold rush. The new material flooded the market too quickly and "the price of gold throughout Italy at once fell by one-third" after only two months. To stabilize the gold price, mining in the area was quickly monopolized and regulated.

When people wanted to trade precious metals, they would sell them by weight. If the gold or silver or bronze had been worked into jewelry or other objects, this could be melted down and turned into bullion.

People must have delighted in owning these precious metals.

The Athenian writer Xenophon (c. 430 to 350 B.C.) gives a clue about the mindset of ancient silver investors:

Silver is not like furniture, of which a man never buys more once he has got enough for his house. No one ever yet possessed so much silver as to want no more; if a man finds himself with a huge amount of it, he takes as much pleasure in burying the surplus as in using it.

A number of Roman wills reveal people leaving their heirs silver and gold in the form of bars, plates or ingots.

Commodities that could not be 'ruined by Jupiter'

Aside from metals, agricultural commodities were also very popular, especially grain, olive oil, and wine.

To profit from agricultural commodities, people bought farmland and traded the commodities on the market.

The Roman statesman Cato thought putting money into the production of essential goods was the safest investment. He said these things "could not be ruined by Jupiter" – in other words, they were resistant to unpredictable movements in the economy.

Whereas precious metals were a store of wealth, they generated no income unless they were sold. But a diversified portfolio of agricultural commodities guaranteed a permanent income.

People also invested and traded in precious goods, like artworks.

When the Romans sacked the city of Corinth in 146 B.C., they stole the city's collection of famous artwork, and later sold the masterpieces for huge sums of money at auction in order to bring profit for the Roman state.

At this auction, the King of Pergamon, Attalus II (220 to 138 B.C.), bought one of the paintings, by the master artist Aristeides of Thebes (fourth century B.C.), for the incredible sum of 100 talents (about 2,500 kg [5,500 pounds] of silver).

Eccentric emperors

Political instability or uncertainty sometimes raised the price of these metals.

The Greek historian Appian (secondnd century A.D.) records how during the Roman civil war in 32. to 30 B.C.:

the price of all commodities had risen, and the Romans ascribed the cause of this to the quarreling of the leaders whom they cursed.

Eccentric emperors might also impose new taxes or charges on commodities, or try to manipulate the market.

The Roman historian Suetonius (c. A.D. 69 to 122 ) tells us the emperor Caligula (A.D. 12 to 41) "levied new and unheard of taxes […] and there was no class of commodities or men on which he did not impose some form of tariff."

Another emperor, Vespasian (A.D. 17 to 79), went so far as to "buy up certain commodities merely in order to distribute them at profit", says Suetonius.

Clearly, investing in commodities 2,000 years ago could help build personal wealth — but also involved some risk, just like today.

This edited article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The ancient Romans are well known for their advanced water supply systems and hygienic facilities, including public baths and toilets. But the first baths built in Pompeii may not have been particularly pleasant, due to dirty, contaminated water that was replaced only once per day, according to a new study.

"It is very likely that the bathing experience in this small bathing facility was maybe not hygienic and hence not very inviting," study lead author Gül Sürmelihindi, a geoarchaeologist at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz in Germany, told Live Science in an email.

Sürmelihindi and colleagues analyzed the chemical compound calcium carbonate preserved in incrustations in the Republican Baths at Pompeii to investigate the composition of the water supply. Their study was published Monday (Jan. 12) in the journal PNAS.

Public baths were a key part of Roman culture, the researchers wrote in the study, and as the Roman Empire expanded, bathing culture also evolved. At the height of the Roman Empire, the Romans "built long-distance aqueducts in order to have their daily bathing and cleansing experience," Sürmelihindi said.

But in the earliest baths built at Pompeii, which were in use between about 130 and 30 B.C. during the Roman Republic, the situation was different. Before the city constructed an aqueduct, bathing facilities were filled with water from wells and cisterns via a single water-lifting machine that was operated by enslaved people.

"The water could not be replenished more than once a day," Sürmelihindi said. "In this setting, I would expect water to be less clean, especially before the bathing water was refreshed again."

To investigate the composition of the bath water during this time, the researchers studied samples of calcium carbonate, a mineral form of calcium. Calcium carbonate is produced when calcium ions in hard water react with carbonate ions, leading to limescale — a hard, chalky deposit that builds up in kettles, boilers and pipes.

The researchers found that the carbonate in the Republican Baths showed a strong decrease in carbon isotopes (variations of the element with different numbers of neutrons) between the well that supplied the water and the heated pools where people bathed. The lowest carbon isotope values were found in areas where the water drained, meaning the main cause was likely "the introduction of organic carbon from microbial activity and human waste (e.g., sweat, sebum, urine, bathing oil)," the researchers wrote.

"These baths were an experience we do not have nowadays," study co-author Cees Passchier, a geoarchaeologist at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, told Live Science in an email. "People would not use soap, but olive oil to rub in and scrape the dirt off, and some of that oil would land in the water."

The water in the heated pools of the Republican Baths shows "high contamination by human waste," suggesting that it was not replenished regularly and that it offered "poor hygienic conditions for the Pompeiian bathers," the researchers wrote.

The researchers also investigated heavy-metal contamination in the baths by analyzing traces of elements left there. In the Republican Baths, the team identified elevated levels of lead, a toxic element that was likely introduced through the lead-pipe system in the bathing complex. Over time, though, the gradual incrustation of the pipes with calcium carbonate would have reduced the water's lead level.

It's unclear whether the murky water would have kept people away.

"Everyone mixed in the baths, regardless of social class, and the price was low," Passchier said. But if the water was really gross and smelly, he said, the baths would not have had customers. "People probably did not spend much time in the warm pools, which were small, but mostly spent time sitting around in the warm air of the hot bath having a conversation," he said.

Pompeii quiz: How much do you know about the Roman town destroyed by Mount Vesuvius?