Anyone buying jewelry for the first time (or the second, or the third), is bound to experience sticker shock. Walk into any major jeweler and even the most nondescript silver bauble can cost thousands of dollars. Unfortunately, astronomical prices don’t always mean exclusivity—there’s a chance you’ll see the necklace you bought on two other people before you’ve left the store.
Those odds become a lot longer when your necklace is 3,000 years old. Sometimes the best jewelry store isn’t a store but an auction house.
How are antiquities like this available to the public and not behind lucite in a museum? Start with provenance. Read more.
Though separated by a thousand years, two newfound “emergency hoards” from Israel—including gold jewelry and coins—may have been hidden by ancient families fleeing unknown dangers, archaeologists say.
Revealed late last month, these 3,000-year-old rings (foreground) and earrings, from the older hoard, were found in a ceramic jug among the ruins of a house. Though unearthed in 2010, the vessel concealed its cargo until late last year, when scientists began molecular analysis of the contents.
“This is really a very impressive piece,” Finkelstein said of this golden earring adorned with ibex, or wild goats.
These fractured ceramic fragments concealed the Megiddo treasure hoard for some 3,000 years. But the container itself, Finkelstein said, was originally hidden in plain sight.
“They simply put the hoard in the vessel, put the vessel in the corner of a room, and covered it with two bowls—and that’s it,” he said. More.
A spectacular 2,000 year-old gold and silver hoard was uncovered in an archaeological excavation conducted by the Israel Antiquities Authority in the Qiryat Gat region.
A rich and extraordinary hoard that includes jewelry and silver and gold coins from the Roman period was recently exposed in a salvage excavation in the vicinity of Qiryat Gat. The treasure trove comprising some 140 gold and silver coins together with gold jewelry was probably hidden by a wealthy lady at a time of impending danger during the Bar Kokhba Revolt.
Researchers from Tel Aviv University have recently discovered a collection of gold and silver jewelry, dated from around 1100 B.C., hidden in a vessel at the archaeological site of Tel Megiddo in the Jezreel Valley in northern Israel. One piece — a gold earring decorated with molded ibexes, or wild goats — is “without parallel,” they believe.
According to Prof. Israel Finkelstein of TAU’s Department of Archaeology and Near Eastern Cultures, the vessel was found in 2010, but remained uncleaned while awaiting a molecular analysis of its content. When they were finally able to wash out the dirt, pieces of jewelry, including a ring, earrings, and beads, flooded from the vessel. Prof. Finkelstein is the co-director of the excavation of Tel Megiddo along with Professor Emeritus David Ussishkin of Tel Aviv University and Associate Director Prof. Eric Cline of George Washington University in Washington, D.C. Read more.
The discovery suggests an expedition led by conquistador Hernando de Soto ventured far off its presumed course—which took the men from Florida to Missouri—and engaged in ceremonies in a thatched, pyramid-like temple.
The discovery could redraw the map of de Soto’s 1539-41 march into North America, where he hoped to replicate Spain’s overthrow of the Inca Empire inSouth America. There, the conquistador had served at the side of leader Francisco Pizarro.
A continent and five centuries away, an excavation organized by Atlanta’s Fernbank Museum of Natural History found buried glass beads, iron tools, and brass and silver ornaments dating to the mid-1500s. The southern-Georgia location—where they’d been searching for a 17th-century Spanish mission—came to be called the Glass Site. Read more.
The archaeological excavations at the Bulgarian Black Sea Kaliakra cape have been renewed at the beginning of August, immediately yielding more artifacts.
The information was reported by the Head of the archeological team, Boni Pertunova, from the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (BAS).
Until now, the researchers have already discovered 20 gold objects – mostly jewelry as well as silver jewelry. They were located inside a necropolis and date from the 12th-14th century. The most interesting find has been a golden earing with two exquisite pearls, Petrunova explains.
43 tombs have been found in the area of the so-called Church 2 in Kaliakra. The most precious find there is a stamp with the portrait of the Virgin Mary, discovered on August 15th, the very same day when the Christian world celebrates the Dormition of Mary. The stamp also has the monogram of its owner – a wealthy, prominent person. Read more.
The 32,000-year-old human remains reveal incriminating cut marks.
Early humans wore jewelry and likely practiced cannibalism, suggest remains of the earliest known Homo sapiens from southeastern Europe.
The remains, described in PLoS One, date to 32,000 years ago and represent the oldest direct evidence for anatomically modern humans in a well-documented context. The human remains are also the oldest known for our species in Europe to show post-mortem cut marks.
“Our observations indicate a post-mortem treatment of human corpses including the selection of the skull,” co-author Stephane Pean, a paleozoologist and archaeologist at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, told Discovery News. “We demonstrate that this treatment was not for nutritional purposes, according to comparison with game butchery treatment, so it is not a dietary cannibalism.”
Instead, Pean said that he and his colleagues believe that the “observed treatment of the human body, together with the presence of body ornaments, indicates rather a mortuary ritual: either a ritual cannibalism or a specific mortuary practice for secondary disposal.” Read more.
VIENNA — A trove of medieval jewelry and other precious objects found by a man working in his backyard includes pieces made for a royal court and may be worth as much as 100,000 euros ($150,000) government experts said Monday.
The officials from Austria’s department of national antiquities and the Academy of Sciences said they were only at the beginning of their investigation into the provenance and other details of the find.
“We have in front of us high-end products (made) for the highest consumer class of Central Europe” of the Middle Ages, academy member Thomas Kuehtreiber told reporters as security guards lifted a black velvet cloth from a glass case to reveal some of the rarer pieces. Read more.
