Villagers installing a water pipe in southwestern Mexico stumbled onto an ancient granite statue depicting a player from a pre-Hispanic ball game, the national anthropology institute said Monday.
The stone had been sliced at the neck, like a decapitation, and buried in a ritual that was common at the time, the National Anthropologyand History Institute said in a statement.
There are indications that the 1.65-meter (5-foot-4) tall statue, which depicts a bow-legged ballplayer with his arms crossed, was built onto an I-shaped ball game field before it was buried and could be more than 1,000 years old.
A French archaeological mission from the French Institute for Archaeological Studies have unearthed a yet unidentified royal statue of a New Kingdom king during routine excavations at Monthu Temple, northeast of Karnak Temple in Luxor.
The statue is 125 centimetres tall and made of black granite and depicts a standing king wearing short dress with hands aside.
Christopher Tiers, head of the archaeological mission, said that early studies of the statue suggest that the artistic features of the depicted king confirm its royalty.
The statue is to be transferred to the storage facilities of the Ministry of State for Antiquities (MSA) for restoration and documentation. Tiers asserted that excavation at the site is in full swing in order to find any additional statues that may enable archaeologists to identify the New Kingdom king. Read more.
A 2,500-year-old statue of a woman from the late Hellenistic period has been unearthed during the excavations at the Metropolis ancient city in İzmir’s Torbalı district.
According to a written statement made by the Sabancı Foundation, new artifacts are being unearthed during the excavation of the ancient city, which has been ongoing for 22 years as part of a collaboration between the Culture and Tourism Ministry, Trakya University, the Metropolis Association, the Torbalı Municipality and sponsored by the Sabancı Foundation.
The head of the excavations, Trakya University Archaeology Department Associate Professor Serdar Aynek, said the headless, dressed, female statue was found buried in the city wall and that the statue reflected the richness and magnificence of the late Hellenistic period in its 2-meter length. Read more.
The narrative was, perhaps, just a little too good to be true. When news broke last month of the so-called “buddha from space” – a swastika-emblazoned statue, apparently 1,000 years old, that had been carved out of a meteorite and looted by a Nazi ethnologist – the world was enthralled.
There were only, it turns out, a few slight catches. According to two experts who have since given their verdict on the mysterious Iron Man, it may have been a European counterfeit; it was probably made at some point in the 20th century; and it may well not have been looted by the Nazis. The bit about the meteorite, though, still stands.
According to Buddhism specialist Achim Bayer, the statue bears 13 features which are easily identifiable by experts as “pseudo-Tibetan” – and which sit uneasily with speculation by researchers last month that it was probably made in the 11th-century pre-Buddhist Bon culture. Read more.
HOHHOT — Archaeologists of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences have reconstituted a 5,300-year-old pottery statue from fragments unearthed in north China’s Inner Mongolia autonomous region, it was announced on Saturday.
The debris of the pottery statue was found at the Xinglonggou relics site in Aohan banner of Chifeng city in May, Xinhua news agency reported.
Experts began to excavate the debris on June 30 and using 65 fragments finished piecing the status together on Friday, said Liu Guoxiang, head of an archaeology team of Inner Mongolia.
The restored seated figure is 55-cm high and has a vivid facial expression with bulging eyes.
“The statue may be of a wizard or leader during the Ho
The icon of Rome’s foundation, a life-size bronze statue of a she-wolf with two human infants suckling her, is about 1,700 years younger than its city, Rome’s officials admitted on Saturday.
The official announcement, made at the Capitoline Museums, where the 30 inch-high bronze is the centerpiece of a dedicated room, quashes the belief that the sculpture was adopted by the earliest Romans as a symbol for their city.
“The new dating ranges between 1021 e il 1153,” said Lucio Calcagnile, who carried radiocarbon tests at the University of Salento’s Center for Dating e Diagnostics.
Recalling the story of a she-wolf which fed Romulus, the legendary founder of Rome, and his twin brother, Remus, after they had been thrown in a basket into the Tiber River, the so called “Lupa Capitolina” (Capitoline she-wolf) was donated to the museum in 1471 by Pope Sixtus IV. Read more.
A Bulgarian businessman has donated an absolutely unique Ancient Thracian statue to the Archaeology Museum in Bulgaria’s Black Sea city of Varna.
The statue of the so called Thracian Horseman, also known as Thracian Heros, the supreme deity of the Ancient Thracians, was presented at a news conference inVarna Monday.
The statue in question was donated to the Varna Archaeological Museum by a local businessman, Georgi Bonin, who found it in a house that he inherited from his family in the village of Brestovitsa, Plovdiv District, that he was clearing in order to sell it.
The Thracian Horseman statue, which is dated to the end of 2nd and beginning of the 3rd century, was discovered in several pieces, and Bonin took it to the VarnaArchaeological Museum where it has been put together and restored.
“When I found out how precious it is, I decided that the only place for this statue is in the museum,” Bonin explained Monday, as cited by BGNES. Read more.
A small bronze statue dating back nearly 2,000 years may be that of a female gladiator, a victorious one at that, suggests a new study.
If confirmed the statue would represent only the second depiction of a woman gladiator known to exist.
The gladiator statue shows a topless woman, wearing only a loincloth and a bandage around her left knee. Her hair is long, although neat, and in the air she raises what the researcher, Alfonso Manas of the University of Granada, believes is a sica, a short curved sword used by gladiators. The gesture she gives is a “salute to the people, to the crowd,” Manas said, an action done by victorious gladiators at the end of a fight.
The female fighter is looking down at the ground, presumably at her fallen opponent.
The “precise real-life” details of the statue suggest the depiction was inspired by an actual person, a real woman who fought, Manas told LiveScience in an interview. Read more.
