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Roman Soldier Rescue Mission, Thrift Store Dalí and More Unearthed Secrets

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A roundup of Secrets in the News for May 2021.

2,000-year-old skeleton identified as senior Roman soldier on Vesuvius rescue mission

NBC News: ROME — A 2,000-year-old skeleton belonged to a senior Roman soldier who was likely sent on a rescue mission to the doomed towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum as Mount Vesuvius erupted, scientists have discovered. Initially thought to be that of a regular solider, the skeleton was among 300 found at Herculaneum in the 1980s. But now researchers have concluded that it belonged to a high-ranking officer with a Roman fleet sent on a rescue mission to evacuate panic-stricken inhabitants running for their lives…[read more]

 

Thrift Store Wood Engraving Print Turns Out To Be Salvador Dalí Artwork

NPR: It’s pretty much the thrift store dream; to find a rare, long lost treasure on a crowded tchotchke shelf, on sale for a bargain price. That’s what happened at the Hotline Pink Thrift Shop in Kitty Hawk, N.C., when Wendy Hawkins came across an otherwise ignored piece of art. “One day I saw this, with a bunch of other paintings lined up on the floor, and I said ‘this is old, this is something special,’ ” Hawkins, who volunteers at the store twice a week, told WAVY TV. It was priced somewhere between $10 to $50 dollars…[read more]

 

It’s a golden age for Chinese archaeology — and the West is ignoring it

Washington Post: Early in April, news broke that a 3,000-year-old “lost golden city” had been uncovered in Luxor, Egypt. Described in some articles as the most important find since the 1922 discovery of the tomb of the boy king Tutankhamen, the city of Aten, founded sometime between 1391 and 1353 B.C. — during Egypt’s 18th dynasty — appears to have been the largest settlement of that era…[read more]

 

Archaeologists Say a Mystifying Group of Ancient Monuments in Saudi Arabia Suggests the Existence of a Prehistoric Cattle Cult

Artnet: A mysterious group of ancient monuments first discovered in Saudi Arabia in the 1970s, known as mustatials, predate the first Egyptian pyramids and Stonehenge by over 2,000 years, making them the world’s oldest ritual landscape, archaeologists now say. Scattered across 77,000 square miles of desert in northwest Arabia, the mustatils (the name comes from the Arabic word for “rectangle”) were built between 8,500 and 4,800 years ago, during the period known as the Middle Holocene, according to a report published last week in the journal Antiquity…[read more]

 

Forensic archaeologists begin to recover Spanish Civil War missing bodies

Heritage Daily: Forensic archaeologists and anthropologists from Cranfield University have started to recover the bodies of victims executed by the Franco regime at the end of the Spanish Civil War during an excavation in the Ciudad Real region of Spain. The team from Cranfield is working with partners from the University Complutense of Madrid (UCM) and social anthropologists from Mapas de Memoria (Maps of Memory) to search for, exhume and identify those executed and buried in the civil cemetery at Almagro…[read more]

 

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