Archaeologists have identified previously unknown buildings, fortifications, tombs, and water systems at the ancient city of Butrint in southern Albania.

A new laser survey has revealed structures concealed by dense vegetation, including a possible public building near the Roman Forum and a church with three apses.

One of the Mediterranean’s most extensively studied ancient cities has yielded a series of unexpected discoveries. At Butrint, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in southern Albania, archaeologists have identified monumental structures that had escaped documentation for decades, including a large building that may have stood alongside the city’s Roman Forum.

The discoveries suggest that significant parts of Butrint’s ancient urban landscape remain unexplored, even a century after modern archaeological investigations began.

The findings were announced on October 26 by the University of Bologna, whose archaeological mission works in partnership with the Archaeological Institute of Tirana.

Using drone-mounted laser technology and ground surveys, the team identified previously unknown buildings, defensive walls, water installations and burials both within the archaeological park and in the surrounding hills.

Diane and Arlen Chase have spent a good portion of their lives uncovering the once-great city of Caracol. Their groundbreaking research is rewriting everything we thought we knew about the Maya

Archaeologists once considered Caracol a minor site barely worth their time, but its remoteness turned out to be an asset. Other Maya strongholds like Tikal in Guatemala and Chichén Itzá in Mexico were first encountered by European colonists in the 19th century.

Caracol, hidden in dense tropical forest, had barely been excavated when the Chases arrived in the 1980s. Over the following decades their painstaking work exploded a number of misleading myths about the Maya. For centuries, most scholarly assumptions about this ancient civilization came from the writings of Friar Diego de Landa, a 16th-century Spaniard who lived as a missionary among the Maya communities in the Yucatán.

By his own account, de Landa burned most of the Maya’s hieroglyphic codices. “ These people also used certain characters or letters, with which they wrote in their books about the antiquities and their sciences ” de Landa wrote in Yucatán Before and After the Conquest.

“ We found a great number of books in these letters, and since they contained nothing but superstitions and falsehoods of the devil, we burned them all, which they took most grievously, and which gave them great pain .” As American scholar William Gates wrote, introducing his English translation of de Landa’s writings, the bishop “ burned 99 times as much knowledge of Maya history and sciences as he has given us .”

De Landa falsely portrayed the Maya as largely an impoverished rural peasantry lorded over by a ruthless aristocracy who dwelled in monumental cities. “ The Spanish imposed their worldview on everything over here " Arlen said.

“ And if you look back at Spain in the 1500s, what are you dealing with? You had knights and nobles in castles, and everyone else was scattered throughout the countryside. The Spaniards slapped that two-class model onto the Maya. ”

By the time Arlen and Diane were in graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1970s, more was known about the ancient culture—for instance, that the Maya had designed one of the world’s most sophisticated calendars and held a deep understanding of astronomy, mathematics and architecture.

But most scholars saw the Maya as peaceful stargazers so absorbed by gauzy ceremonial pursuits that they neglected certain practical concerns. In the influential 1954 book The Rise and Fall of Maya Civilization, British archaeologist J. Eric S. Thompson wondered how the Maya were able to “ chart the heavens yet fail to grasp the principle of the wheel; to visualize eternity as no other semi-civilized people has ever done, yet ignore the short step from corbeled to true arch; to count in millions yet never learn to weigh a sack of corn. ”

Anthropologists believed that Maya cities had been near-empty husks, with a dispersed, rural population who ventured into town only for occasional ceremonies, or to serve elites. Arlen and Diane challenged this conventional wisdom. In 1979, four years after they were married, they set off for a six-year stint at Santa Rita Corozal, a Maya site in Belize just south of the Mexican border.

As they excavated residential areas, they found that many non-elites had owned tools made of obsidian, a dark, glassy stone found only in distant volcanic regions. Scholars at the time assumed that Maya elites had total control over ancient economies and distributed goods directly to specific people. But the sheer number of non-elites in Santa Rita who had this imported material made it unlikely that elites were bestowing obsidian directly to those households as gifts or rewards.

A more plausible explanation was that Santa Rita was an important trading junction, between the coastline and two rivers, and that residents had market access to imported goods like obsidian, jade, ceramics and shells.

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Vedeler also argues that the well-known carved animal heads found in the grave may be connected to this possible bed.

“We actually know very little about it. What we can say is that they were found in each corner of this huge accumulation of down,” she says.

One of the animal heads from the Oseberg grave. It is called the Lion's Head. (Photo: Kirsten Helgeland / Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo / CC BY-SA 4.0)

The animal heads were found in the burial chamber, tied together with rope, Vedeler wrote in this article.

It is therefore possible that the unknown women in the grave were laid on a huge mattress filled with down. Remnants of what could be a plant-based fabric were also found, which could have been the mattress cover, according to Vedeler.

Much of this is speculation.

Although a great deal of the Oseberg Ship and the objects in the grave were so well-preserved that even the down survived over a thousand years in the soil, the grave had been heavily disturbed.

Archaeologists digging through an ancient burial complex on Peru’s desert coast stumbled upon a dog mummy that looked almost too well preserved to be ancient. Its skeleton was nearly complete, and even its skin was still intact. They initially thought this was a relatively recent burial, perhaps dating to the looting that had ravaged the site some 50 years earlier.

But radiocarbon analysis showed that dog hadn’t been buried 50 years ago. It had been dead for roughly 1.200 years.

The animal had lived sometime between 688 and 870 CE, when the Wari Empire ruled much of what is now Peru, centuries before the rise of the Incas.

By examining its skin and an unusual pattern of missing teeth, researchers traced it to an ancient form of the Peruvian hairless dog, a distinctive breed still found in Peru today. And it wasn’t alone. Dozens of other canine remains were found scattered across the burial complex.

Archaeologists have excavated and dated one of the Sahara's stone "antenna" tombs. The burial inside is between 4,100 and 4,400 years old and holds a young adult laid to rest with four ostrich eggshell beads.

On a gravel plain in northern Western Sahara, with no shade for miles, there is a heap of stones 54.5 meters (179 feet) long.

Two rows of stone slabs run out from it like the arms of a V that never quite closes. Archaeologists call these rows “antennae”, and the monuments antennae tumuli (a tumulus is simply a mound of piled earth or stone).

They are common in Western Sahara and well beyond it, from the Atlantic coast to the heart of the Sahara.

Almost nobody had excavated one, though, so two basic questions had no answer: what were they for, and when were they built?

Following the collapse of mainland Iberian Copper Age networks under the stress of the 4.2-kiloyear BP aridification event, the architectural impulse to fortify and defend shifted offshore. This chapter examines the "Architecture of Anxiety" across the central Mediterranean islands, the Balearics, Corsica, Sardinia, Sicily, and Malta. By analysing these insular environments, this study dismantles the outdated Diffusionist Theory of a single "megalithic missionary," proving instead that the widespread construction of cyclopean walls, rock-cut cliff tombs, and monumental temples was a process of convergent evolution. Driven by the shared pressures of the Holocene Arid Climax and the escalating stakes of the prehistoric maritime prestige economy, local populations engineered unique architectural dialects. From the towering corbelled nuraghi of Sardinia to the water-hoarding temple silos of Malta, this chapter demonstrates how prehistoric island societies weaponized geology and ideology to survive an increasingly hostile and competitive Bronze Age world.

Sorry Redditors, this article is far too long to reproduce here but you can read it at

https://nuttersworld.com/megalithic-phenomenon/mediterranean-islands/

So, grab a nice cup of tea, settle down and have a good read this weekend.