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Mysteries of Archeology and History, New York, NY (2026)

06/19/2026

Phaselis: The 2,700-Year-Old Ancient City Where Travelers Swim Through History

Phaselis ancient city is one of the most unusual archaeological destinations on Türkiye’s Mediterranean coast, not because its ruins stand apart from nature, but because they seem to grow directly out of it. Set near Tekirova in Antalya’s Kemer district, the ancient port lies between pine-covered slopes, the Beydağları mountains, and three sheltered bays that once made the city a maritime power.

For modern travelers, Phaselis offers something few ancient cities can: the chance to walk along a Roman street, pass aqueducts and agoras, then step into the same turquoise waters that carried merchants, soldiers, and sailors more than two thousand years ago. This is not only a visit to a ruin. It is a place where swimming can feel like moving through history.

Ancient sources and official museum information place the foundation of Phaselis around 691/690 BC, when settlers from Lindos on the island of Rhodes established a colony on this strategic coastal point. Its location was no accident. The city sat on major maritime routes linking the Aegean, Egypt, Phoenicia, and the wider eastern Mediterranean.

The three natural harbors were the key to its rise. In antiquity, harbors were not simply places to anchor ships. They were the gates through which a city exchanged goods, ideas, people, and power. Phaselis had an advantage that few cities could match: multiple protected anchorages on a compact peninsula, with access to both local resources and long-distance trade.

This geography helped turn Phaselis into one of the important port cities of the Lycian coast. Although it stood at the meeting point of Lycian, Pamphylian, and Greek cultural zones, its identity was strongly maritime. Coins, inscriptions, and the layout of the settlement all point to a city whose daily life was shaped by ships, cargo, merchants, and the rhythm of the sea.

06/19/2026

Mysterious 2,500-Year-Old Holes Across Denmark Leave Archaeologists Searching for Answers

Across Denmark, rows of shallow holes cut through the landscape like traces of a forgotten plan. They are not graves, not ordinary postholes, and not simple refuse pits. Known in Danish as hulbælter, or “hole belts,” these long bands of spaced pits have puzzled archaeologists for decades. Now, a new experimental archaeology project is trying to answer a basic question: what did these thousands of Iron Age holes actually do?

The phenomenon dates to the early Pre-Roman Iron Age, around 500–300 BC. The features can run for hundreds of meters and sometimes for several kilometers. Individual pits are usually only about 30 to 40 centimeters deep, but together they form belts three to six meters wide. Nearly 50 examples have been identified across Denmark, especially in central and western Jutland, with others known on Funen and Lolland. Earlier research has noted that these pit-zone alignments are unusually concentrated in Denmark, although isolated parallels are known in Sweden and the Netherlands.

At the Saxo Institute at the University of Copenhagen, associate professor Henriette Lyngstrøm has gathered 30 archaeology students to move the debate from theory into the soil. Instead of asking only why the holes were dug, the team is rebuilding a hole belt from scratch: shaping tools, digging with reconstructed wooden spades, comparing them with modern spades, recording labor, and testing how the feature behaves.

The work is taking place in front of the Iron Age village at Sagnlandet Lejre, where ancient techniques can be tested at full scale. Some aspects of the past are not visible in a plan drawing. They emerge only when bodies, tools, soil, time, weather, and coordination are forced into the same experiment.

06/18/2026

New Study Links Göbekli Tepe’s Vulture Stone to Europe’s Trypillia Culture

A new study compares the carved symbolism of Göbekli Tepe’s Vulture Stone with ritual imagery from the Trypillia culture, suggesting that early farming societies in Anatolia and Eastern Europe may have shared cosmological ideas about time, death, sacred space and the movement of the heavens.

At Göbekli Tepe, the famous Vulture Stone has never been easy to read. Its carved birds, snakes, scorpion, abstract signs and headless human figure have inspired competing interpretations for decades. Was it a scene of death ritual, an astronomical code, a mythic narrative, or something more complex? A new study argues that the answer may not lie in choosing one explanation over another, but in seeing the pillar as part of a wider symbolic system linking architecture, timekeeping and cosmology across early farming societies.

The study, published in the International Journal of Culture and History by Oleksandr Zavalii, focuses on the cosmological aspects of Göbekli Tepe’s T-shaped stelae and compares them with religious symbolism from the Trypillia culture of Ukraine. Its central claim is cautious but ambitious: the carvings at Göbekli Tepe may preserve not isolated symbols, but a structured sacred language involving solar cycles, lunar rhythms, animal imagery, geometry and sacred space.

Göbekli Tepe, dated to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic period, roughly 9600 to 8200 BCE, already occupies a special place in archaeology as one of the earliest known monumental ritual landscapes. Zavalii’s paper revisits several pillars, especially Stele 43, known as the Vulture Stone, along with Steles 33, 18, 20 and 1. Rather than treating the carvings as decoration, the study reads them as components of a broader visual grammar.

On Stele 43, the upper register includes bird figures, three arch-like forms, a central circle, rectangular elements and H-shaped signs. The lower register contains animals more closely associated with the earth or underworld, including a scorpion, snake, boar, waterfowl and a headless human figure. Zavalii suggests that this division may reflect a two-level cosmos, with celestial imagery above and chthonic or mortal imagery below.

06/18/2026

2,100-Year-Old Funerary Stele from Ancient Antioch Reveals a Woman Portrayed Like the City’s Goddess Tyche

A 2,100-year-old funerary stele discovered in ancient Antioch is shedding new light on how women of the Late Hellenistic period were remembered after death, and how local identity was shaped through the image of one of the city’s most powerful divine symbols.

The marble monument was found in 2017 during rescue excavations in Antakya, in Türkiye’s Hatay province, within the necropolis area of Antioch on the Orontes. Now preserved in the Hatay Archaeology Museum, the stele has been examined in detail by Murat Çekilmez, Nilay İğrek, and Ali Çelikay in a new typological and iconographic study published in OLBA.

The artifact is largely intact despite minor cracks, erosion, and missing sections. Carved from fine-grained white marble, it measures 76 centimeters high and takes the form of a schematic naiskos, a small temple-like architectural frame commonly used in Hellenistic funerary monuments. Its upper section includes acroteria, a plain pediment, and an undecorated architrave, while the central relief panel preserves a carefully arranged scene with two female figures.

The most striking figure appears on the right side of the relief. She is seated on a covered wooden diphros and shown larger and more carefully worked than the standing woman opposite her. Researchers identify her as the deceased, most likely a woman named Antigona, based on the two-line Greek inscription preserved below the scene.

06/17/2026

Scientists Find a Fiji Island That May Have Been Built from Ancient Food Waste

A Fiji shell island surrounded by mangroves may not be a natural landform at all. New geoarchaeological research suggests that a low island off Culasawani, on the northern coast of Vanua Levu, was gradually built from ancient seafood waste, pottery fragments, and the repeated labor of people who processed shellfish there more than a thousand years ago.

The site covers about 3,000 square meters and rises only modestly above the tide. At first glance, it could pass for a coastal feature shaped by waves, sediment, and mangrove growth. But its internal structure tells a stranger story. Researchers found that the island is made up largely of shell material, with shell-rich deposits accounting for roughly 70 to 90 percent of its makeup in places.

Radiocarbon dating places the main formation of the deposit around 760 CE, with dated samples ranging from about 420 to 1040 CE. If the interpretation is correct, the Culasawani site may be the first described “midden island” in the tropical Pacific east of the Bismarck Archipelago in Papua New Guinea.

The first clues did not come from a deep trench or a laboratory result. They came from crabs.

When researchers first noticed the site in 2017, burrowing mud crabs had already brought pieces of shell and pottery to the surface from depths of about 30 to 50 centimeters. That detail mattered. The shells were not simply scattered across the top of the ground. They formed the body of the island itself.

Two fieldwork phases followed in 2024. Researchers mapped the site, drilled 20 hand-auger cores, and excavated several 1-by-1-meter test pits. The results showed a relatively uniform shell-dense deposit, usually 20 to 40 centimeters thick, sitting above a harder coastal platform.

06/17/2026

Rare Mithras Sanctuary in Croatia Challenges Long-Held Views of Roman Mystery Cult Worship

A Mithras sanctuary in Croatia may force scholars to rethink one of the Roman Empire’s most distinctive mystery cults, after a new study found that worshippers at Močići likely gathered not in a dark, enclosed temple, but in an open-air rocky clearing shaped by a cave, a spring, and the local Dalmatian landscape.

The study, published in the Journal of Roman Archaeology by Ian S. Wilson of Harvard University and Matthew McCarty of the University of British Columbia, reexamines a little-studied Mithraic site in the hills above ancient Epidaurum, near modern Cavtat on Croatia’s Adriatic coast. Their findings suggest that the sanctuary does not fit the standard model of a mithraeum, the distinctive temple space associated with the worship of Mithras across the Roman world.

For more than a century, Mithraic sanctuaries have usually been understood as enclosed, elongated halls. They typically had benches or raised podia along the sides, a central passage, and a cult image of Mithras slaying the bull placed at the far end of the room. These spaces were often interpreted as controlled ritual environments where small groups reclined, shared meals, and performed mystery rites. Močići does something different.

The site was first described in 1883 by archaeologist Arthur Evans, who noted a rock-cut relief of Mithras above the mouth of a limestone grotto containing a natural spring. Despite that early notice, the sanctuary had never been fully excavated, planned, or studied in three dimensions.

Wilson and McCarty returned to the site with modern documentation methods, including Structure-from-Motion photogrammetry. By creating a three-dimensional model from photographs and measurements, they were able to examine how the carved relief, cave, spring, and surrounding clearing worked together as a ritual space.

What they found is striking. There is no evidence for a built temple. No walls, no roof cuts, no postholes, no Roman roof tiles, and no carved dining benches were identified around the main space. The cave itself is also too small to function like a conventional mithraeum. Its usable area is about 17.7 square meters, far below the average main cult room of a Mithraic sanctuary, and too cramped for the reclining communal meals usually associated with the cult.

06/16/2026

Anatolia’s Lost Language Sidetic Moves Closer to Decipherment as Ancient Side Alphabet Expands to 31 Letters

A lost Anatolian language once spoken in the ancient city of Side is beginning to give up more of its secrets. New research on Sidetic inscriptions from the Mediterranean port city has expanded the known alphabet from 26 to 31 letters, giving scholars fresh material to study one of the region’s most elusive ancient languages.

The newly identified letters come from ongoing work on inscriptions uncovered at Side Ancient City in Antalya’s Manavgat district. Excavation director Prof. Dr. Feriştah Alanyalı and linguists Michaela Zinko and Alfredo Rizza are examining bilingual and multi-line texts that may finally help researchers read Sidetic more clearly after decades of uncertainty.

Sidetic is known from a limited number of inscriptions and coins, most of them connected with Side, an important Pamphylian port city. Scholars generally place it within the ancient Anatolian branch of Indo-European languages, alongside languages such as Lycian and Carian, though its full structure remains difficult to reconstruct because the surviving material is so scarce.

“The inscriptions are few, and most are very short”
Alanyalı said the greatest obstacle is not the alphabet alone, but the limited amount of readable material.

“In recent years, we have found new inscriptions written in Sidetic during the excavations,” she said. “The language still cannot be fully read or understood. The reason is that the number of inscriptions is low, and the existing ones are usually only one or two lines long. This makes decipherment very difficult for researchers.”

That picture has begun to change. According to Alanyalı, the discovery of bilingual inscriptions and longer texts, some reaching 30 to 40 lines, has created new possibilities.

“Both bilingual inscriptions and multi-line inscriptions found in recent years have once again raised hopes,” she said.

For a language like Sidetic, bilingual texts are especially valuable. They allow researchers to compare an unknown script with a better-understood language, often Greek, and identify repeated names, titles, formulaic phrases, or place names. Sidetic is known from Greek-Sidetic bilingual inscriptions as well as coin legends, and earlier scholarship used such material to begin assigning values to the script.

06/16/2026

2,200-Year-Old Zapotec Lunar Calendar Decoded at Monte Albán, Predating Maya Records by 857 Years

The oldest known lunar day count in Mesoamerica may have been hiding in plain sight on the carved stones of Monte Albán.

Researchers have decoded a long-debated Zapotec symbol known as “Glyph W,” revealing that it recorded the visible age of the moon more than 2,200 years ago. The discovery places a series of Zapotec calendrical records between 496 and 221 BCE, making them 857 years older than the earliest known Maya lunar count.

For nearly a century, scholars knew the sign mattered, but not exactly how. Now a study by John Justeson of the University at Albany, SUNY, and Justin Patrick Lowry of SUNY Plattsburgh argues that Glyph W counted the evenings since the first crescent moon appeared after the new moon. In doing so, it turns several stone inscriptions from Monte Albán into some of the earliest written evidence for lunar astronomy in the ancient Americas.

Glyph W was first identified by Mexican archaeologist Alfonso Caso in 1928, but its meaning remained unresolved for nearly a century. Earlier explanations tried to connect the sign with the 260-day divinatory calendar or the 365-day Mesoamerican year. The new study argues that those interpretations do not fit the surviving data.

Justeson and Lowry reached a different conclusion after examining fully preserved inscriptions that combine three elements: a date in the 260-day divinatory calendar, a year name within the 52-year Calendar Round, and Glyph W followed by a numerical coefficient written with bars and dots.

06/15/2026

1,700-Year-Old Roman Bridge Discovered Beneath the Aare River in Solothurn, Switzerland

A Roman bridge in Solothurn, Switzerland, long suspected by archaeologists but never proven through physical remains, has finally been confirmed beneath the waters of the Aare River.

During an underwater archaeological survey ahead of the renewal of the SBB railway bridge, divers working for the Cantonal Archaeology Office of Solothurn identified wooden piles embedded in the riverbed near the Wengi Bridge. Samples from the timbers have now been dated to the fourth century AD, placing them in the late Roman period, when ancient Solothurn, known as Salodurum, was being reshaped into a fortified settlement.

The find gives archaeologists the first material proof of a Roman-era river crossing at a location that had long seemed almost inevitable. For years, scholars suspected that a bridge must have stood here. Now, after roughly 1,700 years underwater, part of its structure has been found.

The remains lie a few meters upstream from the modern Wengi Bridge, around ten meters from the southern bank of the Aare. Divers documented a short line of piles, nearly two meters long, running in the direction of the current. The timbers probably belonged to a bridge pier, or pile bent, which once supported the upper structure and roadway.

The surviving posts are modest in size today, but their significance is far larger than their appearance suggests. Some are preserved to a height of about one meter and have a diameter of roughly 20 centimeters. Their dating confirms that they were part of a late Roman construction phase, not a later crossing.

06/15/2026

Were Two Medieval Women Buried Together in Poland Lovers? DNA Reveals They Were Not Family

A medieval grave discovered beside the Cathedral of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross in Opole, Poland, has revealed one of the most unusual burial stories yet documented from the region. Two adults, laid to rest close together in what appeared to be an embrace, have now been identified through ancient DNA analysis as two women who were not closely related.

The discovery is significant because it marks the first genetically confirmed medieval burial in Poland involving two individuals of the same s*x. It does not provide a simple answer about who the women were to each other. Instead, it opens a more difficult and more interesting question: what kind of relationship was strong enough for a medieval community to bury two unrelated women together?

The burial was found during archaeological work near the walls of Opole’s medieval cathedral. From the beginning, the grave drew attention because of the position of the bodies. One individual had been placed in a more conventional burial posture, while the other lay in an unusual position, close enough to create the impression of physical closeness.

Researchers found no evidence of violence, no sign of a rushed burial, and no indication that the grave had been filled carelessly. This matters. In medieval Christian burial practice, adults were usually buried individually, especially in formal cemetery contexts. A shared grave therefore demands explanation, particularly when the arrangement appears deliberate rather than accidental.

The location also adds weight to the find. Burial near a cathedral was not an ordinary choice. Such places were often associated with status, religious importance, or strong ties to the local community. These two women were not treated as outcasts. Their grave suggests that someone made a conscious decision to place them together in a meaningful setting.

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