The History Blog

The grave of a Celtic woman buried with an unusual animal offering and rich jewelry has been discovered in Senden, in the German state of Bavaria. The remains of a lamb or kid, which were typically not left in graves as food offerings, raises new questions about the funerary rituals of the Celts of central Europe.

The grave was unearthed in a 2024 excavation at the site of a planned industrial park. The excavation uncovered traces of settlement from the Celtic Iron Age to the Roman Imperial era, but the grave was the most striking find. It contained the skeletal remains of an adult woman wearing valuable jewelry: a matching pair of heavy bronze anklets and a rare arm ring made of sapropelite, a dark, jet-like rock formed from fine organic mud that has hardened and mineralized over millions of years. Iron Age Celts carved and polished it for jewelry, usually bangle bracelets.

The remains have not been absolutely dated yet, but the two anklets are knotted ring bracelets, a type of jewelry produced by the La Tène culture between 380 and 250 B.C.

Dr. Stefanie Berg, who leads the ground monument department at the BLfD, calls the woman’s grave an outstanding single find. She says the grave sits inside a much bigger story. Her team documented traces of settlement across the dig area, running from the Celtic period into the Roman imperial age. Finds like these, she says, show the region served as busy living space for thousands of years. The grave is one point in a long record of people living and working on the same ground.

A prehistoric battle-axe head discovered in 1974 at Scarthingwell, near Tadcaster in North Yorkshire, has been temporarily blocked from export to give museums and local collectors a chance to buy it and keep it in the UK where it can be on public display. It is more than 4,000 years old, dating to the Bronze Age.

The battle-axe provides valuable insight into the role these objects played in expressing status, identity and changing ways of life in Neolithic and Bronze Age Britain. It also has significant research potential, offering future generations an opportunity to learn more about this period of our shared national history.

Discovered by accident during construction work but only reported to the Portable Antiquities Scheme in 2012, the axe head is made of diorite, a hard igneous rock with a distinctive mottled pattern. It has curved edges, a central hole for the handle and highly polished surface that emphasizes the natural pattern in the stone. It is in exceptional condition.

According to Tim Pestell, member of the Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art and Objects of Cultural Interest (RCEWA), cutting a hard stone like this into a tapered shape with a central hole and then polishing it to a bright shine would have required hundreds of hours of hard work. The emphasis on aesthetics in the production of the piece suggest it was not just a utilitarian device.

In a profound period of change, the Early Bronze Age witnessed a society previously restricted to flint tool technology adopting metalwork. Despite this, battle axes became some of the most powerful symbolic objects, labelled by one scholar as ‘blunt instruments of power’. Made of stone rather than metal, they conveyed important social, sacred and political messages.

The axe head’s outstanding connection the British history, aesthetic significance and importance to the study of artifacts like it meets the first, second and third of the Waverley criteria used by the committee to make its determination. On the recommendation of RCEWA, Heritage Minister Baroness Twycross imposed a temporary export bar on the prehistoric artefact. Potential purchasers have until December 22 to make a good faith effort to raise the funds to acquire the axe head for the recommended price of £15,000 ($16,700).

The  has been discovered at the Huaca de la Luna archaeological site in northern Peru. The tomb dates to the 6th or 7th century. It contains the skeletal remains of a small child who was no more than two years at time of death. The sex could not be determined from the initial osteological examination, but he or she was someone important.

Huaca de la Luna (Temple of the Moon) was one of two religious complexes in the ancient capital of the Moche culture, today known as Cerro Blanco, built less than three miles from the modern-day city of Trujillo and from the Pacific Coast. From the 3rd to the 9th century, Moche architects built platforms out of adobe blocks (huacas), then ritually filled them in, encased them in adobe blocks and built platforms on top of them. At least six phases of construction have been identified in the capital, using millions of adobe blocks. The increasingly enormous platforms were connected to each other by an intricate network of ramps and plazas, and smaller platforms were built next to the major huacas.

The team unearthed the tomb inside the Uhle Platform at the Huacas de Moche archaeological site in northern Peru. The Uhle Platform is a mausoleum, attached to the Huaca de la Luna temple, with a patio archaeologists call the Patio of the Serpents. Of the more than 80 burials previously uncovered there, the tomb represents the only known child to receive this sort of lavish burial.

The tomb is large and could easily have been used to bury an adult even with all the grave goods, another indicator of the high status of the child. It contains 32 ceramic objects, most of them vessels. One rare object is a sculpture of a deity with a human body and the wings and tail of a bird. He holds a shield in one hand and a goblet in the other. On each side of him is a bird attendant garbed in ceremonial clothes. It’s possible that the sculpture represents a deity in the midst of transformation rather than a human-bird mixture. Because the Moche had no written language, there is debate among scholars about whether they worshipped a pantheon of multiple gods, or a small number who were capable of multiple transformations.

Another rare find is a pair of the ceramic prisoners of war.

The two prisoner sculptures are associated with the “ritual of combat,” a common theme in Moche art. In this sort of imagery, two warriors fight each other, and the loser is stripped of his clothes and weapons, tied around the neck with a rope and offered as a human sacrifice, Rengifo-Chunga said. The prisoners depicted on these two vessels were the losing warriors, and their presence in the burial of a child is rare.

“One would normally presume that these kinds of vessels represent something related to the deceased’s life,” Rengifo-Chunga said. For example, a vessel like this might signify that the individual took part in combat.

But a toddler couldn’t have taken part in such an activity. In general, archaeologists wouldn’t expect to see elements of an adult ritual in the burial of a child. “This expands our knowledge on Moche funerary practices,” he added.

The artifacts recovered from the tomb have been transferred to the laboratories of the Santiago Uceda Castillo Museum in Peru. There they will undergo scientific analysis and study and will be conserved for eventual display.

A rare monumental inscription likely dating to the Augustan era has been discovered at the site of ancient baths in Fortuna, Spain. It is a fragment, but the surviving lettering is comparatively huge: 23 cm (9 inches) high. Extrapolating from the size of the text, the original inscription would have been about 4.8 meters (15.8 feet) long when intact. Monumental inscriptions on this scale are extremely rare on the Iberian Peninsula. Only three comparable examples are known in the Region of Murcia, all of them in the major metropolis of Carthago Nova (Cartagena).

The ashlar block almost 1.2 meters (4 feet) long was discovered in the northern part of the Roman thermal complex. It was inside a wall that was not its original location, reused as building material in antiquity. Before the discovery, archaeologists thought that wall was part of the northern enclosure of the baths, but the reused stone means that it was built in a larger phase of construction.

There are two lines of text framed by decorative moldings with lettering in two sizes: the large 23 cm text on the top line and about 13 cm (5 inches) high on the line below. Text of these dimensions suggest the inscription was originally part of a large architectural feature, meant to be read from a distance.

Preliminary analysis has identified the end of a Roman name and writing characteristics that point to a chronology situated between the end of the 1st century BC and the 1st century AD, possibly during the period of Augustus.

Experts suggest that it may have been a commemorative inscription related to a monumental architectural work, although its exact function still needs to be determined.

The baths of Fortuna is one of the most important thermal sites in Roman Murcia. Archaeologist from the University of Murcia have been excavating and studying the thermal complex for years. The current intervention is part of a project funded by the regional government to excavate, document and recover the baths’ ancient structures with the goal of increasing understanding of its usage in the Roman period and to conserve the remains for the long-term stability of the heritage site.

The ashlar has been raised and transferred to the Archaeological Museum of Murcia, where it will be studied, documented, and conserved.