10 Amazing Archaeological Finds Discovered by Ordinary People (and One Badger)
By livius drusus, Mental Floss, 3 November 2015.
By livius drusus, Mental Floss, 3 November 2015.
It's not always archaeologists who make the greatest archaeological discoveries. Sometimes it's regular people going about their business who inadvertently stumble on history-making finds. Sometimes it's a badger.
1. French labourer shovels up Childeric's treasure
Photo: The History Blog
On May 27, 1653, labourer Adrien Quinquin was working on the church of Saint-Brice in Tournai when, instead of dirt, he suddenly shovelled up gold coins. Further shovelling revealed an ancient tomb packed with wonders: a hundred more coins, gold and garnet-ornamented swords, horse fittings and buckles, a solid gold torc, a gold bull's head, 300 gold bees and a gold signet ring. The signet ring was tellingly inscribed CHILDERICI REGIS.
Monsieur Quinquin had found the tomb of Childeric I, king of the Salian Franks, who was buried in his capital of Tournai after his death in 481 or 482 CE. Two centuries after it was found, the treasure of Childeric was stolen from the Bibliotheque Nationale de France. The thieves melted down almost all of it, leaving only two coins, two bees and the sword fittings for police to fish out of leather bags immersed in the Seine.
2. French soldiers find the Rosetta Stone
French soldiers who were demolishing ancient walls to strengthen Fort Julien just outside of the Egyptian city of Rosetta in July 1799 uncovered an inscribed black slab that had been recycled in antiquity as building material. The soldiers' superior officers realized it could be a significant artefact, so they alerted Napoleon's scientists at the Institut d'Égypte, who dated the slab to the 2nd century BCE. The inscription - a decree establishing the divine cult of King Ptolemy V - was written in Greek, Demotic, and hieroglyphics. Because the same decree was written in three scripts, the Rosetta Stone gave researchers the chance to finally decipher ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. It took 20 years, but scholar Jean-François Champollion eventually cracked the code.
3. Sponge divers find the world's oldest analogue computer
Photo: The History Blog
The Antikythera Mechanism is a clockwork device of at least 30 interlocking gears made in Greece in the 2nd or 3rd century BCE. Used to calculate celestial events and the cycles for the Panhellenic Games (such as the Olympics), the mechanism is also considered the oldest-known analogue computer. In the 1st century BCE, the Romans packed it on a ship full of luxury objects they'd looted from around Greece (experts don't know exactly where the mechanism came from).
The ship sank off the island of Antikythera, only to be rediscovered by sponge divers almost 2000 years later, in 1900. They retrieved the mechanism - now corroded into an unidentifiable lump of metal and wood - with no idea of what they'd found. It took seven decades and numerous X-rays for archaeologists to begin to figure it out.
4. Demolition crew finds the most important collection of Elizabethan and Jacobean jewellery ever discovered
Photo: The History Blog
Workers were demolishing the Wakefield House in Cheapside, London, in 1912 when a pickaxe through the cellar floor hit a wooden box filled with jewels. The box held more than 400 pieces of late-16th and early-17th century jewellery, among them a Swiss watch set in a solid Columbian emerald, a gold, diamond, and emerald salamander, and a Byzantine gemstone cameo.
Wakefield House was on a street known as Goldsmith's Row when those jewels were accumulated, so the stash was probably a goldsmith's working stock hidden under the floor during the English Civil War. The construction workers stuffed the treasures in their pockets, boots, and caps, and sold them to a local pawn shop owner who turned out to be the head of acquisitions for the London Museum. The Museum of London remains today the proud owner of the Cheapside Hoard.
5. Banana plantation workers discover the stone spheres of Costa Rica
When United Fruit Company workers cleared the jungle in the DiquÌs Delta of Costa Rica in the 1930s to make way for banana plantations, they found their bulldozers blocked by large stone spheres - some of them weighing tons. The local labourers had heard tales of great spheres filled with gold, so they did their utmost to get to the centre of the stones, even to the point of dynamiting them. They found no gold, and many of the spheres were damaged by attempts to move or open them, but eventually the government intervened to preserve the artefacts.
Later studies determined the spheres were created by the DiquÌs culture starting in 600 CE and continuing well into the second millennium, stopping before the arrival of the Spanish. They range in size from a few inches in diameter to over six feet, and nobody knows what their purpose was. Approximately 300 of them survive today, as Costa Rican national icons whose massive roundness has inspired alien conspiracies and classic Indiana Jones moments alike.
6. French teenagers discover Lascaux cave paintings
Eighteen-year-old apprentice garage mechanic Marcel Ravidat was walking in the woods outside his home village of Montignac, southwestern France, in September of 1940 when he came across the entrance to a cave. Some say his dog chased a rabbit into the entrance. Some say Marcel found it himself. Either way, he returned with three friends and explored the cave. Inside they found a riot of painted figures of bulls, horses, stags, rhinos, felines, and people on the walls, the paint still brilliant. They made a pact to keep their find secret, but only managed to hold on for a week before telling a teacher who was a local expert on prehistoric art.
The cave opened to the public after the war in 1948, but closed just 15 years later when the various miasmas and effluvia humans breathe and secrete caused a rapid decline in the caves' condition, introducing lichen, fungi, and mould to the previously pristine space. Now would-be visitors have to content themselves with a replica, Lascaux II, or take virtual tours.
7. Shepherd boys find the Dead Sea Scrolls
In 1947, three Bedouin shepherds followed a lost goat into a cave near the ancient site of Qumran, a mile from the Dead Sea, and found clay jars containing seven papyrus scrolls. They sold the papyri to an antiquities dealer in Bethlehem for a pittance. When scholars caught wind of the find, they tried to locate the cave. In 1949 they were successful, and over the next decade multiple excavations in multiple caves discovered 981 texts - books of the canonical Hebrew Bible, Second Temple apocrypha, the beliefs of one or more Jewish sectarian groups - written from the 4th century BCE to the 1st century CE. The Qumran scrolls beat the then-oldest known manuscript of the Hebrew Bible by more than a thousand years.
8. Farmers digging a well find the terracotta army of Emperor Qin Shi Huang
Photo: The History Blog
On March 29, 1974, seven farmers digging a well outside Xian, China, struck the head of a life-size clay statue. They informed the local authorities, who called in archaeologists to excavate the find. The statue proved to be one of an estimated 8,000 terracotta soldiers, each with unique combinations of facial features, hair styles, postures, and armature. The clay soldiers, officers, archers, charioteers, and cavalrymen were aligned in trenches underground, a vast force arrayed to protect Emperor Qin Shi Huang (who died in 209 BCE and was buried in an unexcavated mausoleum behind them) in the afterlife. The pits have yet to be fully excavated, so these icons of funerary lavishness could well be even more numerous and complex than we know.
9. Badger finds graves of medieval Slavic chieftains
Photo: The History Blog
A badger spent five years digging his den on a farm in Stolpe, northeastern Germany, only to leave in 2012 after unearthing the pelvic bone of a previous (human) tenant. A subsequent archaeological excavation discovered eight 12th-century graves, two of which were of Slavic chieftains buried with bronze bowls at their feet. Other grave goods found included a double-edged sword three feet long, an arrowhead, a belt buckle with snake heads on each end, and a coin in the mouth of one of the skeletons - evidence of pre-Christian funerary rituals. Since the area was thoroughly Christianized by the 12th century, the badger discovered one of the last pagan burials in Brandenburg.
10. German tourists find 5300-year-old mummy frozen in the Alps
Photo: The History Blog
Helmut and Erika Simon were hiking in the Ötztal Alps on September 19, 1991, when they saw an upper body jutting out of the ice of the glacier. Thinking he was a climber who had recently met a deadly end, the couple reported their find to a gendarme. His attempt to extract the body using ice picks and a pneumatic drill, a much-lamented choice in hindsight, was successful on September 22, and within days a University of Innsbruck archaeologist identified the figure (from artefacts found with him) as a Bronze Age man.
Since then, Ötzi, named after the mountains where he was found, has been an immense boon to archaeology thanks to his outstanding state of preservation. Researchers have sequenced his genome, discovered he likely had Lyme disease and was lactose intolerant, studied his final days and cause of death, and identified 19 modern men from South Tyrol who are genetically related to him. Scientists have also found the oldest human blood yet discovered - red blood cells trapped in tissue by one of Ötzi's wounds. He is the 5300-year-old mummy who keeps on giving.
Top image: The Pesher Habakkuk Scroll, one of the original seven Dead Sea Scrolls discovered in 1947. Credit: Superikonoskop/Wikimedia Commons.
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