Manfred Huchthausen, a 58-year-old teacher, proudly showed me around his well-tended garden. “Isn’t it beautiful?” he asked, pointing to the lush flower bed and immaculate lawn.

“But I know that you want to see the cave, don’t you? I’ll show you,” he said, chuckling.

The Lichtenstein Cave is a short drive away from Manfred’s village, deep in the Harz mountains.
This is the spot where Manfred’s relatives, dating back 3,000 years, were buried. The cave remained hidden from view until 1980, and it was only later, in 1993, that archaeologists discovered 40 Bronze Age skeletons.

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A recent archeological find of 1000-year-old human remains in Skagafjördur in north Iceland may shed a new light on a period of Iceland’s history that is largely in the dark, the period around which Iceland converted to Christianity.

Archeologists have found bones that belonged to an infant and an old man under a layer of volcanic ash from 1104 during an ongoing excavation project at the farm Steinsstadir, Fréttabladid reports.

“It is a significant find because it educates us about the time when Iceland was converting to Christianity, which we don’t know much about,” said archeologist Gudný Zoëga. “It also confirms that there is a graveyard [at Steinsstadir] which isn’t mentioned in any sources.”

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One of the largest and best-preserved Roman villas yet discovered in Britain has been unearthed by archaeologists.

Built 1,800 years ago on the Isle of Wight, the building is as vast as an Olympic swimming pool and shaped like a church.

“It would have sung out the status of the owner,” Sir Barry Cunliffe, Emeritus Professor of European Archaeology at Oxford University and head of the excavation, told The Times yesterday. “It’s a very impressive building, absolutely magnificent. It could have been seen for miles around.”

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ARCHAEOLOGISTS may have unearthed evidence of a prehistoric tragedy at Isle of Man Airport.

They are working on a theory that fire could have razed a Bronze Age village to the ground in a cataclysmic conflagration in the area known as Ronaldsway.

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An ancient Greek ship recently raised off the coast of southern Sicily, Italy, is the biggest and best maintained vessel of its kind ever found, archaeologists say. At a length of nearly 70 feet (21 meters) and a width of 21 feet (6.5 meters), the 2,500-year-old craft is the largest recovered ship built in a manner first depicted in Homer’s Iliad, which is believed to date back several centuries earlier.

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The invention of agriculture was a pivotal event in human history, but archaeologists studying its origins may have made a simple error in dating the domestication of animals like sheep and goats. The signal of the process, they believed, was the first appearance in the archaeological record of smaller boned animals. But in fact this reflects just a switch to culling females, which are smaller than males, concludes Melinda Zeder, an archaeologist at the Smithsonian Institution.

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Archaeologists of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven team (Belgium) directed by Marc Waelkens uncovered the colossal portrait head of the Roman empress Faustina, wife of the emperor Antoninus Pius, who ruled from A.D. 138 to 161. According to Waelkens, the excavation team was ecstatic at the discovery.

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A treasure hunter using a metal detector has discovered a pure gold cross dating from the 7th century - and worth at least £25,000.The Anglo Saxon artefact is set with red gemstones and might have originally held a relic such as bone from a Disciple or fragment of the Cross.Measuring just over an inch long, the 18 carat gold cross has been decorated with fine detail and is thought to have been worn as a pendant.More… 

NottinghamshireA 7th-century Anglo-Saxon cross has been unearthed by a treasure hunter in a Nottinghamshire field.The 18-carat gold artefact, roughly one inch (2.5 cm) in width, is set with red gemstones and is believed to have been made in England from melted-down French coins from the Merovingian kingdom. It is thought to be worth at least £25,000.More… 

BERLIN (Reuters Life!) - Archaeologists have discovered traces of a Bronze Age place of worship in Germany in what they say might be the country’s answer to Stonehenge.

Scientists from a university in Halle are excavating a roughly 4,000 year-old circular site in eastern Germany which contains graves that bear a strong resemblance to Stonehenge, a prehistoric stone circle of towering megaliths in southern Britain.

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