Latest #Archaeology #Discoveries: August 2026

Hey there. Are you wondering what archaeologists have found lately? Off the tip of my trowel, there's... Native Americans were drinking chocolate in the U.S. state of Georgia a thousand years ago. An 11,000-year-old statue of a human riding a leopard from Karahantepe in Turkey. Numerous ancient ruins surfacing during record-breaking heat waves and droughts in Europe. A Roman shipwreck containing the perfectly preserved remains of hundreds of amphorae. A shattered skeleton found in a Scottish castle is the first identified death by trebuchet. Rare Nazi-era warship found nearly intact off the coast of Greece. Gold grave shoes in Kazakhstan. And an update to the story of the first-ever mass Roman war grave found in Vienna. Those are just a few of the many fascinating discoveries made in archaeology last month. Chances are they haven't shown up in your feed, but since I'm an archaeologist, I've carefully chosen and researched the ones that I think are the most groundbreaking to share with you today. Since I'm currently on site excavating a Roman villa with Big Ventures, more about that in another video, there's no cameos from my cat Emma, but Bruna the sight dog has agreed to guest star instead. And yeah, I'm not wearing makeup and I'm not as polished as usual and I'm wearing sunglasses because it's crazy bright out today and I don't really want to squint through the whole video. The audio might have a little bit of wind or background noises in it, but this Dirt Nerd couldn't think of a better way to bring you this month's news about real archaeology. No pseudoscience or AI slop or clickbait here. Keep watching and let's dig in to these captivating stories from our past. I usually present these discoveries in chronological order, starting with the one that goes the farthest back in time, but today is going to be a bit different. Our journey today begins with a bit of an unusual story because it actually involves multiple discoveries spanning multiple periods of time that were made because of this summer's unusually high temperatures and river drops in Europe, which has revealed a plethora of archaeology, so to speak. In the UK, sites like Portchester Castle and Blenheim Palace have seen the outlines of historic installations appear in the ground. At Blenheim, the footprint of an 18th century garden could be seen on a lawn, while at Portchester, the outline of a Tudor era storehouse showed up as parchmarks. 30-year record low levels of the Danube River in Hungary revealed a Roman altar to Jupiter and inscribed limestone tablets, plus a suspected wartime grenade. Bit scary. Along the Serbian stretch of the river, 20 Nazi warships have been exposed while its banks in Bulgaria have exposed the foundations of the 1700-year-old Konstantin Bridge and the bones of an ancient woolly mammoth, including a jawbone, tusks, shoulder blade, and ribs. I'm just going to wait for that plane to pass over me. Similarly low levels of the Tiber River in Rome have exposed the remains of a Roman bridge that have resurfaced near the Vatican. Traditionally known as Nero's Bridge, it probably dates to Caligula, Nero's uncle, and was built to connect the villa of Caligula's mother Agrippina to the other side of the city. Everyone's disappeared for tea break, that's why the site's suddenly empty behind me. However, the most ominous reappearance comes from the Elbe River in Saxony, where low water levels have once again revealed the Pirna Obroposta hunger stone. Carved with 20 dates in the rock face, with the oldest going back to 1707, the stone has served as a warning sign during times of extreme drought, and its visibility now is a stark reminder of a climate crisis in progress. Only time will tell if this warning of dying rivers and hard times will spur some much-needed climate action. After that rather grim opening, we head now to one of our regular stops on this show, the Stone Hills of Turkey, where a unique 11,000-year-old statue has been found. This area is famous for its group of archaeological sites that date to the pre-pottery Neolithic period, during the transition of humans from nomadic hunter-gatherers to settled farming communities. The most famous site is Göbekli Tepe, maybe you've heard of it, but our focus today is 35 kilometers away on its sister site of Karahan Tepe. Excavations here have found more than 250 T-shaped pillars, enclosed communal structures, and intricately carved sculptures depicting humans and animals, occasionally in unique compositions. And now another specimen has been added to this visual vocabulary. During the 2026 excavation season, a 70-centimeter tall sculpture depicting a human figure seated on the back of a leopard was found, resting on a bench running along the wall of a structure measuring about three meters in diameter. The building it was in had a floor paved with flat stones. Interestingly, three other sculptures have been found here but with the opposite configuration of a human carrying a leopard on their back. Leopards are also the most popular animal motif depicted in imagery at this site, appearing both in reliefs and in sized images on the pillars. Since these people don't have any writing to tell us the significance or meaning behind these sculptures, it makes them almost impossible to definitively interpret and raises the question of why Karahan Tepe's artists repeatedly chose to place humans in such intimate and sometimes unsettling relationships with predators. What do you think? Let me know your hypothesis in the comments. Our third story today comes from Italy, where just three miles off the coast of Masara del Vallo in Sicily, a 2,100-year-old Roman shipwreck carrying around 500 amphorae has been found. This discovery was made not by archaeologists but by champion spearfisher and freediver Giacomo de Mola and his friend Egor Bisouli. I caught up with Giacomo to learn more about this once-in-a-lifetime find. Let's dig in to what he has to say. My name is Giacomo de Mola. I'm a spearfishing world champion and multiple-time Italian champion. Also in my young age I was Italian and the world freediving champion. I have a sales agency where I sell equipment all over the world. Equipment for spearfishing and freediving. So my life is practically all in this port, in the water, in the sea. I spent most of my life in one boat underwater. That has led you to make a pretty amazing archaeological discovery. Can you tell us exactly what you found? I found a Roman wreck that is dated like 200 years before Christ on the Republican Rome. How exactly did you find it? Can you tell us a little bit of the story around the circumstances? I was in Mazzara del Vallo, Sicily for a spearfishing competition, the Italian national spearfishing competition. Training and scouting the place, looking for some rocks or other kind of structure with the sonar, with our boat. And after, let's say, a few hours that we were scouting the place with the sonar, at some point I saw on the monitor one very strange structure that was different, totally different from something that we found on that area. And so I decided that I had to check it out and I did my first dive there. I did the freediving in 46 meters depth. I started my descent, the visibility was okay, it was good. When I was going deeper and deeper, the visibility was becoming poorer and poorer. It was like close to the bottom was three with five meters. And so I follow my instinct also where I could imagine something to see something more dark. And at some point I see these geometrical objects because I didn't realize immediately that was amphoras. So I was expecting like was one rock or something like this, natural. Then I see these geometrical objects and at the beginning I was not sure. Let's say that the first thought was are bombs. What is this? Bombs? But after that I realized immediately that no, this is amphoras because I saw also the handles, no? And so I was on the bottom and I had my GoPro camera and I followed the wreck that was quite long. All the dive was two and a half minutes, 50 seconds to go down, around 40-45 to go up. And so I had some seconds there, like 30-40. I could not see all the wreck on the first dive. So I've been on the surface. I talked to my friend there, Igor, and I told him, look, Igor, down is something that I cannot imagine. You cannot believe what is down here. And he said, what is this? What is this? And I said, amphoras, amphoras. No, it's amazing. Something, you know, emotion, very big emotion. Even that we are not experts like you. And so we didn't know how old this would be, how important this would be. So we just was, OK, we found something, you know, something special, but we didn't know how much special. After that, I did another second dive. So I saw all the wreck also on the other part. And that's it. That was my experience there. It must be really amazing to be able to make that kind of connection with people who were doing probably something similar to what you were doing and were living their lives on the sea. Yeah. Two thousand years ago. How did you figure out or know what to do to report it after you guys finished your boat trip? So this was our second, let's say, problem, because what do we do with this now? Who do we need to talk with? Because also we understood that it could be important. So also it's dangerous to talk with the wrong person, because I had the one friend that is from Sicily and he's a police officer. So after that afternoon, I called him and I say, look, Nini, I found something. I don't know what is this, but probably something that can be important. And I don't know what to do. He told me, OK, don't worry, don't talk to anybody. I will put you in contact with the person that is connected with the authorities and can you talk to him and you see and he can understand if this is important or not. And so I spoke with Fabio Portella. He's very well known for his discoveries, underwater discoveries, and he's an expert in this. And he's a person that most of the time in Sicily, the authorities ask him for help to go and check the wrecks that the people found. I called him, he told me, OK, OK, I need to see this because probably something important. So he came, he did the dive, he did also the videos and 3D. He told me, Giacomo, this is something very important. So we need immediately to declare to the Superintendenza del Mare and Carabinieri everything and give them the coordinates, give them the exact point. After that, the authorities called me. They asked me if I could be present when the Carabinieri special divers will go down to verify my declaration. And so I took the plane. We were present in that day on the boat of the authorities when they have been down to make the verification. Do you know anything more than about or what else they said about what exactly it is that you found besides the age of it? The wreck is 21 meters long, six meters wide, and it can have, let's say, between 500 and one and a half thousand amphoras. And all the amphoras are intact, like the boat sank two months ago, but it's 2000 years. They told me that probably they will start in the next month to excavate in one part or in the other part of the wreck to find the wood, the wooden wreck. Yeah, so watch this space for more information. Thanks again to Giacomo for taking the time to chat to me. If you could make any archaeological discovery as a member of the public, something that you would just stumble upon while you're doing your job or your hobbies, what would it be? Our next story in August is actually an update I've been waiting to give you for a year and a half. It takes us to Vienna in Austria, where beneath a soccer field in early 2025, archaeologists uncovered the first ever mass Roman war grave. I interviewed the team that found it back in 2025, and you can watch what they had to say here. But to summarize, 129 skeletons were found in a shallow pit. The bodies have been placed in as many as four layers, but without a consistent orientation, and many of their limbs were intertwined. It kind of just seemed like they were thrown in the pit, so to speak. There was no sediment in between the layers that separated them, which indicates that they were all put in at the same time. The absence of scavenging also suggested that the grave was covered up soon after the bodies were put in it. Preliminary examination of their bones indicated that they were all biologically male, and most died between the ages of 20 and 35. Initially, it was thought that it might have been a World War II grave, which are depressingly common in this area. But the discovery of lance heads, Roman scale armor, shoenails, and a corroded dagger firmly placed the find 2,000 years earlier. At the time of my interview, more detailed analysis was being carried out, and now some of the results of that have finally been announced. Radiocarbon dating has corroborated the initial dates of the finds, placing the grave in the late 1st or early 2nd century CE. An assessment for violent injuries found them in 48 individuals, 85% of which were inflicted at the time of death. About 40% of the injuries were to the pelvic area. In one case, a lance head was found still embedded in a man's pelvis. Ouch! An unusually high amount of these injuries came from projectiles. The overall pattern raises questions about the nature of the fighting, and why that particular area of the body was targeted. Was it because it was less protected, or perhaps had a greater chance of killing an enemy? You know, people don't tend to survive gut wounds. One thing the researchers can say is that the variety of distribution of wounds fit a situation of battlefield violence rather than controlled executions. As for what conflict they were fighting, this was still up for debate. The site lies within the militarized frontier of the Danube, which in this time was a volatile military zone as Roman forces under Emperor Domitian fought repeated conflicts against the Sarmatians and Germanic tribes. No historical records describe a battle near this location, so it's possible that these troops were either moving between nearby forts when they were ambushed, or they were responding to a raid. What do you think? Further DNA and stable isotope analysis is planned, and it's hoped that this will provide another piece to the puzzle by revealing where the men grew up, and whether they formed a single military group. Were they all Romans? Are some of them Germans? Those are the questions that they're looking to answer next. You can bet that I will let you know once that all has been published. Now we head to the ancient city of Pisidia, Antiochia in Isparta, Turkey, where archaeologists have unearthed an approximately 1,500 year old liturgical vessel decorated with imagery that has no known parallel in Christian iconography. This site was an important place in the history of early Christianity. According to the Acts of the Apostles, Paul and Barnabas visited it during their first missionary journey in the 1st century CE and preached there. In the centuries that followed, Antiochia developed into an important Christian center, and after the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE, it became a metropolitan seat of the Pisidia region. The recent discovery was made in a monastery amid the ruins of a church destroyed during air braids in 713 CE. Dating to the 6th century CE, the double-handled vessel depicts a striking scene from the Book of Daniel. The prophet Daniel is shown alongside the four beasts and the lion from his visionary dream, all rendered together on a single object, which has never been seen on any other known artifact. Jewish tradition identifies the four beasts with the Babylonian, Midian, Persian, and Hellenistic kingdoms, while Christian interpretation views the fourth beast as a symbol of the Roman Empire, with the Son of Man descending from heaven representing the coming of the Messiah. For this reason, Daniel's vision has traditionally been interpreted within Christianity as one of the texts foretelling the arrival of Christ. The depiction of this full narrative on this particular vessel makes it a key piece of data for the study of Christian iconography. Liturgical vessels like this were used in the celebration of the Eucharist or in other rites performed within the church, meaning that their imagery was widely seen and understood by the congregation as part of active worship. A vessel like this one would have carried real theological weight for the community that used it, making it far more than a decorative or functional item. It adds another piece of material evidence to show the city's development into an important Christian center in the 6th century. Our next discovery comes from the Karakabakh Cemetery near the modern city of Aktau on the coast of the Caspian Sea in Kazakhstan, where archaeologists have excavated the 1500-year-old grave of an elite woman buried in an extraordinarily ceremonial costume, including a pair of golden shoes. And yes, mom, I included this story just for you. This burial was originally excavated in 2019, and now a detailed analysis has determined that it belonged to a young woman whose funerary costume seems to have been designed to imitate royal clothing. The elaborate ensemble includes a veil sewn with 40 small round gold plaques, a red silk-like cloth diadem or headband that is sewn with mask-like ornaments, and a drop pendant. The central ornament is one that depicts a Hellenistic gorgon. There's also some gold earrings and a gold foil belt buckle. The shoes consist of thin gold coverings applied to buckles and fittings made from wood or other organic materials. The buckle frames were shaped like stylized birds of prey with outstretched wings. Unusually, the belt and shoe buckles were not functional, as they don't have the attachments needed for ordinary use, so the archaeologists have concluded that they were probably manufactured specifically for this burial ceremony. The burial and artifacts date to which is associated with the late Hunnic and post-Hunnic world. It appears that the burial's adornments were locally made at Karakabakh rather than imported from afar. Early archaeological research here has found evidence of metallurgy, jewelry production, glass making, and pottery manufacture. More than 150 coins dating from the first century to the first half of the sixth century have been recovered from the site. They come from a wide geographic range including Parthia, ancient Khwarazm, Sogdiana, Sasanian Iran, the Byzantine Empire, and China, demonstrating how widely connected this apparently remote settlement was, indicating that it may have been an important node in the ancient Azov-Caspian trade corridor, linking Central Asia with the Northern Caucasus, the Volga region, the Southern Ural Mountains, and territories farther west. This burial and the wider cemetery reinforces that picture, as they show that the population was culturally diverse, with some burials following Zoroastrian traditions, while others use late Sarmatian nomadic burial customs. Looked at together with the jewelry from the workshops and the imported coins, they reveal a place where steppe elites, local craftsmen, and distant trading networks were closely connected 1,500 years ago. Now we go to the state of Georgia in the USA, where evidence has been found that the Mississippian civilization was consuming imported cacao, aka chocolate, roughly 1,000 years ago. For decades, we have known that there is a long history of cacao consumption in Central America, starting around 5,000 years ago. The discovery that people living at the great ancestral Pueblo site of Chaco Canyon consumed cacao changed our understanding of the history of chocolate, by demonstrating that cacao trade networks went north, at least into the American southwest. However, until now, evidence of cacao consumption hasn't been found east of the Mississippi River. A new study has analyzed samples from two pottery sherds recovered from the site of Etowah, an indigenous city located in Georgia that, at its peak in the 14th century CE, was one of the most important centers in this Mississippian world. The sherds come from the layers dating to the 11th to 12th century, and were found inside large pits that once served as fill for Etowah's earliest earthen mound, and they're associated with communal feasting activity. Earlier testing of the ceramic residue of the sherds had detected compounds associated with cacao in this pottery, but they were actually inconclusive, because the same chemical markers also appear in yaupon holly, a caffeinated plant native to the region which was used to brew a ceremonial drink known as black drink. This new study sequenced the genetic material, rather than relying on chemical traces alone, which allowed them to confirm that the DNA was a specific match for cacao, indicating that its consumption played a role in the practices that helped unite the community during the city's formative years. It also adds to a small but growing body of evidence that trade networks distributing cacao extended into the present-day United States well before European contact. Now we head to Stirling Castle in Scotland, where a re-examination of a 700-year-old skeleton riddled with fractures may represent the oldest known death by trebuchet. The remains belong to a young man known as Skeleton 150, and were discovered in the Stirling Castle chapel alongside seven other medieval burials in 1997. This was unusual, as the vast majority of people were buried in parish church cemeteries at this time. All eight skeletons buried in the castle had evidence of trauma inflicted on them, including wounds from blunt objects, projectiles, and a sharp blade. Skeleton 150 was unique, however, in that he suffered from 167 fractures, 61 in his skull, 57 in his ribs, and more in his spine, arms, and right shoulder. During the original excavation, researchers assumed that the fractures were perhaps caused by accidental trampling of the remains after he died, but new techniques using micro-CT and 3D scanning have now painted a very different picture, determining that in fact they came from or were part of the cause of his death. The new analysis revealed that the damage was largely contained to the upper half of his body and had an unusual zig-zag pattern usually associated with injuries from a high-speed car crash, except that the radiocarbon dating showed that this skeleton came from the 1300s, which is a little while before cars were invented. This time period was, however, in the middle of the First War of Scottish Independence, when King Edward I of England was testing the use of siege engines against the Scots. In fact, when he besieged Stirling Castle in 1304, he had up to a dozen such devices and even commissioned his military engineers to devise the largest trebuchet ever built at the time, called the War Wolf, that reportedly sent a missile straight through two walls of Stirling Castle, no bother. Trebuchets are a type of catapult that uses a hinged arm with a sling attached to the tip to launch a projectile. Its design allows it to launch projectiles of greater weights and further distances than a traditional catapult. This kind of high-velocity projectile could explain the fractures in Skeleton 150. While the historical records confirm trebuchets were present at the siege, they don't say anything about a stone killing a defender. But even though we can't say for sure whether the War Wolf was the weapon that killed this man, it is actually a distinct possibility. The fractures showed that the victim was standing with his back to whatever killed him, and his death was probably instantaneous. I would certainly hope it is with that kind of damage. Researchers also tested the idea that he died from falling off of the castle walls, but the leg injuries on the skeleton don't match that kind of a death. This story offers us a rare record of the human cost of siege warfare, where weapons aimed at walls also threatened anyone standing nearby. The last discovery for this month comes from the seabed just off the coast of Preveza in western Greece, where a rare German World War II torpedo boat has been identified in remarkably complete condition. The discovery followed years of work by a historian and a technical diving team that began with a single archival clue 13 years ago about a small Kriegsmarine craft lost between Lefkada and Preveza while under tow. The boat in question was a 12.5 meter Leicht Schnellboot aka an LS6 or light fast boat. Work then began combing through German wartime records, charts and scattered references gathering information to narrow the search area to several possible targets. Years of planning and exploratory dives eventually led the team to north of Lefkada where the vessel was resting upright at a depth of 96 meters with its bow pointing northwest. At this depth, locating the vessel was technically challenging as bottom time was limited and a decent line must be placed close to the wreck. When the boat's outline finally appeared out of the darkness, the team was surprised to find a remarkably complete wreck rather than scattered debris. The towing cable was still attached at the bow preserving a physical trace of the boat's final journey and a 20 millimeter MG151 cannon in a rotating turret was mounted on the bow as well. Open hatches allowed views into parts of the interior and engine room where the distinctive forms of its Junkers Jumo 205 diesel engines can still be seen. At the stern, divers found the special door used to release depth charges, a detail that matters because LS5 and LS6 boats were adapted from being miniature torpedo craft for anti-submarine duties and carried depth charges instead of stern torpedo tubes. An aluminum hull was further evidence for the boat's identification as most comparable ally boats were made of wood and this composition has helped keep the wreck so well preserved after eight decades underwater. As far as historians can tell, LS6 was attacked on September 24th 1943 while moving towards Corfu probably by Italian fighter bombers. This disabled the boat and damaged its hull after which the Kriegsmarine then attempted to tow LS6 from Corfu to Piraeus for repairs but during the tow, cracks in the hull widened under pressure, water entered rapidly and the boat sank in deep water. This is the only known surviving vessel of its type and it provides researchers with a rare and unusually complete physical example of an experimental wartime design that otherwise exists mainly in plans and photographs. Alright everyone, time to pack up our finds and put away our tools. That's everything for this video. Which discovery this month was your favorite? Which one would you like to learn more about? Let me know in the comments and don't forget to like the video or subscribe to the channel before you leave, especially if you want to know a little bit more about what's going on behind me. If you're feeling extra generous you can head to the links in the description to either give me a Ko-fi donation or check out my Redbubble store where I have shirts like this one and other archaeology themed designs all available for you to get. Every watch, like, subscribe and click helps my channel connect you directly to the source of exciting archaeological news and stories and it shows the algorithm that people are actually interested in learning about real archaeology. Thank you so much for watching, stay curious, and I hope to see you on my next adventure inside archaeology. Alright, back to digging!