Tag Archives: archaeologists

Celtic treasure valued at $16.5 million discovered in Jersey

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Russia Today

June 27, 2012

Amateur archaeologists have unearthed one of the biggest buried treasures in the Europe, almost a ton of gold and silver coins dating back almost 2000 years.

The treasure was discovered on Jersey, one of the British Channel Islands off the coast of Northern France. The exact quantity of coins in the find has yet to be determined, as over the time metal mixed with clay pressed into what now looks more like a mass of bullion. Preliminary estimates suggest there might be between 30,000 and 50,000 coins. The value of the find may be anything between $5 million to $16.5 million.

Reports say that the coins date to 50 BC.  The Celtic tribe of Corisolites apparently used these coins.

Scientists believe the fortune might have been buried on Jersey by the French Celts ahead of the Roman invasion led by Julius Caesar in the middle of the 1st century BC.

The area of Grouville on Jersey has long attracted local treasure hunters. The lucky ones were Reg Mead and Richard Miles, who have been searching for the treasure for 30 years.

“We hit something hard, put the trowel hit, the shovel in, and just moved it, and you hear that grinding noise of metal rubbing against metal. We just flicked it up and up came five Iron Age coins,” ITV news quotes the lucky treasure hunters as saying.

FOX News: 10,000 Year old city discovered in Syria

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Fragments of stone tools, stone circles and lines on the ground, and even evidence of tombs appear to lie in the desert near the ancient monastery of Deir Mar Musa, 50 miles north of Damascus, archaeologist Robert Mason of the Royal Ontario Museum said. He likened the formations to “Syria’s Stonehenge.”“What it looked like was a landscape for the dead and not for the living,” Mason said Wednesday during a presentation at Harvard University’s Semitic Museum, according to the University publication the Harvard Gazette.  He made the find during a 2009 trip and is eager to return and further explore the site. But he says regional conflicts make such a return trip nearly impossible.

“It’s something that needs more work and I don’t know if that’s ever going to happen.”

‘What it looked like was a landscape for the dead and not for the living.’

- Archaeologist Robert Mason

The monastery itself, also called the Monastery of Saint Moses the Abyssinian, was built in the late 4th or early 5th century, he said, and contains several frescoes from the 11th and 12th century depicting Christian saints and Judgment Day. He told the audience at Harvard that he believes it was originally a Roman watchtower, partially destroyed by an earthquake and rebuilt.

But the desert puzzle is much older.

Bits of tools Mason found nearby suggest the mystery he discovered in the desert is much older than the monastery. It may date to the Neolithic Period or early Bronze Age, 6,000 to 10,000 years ago, the Gazette said.

Egypt’s oldest pyramid, the Great Pyramid of Giza, was built about 4,500 years ago.

Mason also saw corral-like stone formations called “desert kites,” which would have been used to trap gazelles and other animals. The desert around the monastery is hardly a verdant pasture — “very scenic, if you like rocks,” Mason reportedly said — but was probably greener a few millennia ago, the archaeologist explained.

Like Indiana Jones exploring Italy’s museums in “The Last Crusade,” Mason hopes to return to the monastery to excavate under the church’s main altar — he believes he’ll find an entrance to underground tombs there.

He also hopes to return to strange stone formations he found in the desert, which he dubbed “Syria’s Stonehenge.”