12 Most Mysterious Recent Archaeological Finds And Artifacts Scientists Still Can't Explain

Finding a historically significant artifact is only half of the battle for an archaeologist. As soon as they've located an object or a place, their next job is to explain its purpose or its history. That isn't always possible for them, and nor is it always possible for their fellow experts, who they contact when they get stuck. That means some of the most amazing discoveries of recent times are currently unexplained, so we've put them together in this video for you to see if you can solve the mysteries! In January 2017, a mystery that had endured for more than 200 years may finally have been solved, but experts still aren't sure. The mystery revolves around this bizarre ancient Roman object that was discovered in the ruins of the Villa di Papri during the 1760s, which was destroyed by volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in the year 79. It's notable for its resemblance to a pork chop, and it wasn't until academics printed a 3D copy of the object for closer inspection that they believed they might have uncovered its real purpose. Now, they think it might have been a pocket sundial. They think it would have been hung from a string, allowing the longer end of the object to cast a shadow across the grid carved upon its face. The vertical lines represent the current month, and the horizontal lines represent the time of day. Using this crude system, the owner would have known roughly how many hours of sunlight they had left. There's still one question, though. If the Romans had pocket sundials, why have we never found another one? The people who live on the mainland of Sweden will warn you not to visit the island of Bla Jungfrund. They'll tell you that it's cursed, and that it used to be home to witches. Perhaps they have a point. A brave team of archaeologists who've ignored the warnings and investigated the island's caves have found evidence of strange rituals dating back 9,000 years, and also an ancient labyrinth built for unclear purposes. The caves are of particular interest. There's a stone altar inside one of them, and what appears to be a theater stage in another. Both are curious features for the Mesolithic Stone Age. In the same cave as the stage, hammer stones have been discovered. Stones like this were used for grinding up material, and might imply that ritualistic offerings were made with the grinding process. The experts are, however, less convinced by the Swedish legend that a race of giants created the enormous Jatergrytor Caverns on the island's shoreline. So strong is the superstitious belief about the island that none of the stones that make up the giant labyrinth have ever been stolen. Moving them is said to release a curse, and nobody's ever wanted to take that chance. So much speculation has built up around the contents of Vault B of the Padmanabhaswamy Temple in Kerala, India, that it's almost become a legend. It's said that there are solid gold ropes in there, along with Napoleon's coin collection, belts made from diamonds, gigantic emeralds, and barrels full of gold. The only issue is that the doors of the vault can only be opened by an incantation, and nobody knows what the chant is. The origins of the temple, which is dedicated to Vishnu, are shrouded in mystery. It's referenced in Tamil writing from the 6th century, but is thought to have been considered old even back then. Vault B is the only one of the temple's six vaults that has never been opened. All of the other five contained treasures, but the richest of them are believed to be in this sixth vault. The giant cobras carved onto its doors are said to represent an ancient curse. Indeed, an expedition in 1931 gave up on their attempt to open the doors when they were suddenly attacked by a number of cobras who emerged from either below or behind the doors. It's incredible that it's never been opened, and even more surprising that nobody even appears to be brave enough to try. In June 2020, a deal was agreed between the Wolfson Foundation and the Archaeological Analysis Center for Fort Cumberland in Portsmouth, England, that will see funding provided for the scanning of a strange horde of objects found off England's coast. The agreed sum of $168,000 will pay for brand-new, high-resolution X-ray machines capable of penetrating the thick rust deposits that currently mask the objects. Hopefully, they will finally tell the archaeologists what they've found. The goods come from the wreck of the Rusvijic, which sank close to the coastline of Kent in 1740 while laden heavy with thimbles and silver coins. By the time the cargo was rediscovered in 2018, rust concretions had grown around them so thickly that they're impossible to identify. The scientists and experts hope to see the presence of holes drilled into the coins, which would confirm a theory that passengers on this ship sewed coinage into their clothing to smuggle it into Batavia in the East Indies. Importing coinage was officially banned in order to protect the local economy, but it's known that people brought money with them anyway, and this sewing method is thought to be the way it was done. What kind of lifestyle might a second-century military commander have led in ancient Rome? Well, let's take a look at the home of a former officer and find out! This colossal villa was discovered by accident during the construction of Rome's metro sea line in 2018 and is one of the most palatial military homes ever found in the city. It contains 14 rooms, all of which have marble floors and mosaic designs, and a central courtyard featuring a Rather than being lost by accident over the passing of the centuries, it appears to have been deliberately buried for unknown reasons. The burial has helped to preserve much of the home, allowing us to marvel at these beautiful floors. One of the rooms even appears to have artificial heating. Even though this incredible mansion has been found, the metro line still needs to be completed by 2022. That means archaeologists have had to grab what they can before construction work resumes, although it's hoped that some of the floors will be retained as part of the new station that will stand here. What is the so-called Crocodile Stone in Champasak, Laos? Is it a place where human sacrifice once took place? Is it a stone that was used to collect rainwater? Or is it possible that sometimes a strangely shaped stone is just You'll find the stone amid the ruins of the ancient temple of Wat Phu. It gets its name from the fact it vaguely resembles a crocodile, but it could just as easily be an interpretation of the human form. The temple itself dates back to around the 12th century, but the stone appears to be older, perhaps standing in place since the 5th century. That would be consistent with the Laos, and whose leaders are known to have practiced human sacrifice. Whether they specifically practiced it upon this stone or not is unknown, and it's never likely to be known. What can be said of it is that nothing that looks like the Crocodile Stone exists anywhere else in either Laos or Cambodia, and so it must have been designed for a particular and unique purpose. Any of the Mayan ruins dotted across Central America could be described as mysterious, but we'll reserve special mention for the Quelo Ruins in the Orange Walk region of Belize. The site remained undiscovered until Norman Hammond found it in 1975 and spent the next five years excavating it. By the time he'd finished, he'd turned the world of Mayan research on its head. His radiocarbon dating of the site suggested that it was built over four and a half thousand years ago. That would make it the oldest known Mayan site on the continent, and his research was challenged by historians and academics who insisted it couldn't possibly be true. This isn't one of the grandest Mayan sites. Rather than being full of palaces and temples, it's a place where maize croppers lived in their humble thatched homes, hunting white-tailed deer for food and living with their pet dogs. The burial traditions at the site appear to differ wildly from other Mayan sites, too. Archaeologists were especially delighted by the discovery of a buried teenage girl, who appeared to have been decapitated and then buried with her head placed on her chest, next to two bulls. Quelo is the place that makes Mayan experts feel uneasy. You might expect to find camels in the middle of the desert in Saudi Arabia, but you might be more surprised to find giant stone carvings of camels in the same place. They're easy to see on the sides of these cliffs, and yet somehow, they remained undiscovered in the Al-Jawf province of the country until 2016. It's thought that shifting sand dunes may have hidden them for many years, and also might have protected them from the worst effects of erosion. As they're carved into sandstone, they might otherwise have worn away completely by now. It's thought that the carvings are around 2,000 years old. Aside from camels, there are also easily identifiable carvings of horses and donkeys on the stone, all of which have been drawn with accuracy and skill. What's strange about this site is that there's no evidence that a settlement has ever existed here, so the carvings appear to have been made in the middle of nowhere by unknown people who didn't even leave any tools behind to help us work out how they went about the task. Old Dongala might sound like the place your Wi-Fi dongle might go when it dies, but it's actually a ghost town in the northern state of Sudan, standing on the eastern bank of the Nile River. It's unoccupied now, save for an archaeological mission that started in 1964, but between the 4th and 14th centuries, this city was the capital of the Nubian Kingdom of Makuria. The modern city that replaced it is around 50 miles away, founded by people who abandoned the old town in mysterious circumstances in the 14th century. There's no sign of conflict in the ruins of the city, and it isn't thought that it was ever flooded by the Nile, so why the occupants of that era chose to leave it is a riddle without a solution. The original exodus appears to have taken place before the 14th century, according to writings in the Book of Knowledge, by the year 1348. The native people had already left the town, and it had been resettled by Genoese merchants. There's no apparent reason why they'd have left the area either, so that's two different sets of citizens who upped and left without leaving a note of explanation. If you wondered how all of those camel and horse carvings remained unnoticed in Saudi Arabia for so long, you might be even more surprised that nobody spotted this colossal geoglyph of a killer whale in Peru until late 2017. It's difficult to miss, and it's been visible in the desert for at least 2,000 years. The form of the geoglyph is slightly open to interpretation, but most people who've looked at it believe that it's an orca, also known as a killer whale. To be fair to the people who've failed to notice it for all this time, it's in a comparatively remote region in the Palpa area of Peru's south. Orcas were considered powerful, almost mythical creatures in ancient Peru, so this nearly 250-foot-long interpretation of one was likely an attempt at appeasement to a deity. Photographs of the orca were taken from a passing plane during the 1970s, but the photographer didn't realize its significance and didn't keep any accurate record of its location. It took another 50 years to find it. Now that it's been restored, it will be far easier to see, but that doesn't help us to identify its original meaning. Computers as we know them today began with the invention of the abacus, and so with that in mind, we present to you what might be the world's first personal computer. This almost impossibly tiny device dates back 300 years to the time of the Qing Dynasty in China, and it's an abacus that could be worn as a ring. It's barely half an inch tall, but it works just as well as a traditional abacus would. The only catch is that you'd have to bring a tiny needle with you to operate it properly. There's no way human fingers could manipulate pieces this small. The traders who used these devices referred to them as juchuans, and they were most commonly employed when someone needed to work out the price of a trade or a sale very quickly with their customer in front of them. We can all agree that this is a sophisticated and clever device for its era, but what nobody appears to be able to agree upon is how they were made. Making something like this would probably require a microscope, and it's possible that all juchuans might even have been made by the same inventor. Half of Bangladesh's Govinda Bita Temple is a 6th-century place of worship used by ancient Hindus. The other half is much harder to identify, and how the two halves came to be woven together in such a haphazard fashion is also difficult to explain. Both sides of the temple come from different times, separated by several centuries. Adjoining the 6th-century Hindu temple is an 11th-century temple built in such a manner that it was clearly intended to be an extension of the original. Even that might only be part of the story. Inconsistencies with the design of the temple's walls and foundations suggest that they might have been built on top of even earlier buildings and temples. The most telling piece of evidence is the discovery of a Buddhisatva terracotta head buried at the site. Either someone buried it there 200 years after it was made, or people have been coming here to do their worship since at least the 4th century. Perhaps it goes back even farther than that. We have no way of knowing. 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