The ancient Romans slaughtered dozens of babies at a villa in England’s Thames Valley, a new study into the tiny remains has revealed. Located in Buckinghamshire, just northwest of London, Yewden Villa, as the site is known, was excavated in 1912 by Alfred Heneage Cocks, a naturalist and archaeologist. Now a wheat field, the site was almost forgotten. Archaeologists began investigating it only recently, as Cocks' original report was rediscovered at Buckinghamshire County Museum, along with 300 boxes containing photographs, artifacts, pottery and bones. Indeed, Cocks' excavations produced a number of unusual discoveries, including a very high number of iron styli -- pens for writing on wax tablets -- as well as several corn-drying kilns. But what intrigued the researchers were the...

Scientists have revealed that they think bones found in a German cathedral are those of one of the earliest members of the English royal family. The remains of Queen Eadgyth, who died in 946, were excavated in Magdeburg Cathedral in 2008. The granddaughter of Alfred the Great, King of Wessex, the Saxon princess married Otto I, Holy Roman Emperor, in 929. The findings are due to be presented at the University of Bristol later. A spokesman from the university said the bones were the oldest surviving remains of an English royal burial. As the half sister of Athelstan, who is considered to have been the first king of all of England, Eadgyth had at least two children with Otto and lived most of her married life in Magdeburg, Saxony. She died aged about 36. She was buried in the monastery of St...

Evidence from tests on 80 skeletons of young men found in Yorkshire gardens points to world's best-preserved gladiator graveyard, archaeologists say. The haunting mystery of Britain's headless Romans may have been solved at last, thanks to scars from a lion's bite and hammer marks on decapitated skulls. The results of forensic work, announced today, on more than 80 skeletons of well-built young men, gradually exhumed from the gardens of a York terrace over a decade, suggests that the world's best-preserved gladiator graveyard has been found. Many of the 1,800-year-old remains indicate much stronger muscles in the right arm, a condition noted by Roman writers in slaves trained from their teens to fight in the arena. Advanced mineral testing of tooth enamel also links the...

Archaeologists have found what they say is the earliest evidence of Neanderthals living in Britain. Two pieces of flint unearthed at motorway works in Dartford, Kent, have now been dated to 110,000 years ago. The finds push back the presence of Neanderthals in Britain by 40,000 years or more, said Dr Francis Wenban-Smith, from Southampton University. A majority of researchers believe Britain was uninhabited by humans at the time the flint tools were made. An absence of archaeological evidence suggests people abandoned this land between 200,000 years ago (or 160,000 years ago, depending on who you ask) and 65,000 years ago. But one researcher, unconnected with the study, said he was not convinced by the evidence presented so far.

Archaeologists in southern Mexico announced Monday they have discovered a 2,700-year-old tomb of a dignitary inside a pyramid that may be the oldest such burial documented in Mesoamerica. The tomb held a man aged around 50, who was buried with jade collars, pyrite and obsidian artifacts and ceramic vessels. Archaeologist Emiliano Gallaga said the tomb dates to between 500 and 700 B.C. Based on the layers in which it was found and the tomb's unusual wooden construction, "we think this is one of the earliest discoveries of the use of a pyramid as a tomb, not only as a religious site or temple," Gallaga said. Pre-Hispanic cultures built pyramids mainly as representations of the levels leading from the underworld to the sky; the highest point usually held a temple.

A toe belonging to King Tutankhamun’s father has been finally returned to Egypt, the Supreme Council of Antiquities said on Wednesday. The bone piece belonged to mummy KV55, which was identified as Akhenaton during a recent major genetic investigation into King Tut's family. The son of Amenhotep III and also the father of Tutankhamun, Akhenaton, (1353-1336 B.C.) is known as the "heretic" pharaoh who introduced a monotheistic religion by overthrowing the pantheon of the gods to worship the sun god Aton. The terminal phalanx of his great toe, probably from the left foot, was taken away in 1968, when the Department of Antiquities in Cairo, under the supervision of the then director, handed it over to the late Professor Ronald Harrison of Liverpool University.

Researchers excavating an ancient Roman cemetery made a surprising discovery when they extracted ancient mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) from one of the skeletons buried at the site: the 2,000-year-old bones revealed a maternal East Asian ancestry. The results will be presented at the Roman Archeology Conference at Oxford, England, in March, and published in the Journal of Roman Archaeology. According to Tracy Prowse, assistant professor of Anthropology, and the lead author on the study, the isotopic evidence indicates that about 20% of the sample analyzed to-date was not born in the area around Vagnari. The mtDNA is another line of evidence that indicates at least one individual was of East Asian descent.

"These preliminary isotopic and mtDNA data provide tantalizing evidence...

Beneath Rome's Fiumicino airport lies a "mini-Colosseum" that may have played host to Roman emperors, according to British archaeologists. The foundations of the amphitheater, which are oval-shaped like the much larger arena in the heart of Rome, have been unearthed at the site of Portus, a 2nd century A.D. harbor near Ostia's port on the Tiber River.

A monumental seaport that saved imperial Rome from starvation, Portus is now reduced to a large hexagonal pond on a marshy land owned by a noble family, the Duke Sforza Cesarinis. The two-square-mile site has been known since around the 16th century, but only in the 1860s was it seriously excavated by the Italian archaeologist Rodolfo Lanciani, who marked the remains of what he believed was a theater.

A number of ancient Roman statues might lie beneath the turquoise waters of the Blue Grotto on the island of Capri in southern Italy, according to an underwater survey of the sea cave. Dating to the 1st century A.D., the cave was used as a swimming pool by the Emperor Tiberius (42 B.C. - 37 A.D.), and the statues are probably depictions of sea gods. "A preliminary underwater investigation has revealed several statue bases which might possibly hint to sculptures lying nearby," Rosalba Giugni, president of the environmentalist association, Marevivo, told Discovery News.

Carried out in collaboration with the archaeological superintendency of Pompeii, the Marevivo project aims at returning the Blue Grotto to its ancient glory by placing identical copies of Tiberius'...

Teeth and bones from late Ice Age animals, including hyenas, deer and woolly rhinos, have been discovered by archaeologists at a cave in Devon. The dig at Kents Cavern, Torquay, also unearthed a 15,000-year-old spearpoint, known as a "sagaie", which is made from reindeer antler from the same era. The spearpoint is thought to be the first complete one found in the UK. The dig, organised by the University of Durham and the University of Sheffield, is part of a study into Neanderthals.

The team at the helm of the privately-funded dig is trying to discover exactly when and why Neanderthals became extinct. It is also hoping to discover when our own species first came to the UK and if it is connected to the death of Neanderthal Man, as well as finding out more about the...