Has the lost ancient Macedonian capital city of Lyncus been discovered?
First discovered in the 1960s, archaeologists have spent the last 15 years believing the Gradishte site was a military outpost to defend against Roman attack from the era of King Philip V (221 BCE to 179 BCE).
However, the site near the Macedonian village of Crnobuki, has turned out to be of far more historical significance. Archaeologists believe they've found the city of Lyncus.
In the 7th century BCE, Lyncus was the capital city of Lyncestis, founded in the northernmost mountain region of Upper Macedonia.
Lyncestis was an independent polity that held a useful trade route position on the way east to Lydia, now Türkiye. Lyncus was the birthplace of Eurydice, the grandmother of Alexander the Great.
Eurydice's son Philip II of Macedon conquered Lyncestis in the 4th century BCE, bringing the independent state into the Kingdom of Macedon. This set the stage for his son, Alexander the Great, to become the king of the Macedonian empire.
'It is a civilization that played a major role in today's understanding of the world and the desire to connect different civilizations and cultures,' Engin Nasuh, curator-advisor archaeologist at the National Institute and Museum–Bitola says.
The discovery of an Alexander the Great-era coin first suggested that the site was from an older period. In 2023, North Macedonia's Institute and Museum-Bitola and the California State Polytechnic University in Humboldt researchers used radar and LiDAR scanning to uncover the site.
What they discovered was a seven acre acropolis that included a Macedonian theatre and a textile workshop. They continued to discover multiple stone axes, coins, pottery shards, and textile tools.
There's now evidence that the site was occupied by humans since at least the Bronze Age (3,300-1,200 BCE).
'It highlights the complex networks and power structures of ancient Macedonia, especially given the city's location along trade routes to Constantinople,' Nick Angeloff, an archaeologist at Cal Poly Humboldt called the Gradishte discovery.
'This discovery is significant,' says Angeloff. 'It highlights the complex networks and power structures of ancient Macedonia, especially given the city's location along trade routes to Constantinople. It's even possible that historical figures like Octavian and Agrippa passed through the area on their way to confront Cleopatra and Mark Antony at the Battle of Actium.'
'All these studies are just a small part of the research of early European civilizations,' Nasuh says. 'I see it as a large mosaic, and our studies are just a few pebbles in that mosaic. With each subsequent study, a new pebble is placed, until one day we get the entire picture.'
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Miami Herald
2 hours ago
- Miami Herald
Viking's silver treasure, an ancient Korean crown and three more discoveries
The summaries below were drafted with the help of AI tools and edited by journalists in our News division. All linked stories were reported, written and edited by McClatchy journalists. Throughout history, cultures have left behind a trail of breadcrumbs for archaeologists to follow. New sites and artifacts are found all the time, revealing forgotten secrets of the past. Here are some of the latest discoveries: 1,400-year-old crown — still decorated with insect wings — found in South Korea In Gyeongju, South Korea, archaeologists uncovered a 1,400-year-old crown adorned with jewel beetle wings from the Silla Kingdom. This ornate crown, found in a burial site, is a first-of-its-kind discovery in the region. The crown's intricate decorations, including gold beads and jade pieces, highlight the craftsmanship of the era. | Published May 22 | Read More | Hobbyist studying old map notices odd mark that leads to medieval find in Sweden In Derome, Sweden, a hobby archaeologist discovered the remains of a medieval monastery using an 18th-century map and modern technology. The site, likely dating back to the late 12th century, revealed thick walls and pillar foundations. This find sheds light on the region's monastic history and the Order of Cistercians. | Published May 22 | Read More | Students locate ancient Roman army camp beyond empire's northern border. See it In the Netherlands, university students discovered a rare ancient Roman military camp beyond the empire's northern border. Using computer models and LiDAR surveys, they confirmed the presence of Roman walls and a moat near Hoog Buurlo. | Published May 28 | Read More | Viking-era silver treasures found on farm in Sweden and restored. See them shine In Täby, Sweden, archaeologists unearthed a collection of Viking-era silver treasures, including arm rings, necklaces and coin pendants. The site, occupied for 500 years, also revealed structures from the Viking Age. The silver collection is notable for its size and preservation. | Published May 30 | Read More | Ancient waste shows surprising 'luxury' food item was not only for Roman elite In Pollentia, Mallorca, researchers found evidence of thrushes, a luxury food item, being sold by street vendors in ancient Rome. The discovery in a cesspit challenges the belief that thrushes were exclusive to elite banquets. This find suggests that thrushes were a common part of the urban diet in Roman times. | Published June 3 | Read More | McClatchy News continues to follow the discovery of intriguing archaeological discoveries from around the globe. Check back to see the latest finds.
Yahoo
3 hours ago
- Yahoo
The Dreadful Policies Halting Archeological Discoveries
Thanks to the creative application of new technologies, the 2020s are quietly shaping up to be a golden age of archaeology. In 2023, then-21-year-old Luke Farritor (now with the Department of Government Efficiency) combined machine‑learning pattern recognition with high‑resolution CT scans to decipher the first word from the Herculaneum scrolls—a Roman library charred by Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D. Fully decrypting the library could ultimately double the surviving corpus of Ancient Greek and Roman literature—an unprecedented bonanza for classical scholarship. Analysis of ancient DNA has resolved long-debated questions about human migrations. After sequencing hundreds of Bronze Age human genomes, David Reich's research team at Harvard positively identified southwest Russia as the geographical origin of the Indo-European languages, while other genomic work has dated Homo sapiens-Neanderthal interbreeding to 47,000 years ago, several millennia prior to earlier best guesses. Fossilized human footprints in White Sands, New Mexico, have been conclusively dated to about 23,000 years ago—proof that people were in North America during the last Ice Age and forcing scholars to rethink when and how humans first crossed into the New World. Lidar has recently revealed massive ancient cities under jungle canopies, from the Mayan platform of Aguada Fénix in Mexico—larger than the Great Pyramid of Giza—to mysterious urban centers in the ancient Amazon. These developments—whether driven by artificial intelligence, the decryption of ancient genomics, or airborne lasers—promise to momentously expand society's understanding of humanity's past. Notably absent from this bounty, however, are the fruits of traditional, physical, Indiana Jones-style archaeology. The world of bits, as has often been the case these days, is leaving the world of atoms in the dust. While the storied bits over atoms problem is a complicated one, legal mechanisms are straightforwardly to blame for throttling archeological discovery. The case of Italian antiquities policy is paradigmatic. Since the 1930s, Italy—along with Greece, Turkey, and Egypt—has vested ownership of all antiquities in the state. Commerce in freshly unearthed artifacts is outlawed, and unauthorized excavation is punishable by hefty fines and sometimes prison time. Even using a metal detector requires a permit. Edward Luttwak, a historian and author of The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire, explains that in Italy, "if you find something, you report it to the authorities. The authorities take it, goodbye. Most often, what they take from you, they put in a depot, a basement, a warehouse, and it never even gets shown." This is the unfortunate lot of the fortunate discoverer of an Italian artifact. Report a Roman coin? It'll be confiscated. Find an Etruscan urn while planting olives? Your land will be turned into an archaeological site the government may never have time to excavate. It's unsurprising, then, that Italians frequently don't report their findings to the government. Many artifacts end up on the black market (in 2023, Italy's Carabinieri Art Squad seized nearly 70,000 illegally excavated artifacts), or are even simply destroyed or hidden away. Private hoarding is an especially pernicious problem: When "illegally excavated" (read: most) Italian artifacts are privately held in people's houses, they are lost both to scholarship and public view. "You could fill twice the museums that exist in Italy from what people have hidden in their houses," says Luttwak, "which they wouldn't hide if you could report [them] to the authorities like they do in England." The British model provides a striking contrast. Since the 1996 Treasure Act, British law has required that significant archaeological finds be reported. Instead of simply seizing them, if the state wishes to retain an item, it must compensate the finder and landowner at its full market value. To capture the far larger universe of objects that fall outside the law's narrow legal definition of "treasure," the state-sponsored Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS) established a voluntary nationwide program through which average Britons can log any find, whether or not the state intends to acquire it, into an open scientific database. As of 2020, over 1 million objects have been logged in PAS. According to Michael Lewis, head of Portable Antiquities and Treasure at the British Museum, over 90 percent of PAS-recorded items are found by metal detectorists on cultivated land, indicating how the scheme has turned what was once seen as a threat into a fountainhead of archaeological data. Thanks to these policies, Britain has been increasingly outpacing Italy in Roman archaeology despite its relatively modest classical history, as seen in this viral map of the provenance of hoards of Roman coins. Notice the sheer quantity of Roman coin discoveries reported in the U.K., far surpassing those in Italy. This disparity isn't explained by Roman Britain being richer than Roman Italy (quite the opposite), but by modern Britain recognizing and leveraging incentives to bring history out of occultation. The Great Stagnation of physical archaeology is a choice. The failure of policymakers to get the basics right—to make physical archaeology worth anyone's time—renders the richest landscapes fallow. Luttwak's attention is on one such landscape: the confluence of the Busento and Crati rivers on the edge of Cosenza, Calabria. Contemporary accounts record that in 410 A.D. the Visigoth chieftain Alaric—fresh from sacking Rome—was buried beneath the temporarily diverted river along with the treasures of the Eternal City. "Alaric's treasure is located in the southern part of the city of Cosenza," says Luttwak. "It was documented by an eyewitness." Alaric took "gold and silver objects…statues, and all kinds of things—possibly even the Temple menorah….When Alaric died in Cosenza, he got as the king one third of the treasure [to be] buried with him." "It could be found," explains Luttwak, "with hovering metal detectors, because he was buried with his weapons, too." Alaric's hoard—and maybe Judaism's most iconic physical symbol—should be discoverable today with an aerial anomaly survey and some clever hydraulics. The technology is ready; the incentives are not. Change the rules, and the payoff could be extraordinary. The post The Dreadful Policies Halting Archeological Discoveries appeared first on
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Yahoo
Dead Sea Scrolls aged decades older by AI-powered discovery
'The implications are profound,' said Dr. Maruf Dhali, assistant professor of AI at Groningen and co‐author of the study. An international team led by the University of Groningen has combined radiocarbon dating, paleographic analysis and artificial intelligence to assign more precise dates to individual Dead Sea Scroll manuscripts, showing many are significantly older than previously believed. Using a deep‐learning model called Enoch, researchers input digitized images of 135 scroll fragments and trained the system to recognize microscopic ink‐trace patterns, such as curvature and character shape, alongside new radiocarbon results for 24 samples. By correlating these handwriting features with empirically established dates, the team narrowed dating uncertainty to roughly ±30 years, outperforming conventional radiocarbon ranges for the period of 300–50 BCE. Until now, most Dead Sea Scrolls had been broadly placed between the third century BCE and the second century CE based on paleography alone, a method that lacked solid empirical markers. 'There simply were no securely dated Hebrew or Aramaic manuscripts from the late Hellenistic era against which to compare,' explained Professor Mladen Popović, director of the Qumran Institute at Groningen. 'Our approach bridges that gap by using 24 radiocarbon‐anchored examples to give an objective timecode for handwriting styles.' BiNet, an earlier neural network that the Groningen group developed to detect handwritten ink traces, formed the foundation of Enoch's architecture. Once trained, Enoch produced date predictions that aligned remarkably closely with radiocarbon results—and, in some cases, suggested scrolls written in 'Hasmonaean‐type' script may date to decades earlier than the approximate 150–50 BCE range. Similarly, Herodian‐style fragments appear to have emerged in the late second century BCE rather than the mid‐first century BCE, indicating concurrent script traditions rather than a simple evolutionary sequence. 'The implications are profound,' said Dr. Maruf Dhali, assistant professor of artificial intelligence at Groningen and co‐author of the study published this week in PLOS One. 'With empirical evidence now anchoring paleographic analysis, scholars can revisit longstanding questions about when particular biblical texts circulated—and how these scripts relate to political and cultural shifts in ancient Judea.' Indeed, two biblical fragments—4QDanielc (4Q114) and 4QQoheleta (4Q109)—were shown by Enoch and new radiocarbon dates to originate roughly in the early 160s BCE and third century BCE respectively, matching the eras their anonymous authors likely composed the Books of Daniel and Ecclesiastes. 'This is the first tangible proof that portions of Daniel and Qohelet were penned contemporaneously with their presumed scribes,' noted Popović. 'It opens a window into the production of biblical literature at its very source.' Researchers stressed that Enoch does not replace human paleographers but augments their expertise with quantitative, explainable AI inferences. 'Within a few decades, we could use this model to date more than a thousand additional scroll fragments,' said Popović. 'The resulting new chronology will reshape our understanding of literacy, script development, and textual transmission in the eastern Mediterranean during the Hellenistic and early Roman eras.' Buddy Christ, an associate curator at the Israel Antiquities Authority who was not involved in the study, praised the advance: 'Marrying radiocarbon science with AI‐driven handwriting analysis represents a major leap forward. We now have a roadmap for dating unlabeled manuscripts across the Judean Desert corpus—and beyond.' The Enoch method could also be applied to other partially dated collections, such as Greek papyri or medieval European codices, providing a template for empirically grounded paleography. As the next step, Popović's team plans to make Enoch publicly accessible so that scholars worldwide can upload digitized manuscripts and receive probabilistic date estimates. For now, the Dead Sea Scrolls—drawing renewed attention thanks to this breakthrough—remain as historically vital as ever. With a precise 'timecode' now embedded in their script, the scrolls promise fresh insights into the political upheavals, theological debates, and cultural transformations that shaped the Jewish and early Christian worlds.
