Seventy-Seven Fascinating Finds Revealed in 2024, From a Mysterious 'Anomaly' Near the Great Pyramid of Giza to a Missing Portrait of Henry VIII

Senior Associate Digital Editor, History

In a year marked by political polarization, violent conflicts in the Middle East and Europe, and other crises, not all news stories presented a bleak portrait of the current moment. These accounts of surprise discoveries delighted our readers, leaving all of us to ask what awaits us next year. Spanning disciplines, historical eras, geographic locations and cultures, some of the artifacts highlighted below were first unearthed years ago but only documented now, while others were identified more recently. From Ramses II’s long-lost sarcophagus to the world’s oldest deep-sea shipwreck, these were 77 of the most fascinating finds of 2024, as covered by Smithsonian magazine.

Missing masterpieces

For as long as humans have been making art, natural disasters, the ravages of time, theft and iconoclasm have threatened their creations’ survival. Though countless masterpieces have vanished over the millennia, many others remain hidden away, tucked in attics, basements and even thrift stores.

Luck and a keen eye helped members of the public recover some of these missing artworks, leading them to take a second look at items dismissed by others as worthless. When Mat Winter was 11 years old, he rescued a print by Renaissance master Albrecht Dürer from a pile of rubbish a woman was depositing at the local dump. “I thought it looked interesting and asked if I could have it,” Winter recalled. “She was more than happy to give it to me because she wanted it to go to someone rather than just throwing it away.” In September, more than a decade after Winter’s find, the 500-year-old print sold at auction for more than $40,000.

Winter obtained his masterpiece for free. But others shelled out a small amount of money, which they later recouped—and then some—upon discovering the true value of their finds. Similarly profitable (and culturally significant) purchases included a $20 box of vintage reels that contained a lost film starring silent movie star Clara Bow and a Victorian brooch, acquired at an antique fair for $25, that sold for around $12,000 earlier this year. The woman who owned the jewelry only learned of its significance after seeing sketches of other brooches designed by the same artist on an episode of “Antiques Roadshow.”

Flora Steel & Brooch — Flora Steel pictured with the Burges brooch she found in 2023 Gildings Auctioneers

While some artworks emerged by chance, others materialized through technological analysis and scholarship. Advanced imaging tools and conservation uncovered a hidden self-portrait on the back of a Norman Cornish bar scene and drawings that may be among William Blake’s earliest engravings. “These doodles reveal personal, intimate moments that were not intended to be seen by anyone other than the artist,” said literary scholar Mark Crosby, who spotted the possible Blake drawings while scanning the reverse side of 18th-century printing plates. “For the first time since they were made, we can now see the practice work and doodling of the young apprentice.”

Outside of the realm of visual arts, a number of forgotten musical, literary and theatrical works resurfaced in 2024. Researchers trawling through libraries and archives stumbled onto an early ghost story by Dracula author Bram Stoker, a 12-minute composition written by a teenage Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and 800 pages of sheet music from George Gershwin’s first full-length musical. Titled La, La, Lucille, the 1919 production was previously known through just a few surviving snippets of the score. Thanks to Jacob Kerzner’s chance discovery, Broadway fans can now hear what the show’s songs would have sounded like with full orchestration. “[Gershwin] was just 20 years old writing this show,” Kerzner said. “It feels like Gershwin just beginning to learn what makes a hit song, and just beginning to play around with some of his adventurous harmonies and syncopated rhythms.”

Ancient art

The names of the artists who crafted these millennia-old works are unknown, but their creations live on, offering enduring glimpses into now-lost civilizations.

In Pompeii, the Roman city razed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 C.E., ongoing excavations have revealed a trove of archaeological treasures, including frescoes of such mythological figures as Phaedra, a Cretan princess who falls in love with her stepson Hippolytus; the twins Phrixus and Helle; and Helen of Troy and Paris, the doomed lovers whose romance sparked the Trojan War. Elsewhere in Pompeii, archaeologists found an ancient shrine with brilliant blue walls and paintings of women representing the four seasons.

Off the shore of Naples, Italy, divers examined an underwater mosaic dated to around the third century C.E. The tiles once formed part of a porch at a luxury villa in Baiae, a city sometimes described as the Las Vegas of ancient Rome. The house toppled into the Gulf of Pozzuoli centuries ago, falling victim to a geological phenomenon known as bradyseism, in which the land surrounding a volcano alternates between periods of sinking and rising.

Continuing the aquatic theme, archaeologists exploring Viroconium Cornoviorum, a Roman city in what is now northwestern England, excavated a colorful mosaic featuring dolphins and fish, which was likely installed in a wealthy family’s home to impress important visitors. “It’s very much in line with the taste of the time, so this is someone who knows about fashion and what to put on your mosaics,” archaeologist Roger White said. “They’re culturally attuned.”

Helen of Troy and Paris Fresco — Researchers uncovered this fresco of Helen of Troy and Paris in a newly excavated Pompeii dining room. Pompeii Archaeological Park

Objects of war

Military conflicts tend to leave their mark on the landscape, dotting battlefields with weapons, armor and other traces of bloodshed. In 2024, archaeological evidence of armed conflicts spanned the ancient era through World War II. On the older end of the spectrum, mudbrick barracks possibly used by Ramses II’s army and the ruins of a temporary “rest house” dating to the reign of Thutmose III offered valuable insights on life in the ancient Egyptian military. At the dig site associated with Ramses, researchers excavated cow and fish bones, scarab jewelry, and engraved weapons.

Archaeological digs also generated tangible traces of famous battles. In England, experts unearthed eight stone balls fired from catapults during Henry III’s siege of Kenilworth Castle in 1266. The projectiles, which played a key role in the English king’s 172-day siege of a beleaguered rebel stronghold, range in weight from “that of a cabbage to that of a giant panda,” the London Times reported. Across the Atlantic Ocean in Massachusetts, archaeologists dug up a set of much smaller projectiles: five musket balls fired during the Battles of Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775.

Shots — These stones were shot from catapults during one of the longest sieges in British history. English Heritage

Shipwrecks bore witness to a 20th-century war that cleaved the world in two, separating countries into Axis and Allied powers. Researchers announced the discovery of the “Ghost Ship of the Pacific,” an American vessel that was repurposed by the Japanese after the latter seized control of the Indonesian island of Java during World War II. “Soon, far-ranging Allied pilots began reporting the strange sight of an old American destroyer operating deep behind enemy lines,” a press release said. The U.S. Navy recovered the ship at the end of the war, then deliberately sank it in May 1946.

On the Scottish Isle of Arran, ecological restoration of a peatland revealed the propeller blade of an ill-fated World War II plane. Because the device was found with “a rope still tied around it,” said Kate Sampson, the National Trust for Scotland’s senior ranger on Arran, researchers suspect it was moved during cleanup of a wartime crash site in the 1940s or 1980s. “Someone might have been dragging the propeller down the hill when it [sank] deep into the peat, not to be recovered until now,” Sampson added.

Prehistoric peoples

Prehistory, broadly defined as the period between the invention of stone tools 2.6 million years ago and the development of writing systems in the fourth millennium B.C.E., can be difficult to parse given the lack of documentation available. But physical evidence of people who lived many millennia ago helps illustrate prehistoric life, underscoring surprising parallels with modern society.

Some of the oldest finds recorded this year were a human-like jawbone and teeth embedded in a travertine floor tile in Europe. A dentist noticed the remains during a visit to his parents’ recently renovated home; the limestone used to craft the tile was quarried from Turkey’s Denizli Basin, dating its formation to between 0.7 million and 1.8 million years ago. Scholars are now working with the dentist to remove the tile and determine the age of the jawbone and teeth.

Found a mandible in the travertin floor at my parents house
byu/Kidipadeli75 infossils

Skipping ahead hundreds of millennia, researchers uncovered stirring examples of prehistoric peoples’ artistic inclinations: a sand sculpture that may have been shaped to resemble a blue stingray around 130,000 years ago and a 130,000-year-old bear bone featuring Neanderthal carvings. The precise, parallel nature of the incisions in the bear bone “suggests that they were a cultural practice that had meaning and function, and not, say, the product of unconscious personal habits like modern doodling,” archaeologist Paul Pettitt said.

Closer to 13,500 to 12,000 years ago, Paleoindian North Americans in what is now Wyoming carved needles out of small carnivores’ bones, a discovery that surprised modern archaeologists, who’d expected the tools to be made out of bison or mammoth bone. Another unexpected find that shed light on prehistoric humans’ everyday lives came from Germany, where scholars analyzed a 5,000-year-old ceramic pot filled with the remnants of burnt porridge.

Bone needle scans — Micro-CT scans of the bone needles and the other examples of bone they were compared against © 2024 Pelton et al. / PLOS One under CC-BY-4.0

Royal treasures

The monarchs who commanded ancient Egypt, the Roman Empire, medieval England and other realms wield much fascination for historians and the public alike. This year’s royal-related finds span continents and millennia, beginning with Ramses II, the Egyptian pharaoh who reigned in the 13th century B.C.E.

After assessing a granite fragment uncovered in the Abydos necropolis in 2009, Egyptologist Frédéric Payraudeau identified it as Ramses’ long-lost sarcophagus. One of three nested coffins crafted to hold the ruler’s remains, the granite sarcophagus housed a smaller alabaster sarcophagus that in turn contained a gilded wooden coffin. Archaeologists found the wooden coffin and Ramses’ mummy in a hiding place at the Deir el-Bahari temple complex in 1881, but the alabaster and granite sarcophagi were missing, likely looted by ancient tomb robbers. Thanks to Payraudeau’s research, experts now know that the granite sarcophagus was reused by a high priest named Menkheperre around 1000 B.C.E., masking its connection to its original occupant. In other Ramses-centric news, an excavation in Egypt unearthed the upper half of an enormous statue of the pharaoh, which lines up perfectly with the lower section of a sculpture found nearby in 1930.

In the Americas, the jade funerary mask of a Maya king and a richly adorned throne room that may have belonged to a female ruler of the Moche culture illuminated the lives of ancient monarchs in modern-day Guatemala and Peru, respectively. The throne room’s murals “tell us that powerful [Moche] women were not merely ‘priestesses,’ but that they were leaders who wielded sociopolitical power as well,” art historian Lisa Trever said.

Painting of a crowned woman with scepter (upper left), a procession of men behind her carrying objects (upper right) and a textile workshop (below) on the wall of the throne room — A painting of a crowned woman with scepter (upper left), a procession of men behind her carrying objects (upper right) and a textile workshop (below) on the wall of an ancient throne room in Peru Lisa Trever

Among the most famous—or perhaps infamous—royal houses in world history is the Tudor dynasty, whose members ruled over England between 1485 and 1603. This year, two major discoveries connected to the Tudors came about in two very different ways. In Northamptonshire, locals had long heard tales of Collyweston Palace, a lost Tudor manor visited by Henry VIII and Elizabeth I. These residents banded together to investigate the story, consulting the archives and experts to determine the palace’s possible location. After years of research and digging, the group uncovered the base of a centuries-old wall and a foundation. The ruins have since been verified by scholars, providing closure for history enthusiasts who have long wondered about the local legend. “We’re just a bunch of amateurs really, with no money, no plans, just a lot of enthusiasm,” said Chris Close, chair of the Collyweston Historical and Preservation Society, “and against all the odds, we have unearthed this.”

While Close and his neighbors dedicated significant resources to finding Collyweston Palace, art historian Adam Busiakiewicz stumbled onto a missing portrait of Henry VIII entirely by chance. While scrolling through X in July, Busiakiewicz spotted a distinctive frame in the background of a photo taken at the local shire hall. Noticing the artwork’s resemblance to a set of portraits commissioned by a local politician in the 1590s, the art historian examined the painting in person and determined that it was, in all likelihood, a long-lost entry in the famous series. “Social media is a crazy thing,” Busiakiewicz said, “because some people use it to watch cat videos and follow what’s going on in the world, and then people like me just look at what people have hanging on their walls.”

Delighted to host a reception for Lieutenancy ambassadors to thank them and my Deputy Lieutenants for all they do across #Warwickshire pic.twitter.com/gJOssu2Zj5
— Warwickshire Lieutenancy (@Warkslieutenant) July 4, 2024

Religious history

Fascinating finds related to religious history tell a story of diverse belief systems from the polytheism of the ancient Greeks and Romans to Buddhism and Christianity.

A marble statue of Hermes, the Greek messenger god, paired well with a temple built to honor the Roman emperor Constantine’s imperial ancestors (a practice that reinforced the idea that emperors were divine) in the fourth century C.E. Both discoveries date to the period when the Roman Empire was transitioning from polytheism to Christianity. Together, they show how some ancient resisted this change, whether by surreptitiously hiding a pagan statue in a sewer or constructing a state-sanctioned, yet decidedly not Christian, site of worship.

An octagonal building uncovered in Armenia—the oldest Christian church in the country, and one of the oldest of its kind in the world—comes from a similar period to these Roman finds, dating to around 350 C.E. “Armenia is the oldest Christian state in the world,” archaeologist Achim Lichtenberger said. “Our monument attests to the early Christianization.”

This digital reconstruction of the Armenian church's now-degraded walls shows its original shape. © Armenian-German Artaxata Project

Elsewhere in the world, a 4,000-year-old ceremonial temple in Peru is poised to shed light on early religious practices in the region. It features an elaborate carving of a mythological, bird-like creature that resembles a figure seen 500 years later, in the art of the Chavín culture. “We still know very little about how and under which circumstances complex belief systems emerged in the Andes,” said archaeologist Luis Muro Ynoñán. “Now we have evidence about some of the earliest religious spaces that people were creating in this part of the world.” In Egypt, meanwhile, excavations unearthed a hidden entrance to a 2,100-year-old temple that contains reliefs of the fertility god Min-Ra and the lion-headed goddess Repit.

Indigenous history

Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History, the government agency responsible for preserving the country’s rich cultural heritage, shared a slew of impressive finds this year, including a mysterious ancient structure hidden beneath a Maya ball court, remnants of hallucinogenic plants that may have been left as ceremonial offerings, and carved limestone lids used in Maya beekeeping between 950 and the early 1500s.

Other Indigenous cultures that left tangible traces of their presence ranged from the Nazca, a pre-Inca South American group known for creating the Nazca Lines, to Aboriginal Australians. Earlier this year, an artificial intelligence-assisted survey detected hundreds of previously unknown geoglyphs carved into the surface of Peru’s Nazca Desert. “Older, smaller and less distinct” than the more famous Nazca Lines, according to Smithsonian correspondent Sonja Anderson, the art depicts human-like figures, livestock, cats and even killer whales wielding weapons.

Nine of the newly discovered drawings — The researchers' A.I. model can spot geoglyphs' outlines 20 times faster than humans. Masato Sakai et al. / *PNAS*, 2024

In Australia, 2,000- to 3,000-year-old pottery fragments found on the island of Jiigurru challenged long-held notions that Aboriginal people didn’t create pottery. As the researchers who examined the fragments wrote for the Conversation, these individuals were, in truth, “intimately engaged in ancient maritime networks, connecting them with peoples, knowledges and technologies across the Coral Sea region, including the knowledge of how to make pottery.” Finally, in Wisconsin, on the ancestral territory of the Ho-Chunk Nation, maritime archaeologists collaborated with Indigenous leaders to recover nearly a dozen ancient canoes from the bottom of Lake Mendota. Spanning roughly 2500 B.C.E. to 1250 C.E., the vessels reinforce oral traditions that describe Indigenous peoples traveling by dugout canoe in the Great Lakes region.

Shipwrecks

Sunken ships open portholes to centuries past, presenting eerily preserved glimpses of vessels at the moment they met their demise.

In the Great Lakes, where more than 6,000 shipwrecks have claimed an estimated 30,000 lives, researchers identified the wreckage of the Adella Shores, a wooden steamship that vanished in 1909; the Margaret A. Muir, a 130-foot schooner that sank in Lake Michigan with its captain’s “intelligent and faithful” dog on board; and the Milwaukee, a steamship that collided with another vessel in 1886. Experts from the Michigan Shipwreck Research Association drew on newspaper reports to pinpoint the possible resting place of the Milwaukee, and they spotted the ship after just two days of searching the seabed with sonar technology.

Jacob Sharvit and Karnit Bahartan examine two amphorae recovered from the world's oldest-known deep-sea wreck. Emil Aladjem / Israel Antiquities Authority

Further afield, a merchant vessel found off of Israel’s coast, about 5,900 feet beneath the surface of the Mediterranean Sea, made headlines as the oldest deep-sea shipwreck identified to date. Dated to the late Bronze Age, the wreck testifies to ancient sailors’ ability to navigate by looking at the stars, long before the development of tools like compasses and astrolabes. In China, a pair of Ming dynasty merchant vessels holds more than 10,000 artifacts, around 900 of which have been recovered from the wreck. The porcelain, pottery, shells, copper coins and other objects provide “evidence that Chinese ancestors developed, utilized and traveled to and from the South China Sea, with the two shipwrecks serving as important witnesses to trade and cultural exchanges,” said Guan Qiang, deputy head of China’s National Cultural Heritage Administration.

Canadian researchers unveiled one of the most significant maritime finds of the year in June, when they announced the discovery of the Quest, the steamship used by explorer Ernest Shackleton on his final expedition to Antarctica. Shackleton died of a heart attack on board the Quest in January 1922; crew members found his body in his bed. After Shackleton’s death, the vessel remained in use for 40 years, participating in seal hunting, Arctic research expeditions and rescue missions. On May 5, 1962, sea ice pierced the Quest’s hull, consigning it to a watery grave off the northeast coast of Canada.

Sonar image of a shipwreck — The team used sonar to search a 24-square-nautical-mile search area for the wreck of the *Quest*. Royal Canadian Geographical Society

Amateur archaeologists

Every so often, amateur archaeologists—defined here as individuals without (or currently working toward) graduate degrees in the field—happen upon stunning historical treasures. Sometimes, these individuals deliberately set out to unearth rare artifacts, aided by metal detectors and other tools; in other instances, the discoveries take place purely by chance.

In the first category, persistence paid off for metal detectorists in Wales and Denmark, who uncovered a 300-year-old silver thimble engraved with a message of enduring love and a 1,500-year-old gold ring that may be linked to the Frankish Merovingian dynasty, respectively. A father and son in Poland also enjoyed treasure-hunting success, chancing upon a cache of silver coins worth more than $120,000. The two were part of a metal-detecting group searching for traces of an ancient road in a forest north of Warsaw. “At first, there was a great noise, because everyone who participated in the search—and there were a dozen of us—came running at the call of the discoverers,” said Mateusz Sygacz of the Polish “Husaria” Treasure Hunters Association. “We all realized that we had discovered something incredible.”

Engraved silver thimble — A metal detectorist discovered this silver thimble while scanning the grounds of Carew Castle. National Museum Cardiff

On the last day of a two-week dig in Scotland, volunteer John Ralph stumbled onto a 1,000-year-old kite-shaped ring associated with the early medieval Picts. “I always had an interest in archaeology, and having recently retired and coming out of Covid, I was looking for something interesting to do,” Ralph said. “I saw a call on Facebook for volunteers for the dig at Burghead, and since it was the town I was raised in and my sister stays there, I just thought, ‘Why not?’”

In the realm of luck-driven finds, standouts included a young boy who found a Neanderthal hand ax while playing on a beach in England, a 13-year-old who spotted a Roman-era ring featuring an engraving of the goddess Minerva while hiking in Israel and a geography teacher who unearthed a rock carved with ogham script while pulling weeds in his garden.

The magical, the macabre and the mysterious

In the realm of ritual and superstition, archaeologists uncovered lead scrolls bearing ancient curses and miniature axes likely used as votive offerings at a Roman-era villa in England, as well as graffiti carved by Roman prisoners who called on higher powers to punish their captors. “May the fortune of those who suffer in this lawless place prevail,” one message read. “Lord, do not show mercy on the one who threw us in here.” Another stated, “Lord, make them die an awful death.” A similarly vengeful call to action resurfaced at a medieval manor in England, where tour guide Rick Berry noticed the name of one of the estate’s former owners carved upside down above a crude drawing. “When you get something like that, that is very much a curse,” Berry said. “Someone has cursed him.”

Some finds revealed this year raised more questions than answers. In Egypt, ground-penetrating radar and electrical resistivity tomography surveys identified an “anomaly” near the Great Pyramid of Giza. Featuring a shallow structure connected to a deeper one, the mysterious underground chambers “point to the possibility of the presence of archaeological remains,” researchers wrote in the journal Archaeological Prospection. “It is important that they must be promptly excavated to establish their purpose.” A dig in England, meanwhile, yielded yet another example of a Roman dodecahedron. The 12-sided metal object is one of more than 100 excavated throughout Europe. Dodecahedrons have long mystified archaeologists, who suggest the ancients used the items to predict the future and practice sorcery, or perhaps relied on them as measuring devices, calendars or weapons.

Witches' marks and a curse found at an English manor house — Medieval-era witches' marks and a curse found at an English manor house English Heritage

A more recent mystery investigated by experts centers on a 1924 expedition to Mount Everest. While filming a documentary on the mountain, a National Geographic team spotted the frozen foot and sock of Andrew Comyn Irvine, a British explorer who attempted to summit Everest with partner George Mallory. The pair vanished during their ascent, enabling Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary to proclaim themselves the first to reach Everest’s summit 29 years later, in 1953. A climber found Mallory’s body in 1999, but Irvine’s fate remained unclear until now. The find doesn’t confirm whether Irvine and Mallory beat Norgay and Hillary to the summit, losing their lives in the process, but it does represent a major development in the century-old mystery. “I have lived with this story since I was a 7-year-old, when my father told us about the mystery of Uncle Sandy on Everest,” said Irvine’s great-niece, Julie Summers. She added, “I’m regarding [the remains] as something close to closure.”

Death and taxes

As Benjamin Franklin once said, “In this world, nothing is certain except death and taxes.” Archaeological finds bear out the statesman’s words, testifying to how different civilizations viewed these universal experiences.

The woman's remains were contained in two painted coffins, one stacked inside the other. Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities

Often, ancient burials offer evidence of funerary rituals designed to benefit the dead in the afterlife. In Poland, a dried-up lakebed held skeletal remains and more than 550 bronze artifacts linked to the Lusatian culture, which was active during the late Bronze Age and early Iron Age. Analysis of the site suggests the community buried its dead in the lake between 1040 and 780 B.C.E., then added metal jewelry like beads and pendants during later rituals. Ornate jewelry also featured in a Roman burial ground in central Italy, where researchers uncovered gold necklaces and earrings, amulets, and silver rings adorned with amber. “All these riches, and the fact that the bones show no sign of stress or physical labor, [indicates] these weren’t local farmers, but upper-crust members of Roman families coming from cities,” said archaeologist Emanuele Giannini.

Excavations in Egypt offered insights on the Middle Kingdom, an era often overlooked in favor of the New Kingdom. Idi, the only daughter of a powerful Middle Kingdom governor, was buried in the ancient city of Asyut in two nested coffins painted with advice on how she could find her way to the underworld. Near Luxor, archaeologists unearthed a necropolis that held the remains of several generations of an Egyptian family. It’s the first Middle Kingdom tomb found in the area, as most burials from that time period were destroyed during the New Kingdom.

block — The coins were found in the courtyard of a farmhouse in the small town of Wettin, Germany. State Office for Monument Preservation and Archeology Saxony-Anhalt

Taxes, as represented more generally by currency, proved to be a constant across time. Coin caches unearthed this year demonstrated the diverse circumstances that inspired the wealthy to stash their money away: In western Turkey, a pot of gold coins dated to the fifth century B.C.E. might have been hidden during military conflicts between Greek and Persian forces. “No one ever buries a hoard of coins, especially precious metal coins, without intending to retrieve it,” said archaeologist Christopher Ratté. “So only the gravest misfortune can explain the preservation of such a treasure.”

Gold and silver coins found beneath the floors of a home in England also appear to be linked to a period of unrest: in this case, the First English Civil War, which took place between 1642 and 1646. The stash, which fetched more than $75,000 at auction, contrasted with 285 silver coins discovered in a former brewing town in Germany. That money likely belonged to the town’s wealthy mayor, who was known to keep coins stashed around his property. “It not only demonstrates the wealth of Wettin’s late-17th-century leader, but the wide-ranging trade connections that brought different coins into his possession,” wrote Smithsonian correspondent Sonja Anderson.

Games and recreation

Life in long-ago societies wasn’t all work and no play. Clues to how people of the past spent their free time abound, from a medieval chess piece and six-sided die discovered in a German castle to an ancient Roman villa in Albania that boasted an indoor pool. In England, divers exploring the River Tyne recovered a 2,000-year-old copper knife handle carved to resemble a gladiator. The figure appears to be left-handed, suggesting it was based on a real-life fighter, as the Romans believed left-handedness was unlucky and likely wouldn’t have given this trait to a generic gladiator. Researchers don’t know how the figurine ended up in the river, but they say its presence speaks to the cult of celebrity surrounding gladiators, who earned accolades for displaying prowess in the arena and apparently courted fans as far afield as Roman Britain.

A mysterious toy found in Iceland evoked visions of children at play. Archaeologists excavating a farm site in Seydisfjordur uncovered a tiny stone figurine dated to the Viking Age. Crafted out of palagonite tuff, a type of volcanic rock, the object has sparked debate, with scientists and social media users alike offering their opinions on what animal it represents. Some say the toy depicts a dog, while others say it’s a horse, a bear or a pig. Scientists plan on studying the figurine further to determine its identity, “although it may remain open for discussion,” said excavation manager Ragnheidur Traustadóttir.

Svín,björn eða hundur. A toy pig,bear or dog by nikunorway on Sketchfab

Everything else

Some remarkable finds revealed in 2024 didn’t fit neatly into the aforementioned categories but still ranked among the most intriguing of the year. These eclectic discoveries included a 19th-century chocolate factory in Barcelona and the oldest wine ever found in liquid form, a 2,000-year-old, reddish-brown concoction unearthed in an ancient tomb in Spain.

Other finds served as messages from the past, connecting 17th-century schoolgirls to modern archaeologists, who uncovered the students’ decorative paper cuttings beneath the floorboards of their former London boarding school. “We have long known about the role of Sutton House as a girls’ school over its lifetime, but with few details about the classes, the pupils or teaching,” said Kate Simpson, a senior collections officer at the National Trust. “This discovery brings to vivid life one of the skills that pupils were taught and the painstaking process of handling, cutting and coloring such tiny pieces of paper.”

Paper Cuttings — Preteen and teenage schoolgirls made these tiny paper cuttings in the 17th century. National Trust Images / James Dobson

In a reversal of the previous example, students volunteering at an archaeological dig in the French town of Eu stumbled onto a message in a bottle written by a French archaeologist who’d excavated that same site 200 years earlier. “Sometimes you see these time capsules left behind by carpenters when they build houses. But it’s very rare in archaeology,” said excavation leader Guillaume Blondel. “Most archaeologists prefer to think that there won’t be anyone coming after them because they’ve done all the work.”

Rounding out the incredible finds announced this year was a Q1 microcomputer from 1972—one of the world’s oldest surviving desktop computers. Found by a cleaning crew in London, the device is the world’s earliest microcomputer, built with a single chip rather than multiple microchips. Few examples survive today, but the Q1 left its mark on the world, laying “the foundation for today’s everything device—the modern computer now so ubiquitous in everyday life,” said Paul Neve, an expert on early computers. “We rely on computers for our work, communication, productivity and entertainment, but without the early trailblazers, none of these would exist.”

A 1972 Q1 desktop microcomputer Heritage Auctions

Photo credit for top image: Illustration by Meilan Solly / Photos, clockwise from top left: brooch via Gildings Auctioneers; stingray-shaped rock via Helm et al. / Rock Art Research, 2024; gladiator figurine via English Heritage; jade mask via Francisco Estrada-Belli / Tulane University; Charles I coin via Duke’s Auctioneers; gold coin via Notion Archaeological Project, University of Michigan; dodecahedron via Norton Disney History and Archaeology Group; Neanderthal hand ax via Worthing Museum; paper cuttings by National Trust Images / James Dobson; dolphin mosaic via Paul Belford / Heritage Innovation; chess piece via University of Tübingen / Victor Brigola; Ming vase via National Cultural Heritage Administration; and marble statue via Dobrin Kashavelov / AFP via Getty Images

Seventy-Seven Fascinating Finds Revealed in 2024, From a Mysterious ‘Anomaly’ Near the Great Pyramid of Giza to a Missing Portrait of Henry VIII