6 Strangest Archaeological Discoveries

Digging up some old treasure or a 3000-year-old trinket is always super exciting, especially if you’re an archaeologist and that little trinket may change everything we knew about some ancient civilization or a long forgotten city. For some reason archaeological discoveries aren’t as popular as celebrity weddings, so only a handful of people know what’s going on. So let’s see what those crazy dirt-diggers unearthed during their excavations.

Here are the 6 strangers archaeological discoveries you had no idea were real.

1. The Leicestershire Bark Shield

What is a shield made of bark doing in III-IV BC Europe? Everyone was using metal shields in that era, but this one daredevil was skillful enough to use that light bark shield in combat for 10 years. Here’s the thing about archaeologists: they can identify what and when was used but they have no battle experience. To me it’s a no-brainer that a light sturdy shield was enough to deflect arrows and melee blows, but to them it was a mystery. But hey, we can’t all know everything!

2. The Written Rock Of Gelt

About 1800 years ago, a quarry in Cumbria was occupied by some Roman soldiers. As every human before and after them, they wanted to carve a message for their followers in the stone walls of the quarry. A dozen centuries later William Camden found their drawings, called the whole thing the Written Wall of Gelt, but was unable to properly record them due to stone erosion. In 1980 the quarry collapsed and decades later, the researchers using modern 3D scanning tech were able to reach and scan at least some of the writings.