Millennia after the event, it is hard to nail down the oldest cities and civilizations in the world.
Mud-brick village survived 7,200 years in the Jordan Valleyĭid Neanderthals ritually bury their dead? New evidence found in Iraq This discovery is unique, the archaeologists say.Įarliest mosaic in the world found in Turkey No similar ivory deposit or workshop has been found elsewhere. Yet he suspects the ivory dumps found so far – detritus from a massive industry of carving elephant tusks during the Islamic period – is just the beginning: Archaeologists have only uncovered just a small part of the industrial area, he tells Haaretz.įragments of ivory, evidence of a vast ivory industry in Islamic-period Bhanbhore Muhammad Qaseem Saeed The discovery in Trench 9 “is definitely the largest ivory workshop discovered in the world,” Mantellini says.
The new exploration is led by the latter’s professor emeritus Valeria Piacentini with Mantellini and Agnese Fusaro, an archaeologist and ceramics specialist at the University of Barcelona, Giorgio Affanni, archaeologist and ivory specialist, Alessandro Tilia, surveyor and topographer, and Daniele Redamante, archaeobotanist The new dig is a joint project of the Sindh government’s Department of Culture and Antiquities and the e Italian Foreign Ministry, through the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, Milan. The latest excavation of Trench 9 at the site, halfway between the Bhanbhore grand mosque – one of the earliest in the region – and its southern gate, began in 2017, about a century after the city’s scientific exploration began.