Archaeologists working at the Odeon site in Bulgaria's second city of Plovdiv have found 40 silver coins said to date from the third century CE when the city was under Roman rule. The coins were said by archaeologists to have been minted during the Severan dynasty, while ruled from 193 to 235 CE and variously feature images of four different emperors.

The Odeon site, dating from the second to fifth centuries, is the location of a Roman-era theatre, and is smaller in scale than Plovdiv's well-known ancient theatre in the city's Old Town. The coins were found near the complex of administrative buildings at the northern end of the forum complex. This archaeological season, more than 600 coins have been excavated at Plovdiv's Odeon site. From the Hellenic era, there have been many finds of pottery.

The advent of writing is generally viewed in terms of its significance as a cultural advance - less attention is given to its political implications. Yet it looks like the most important function writing originally served was in the management of slavery and the regulation of society.

The BBC's Sean Coughlan reports on efforts to understand proto-Elamite, the world's oldest undeciphered writing system, which was used in an area that is now in south-western Iran over 5,000 years ago. The script was imprinted in clay tablets.

These were among the first attempts by our human ancestors to try to make a permanent record of their surroundings. What we're doing now - my writing and your reading - is a direct continuation.

But there are glimpses of their lives to suggest that these were tough times. It wasn't so much a land of milk and honey, but porridge and weak beer.

Even without knowing all the symbols, Dr [Jacob] Dahl [director of the Ancient World Research Cluster at Oxford University] says it's possible to work out the context of many of the messages on these tablets.

The numbering system is also understood, making it possible to see that much of this information is about accounts of the ownership and yields from land and people. They are about property and status, not poetry.

This was a simple agricultural society, with a ruling household. Below them was a tier of powerful middle-ranking figures and further below were the majority of workers, who were treated like "cattle with names".

Their rulers have titles or names which reflect this status - the equivalent of being called "Mr One Hundred", he says - to show the number of people below him.

It's possible to work out the rations given to these farm labourers.

Dr Dahl says they had a diet of barley, which might have been crushed into a form of porridge, and they drank weak beer.

The amount of food received by these farm workers hovered barely above the starvation level.

However the higher status people might have enjoyed yoghurt, cheese and honey. They also kept goats, sheep and cattle.

For the "upper echelons, life expectancy for some might have been as long as now", he says. For the poor, he says it might have been as low as in today's poorest countries.

If we think of writing as an observer's record-keeping we might imagine some kind of proto-historian assuming the task of creating these first tablets, yet their content as described above makes it clear that these texts had a purely utilitarian function - they were records for the ruling class. Indeed, the creation of writing was likely one of the necessary conditions that facilitated the development and expansion of ownership.

Rock sculptures dating back to between 4,000-7,000 BC have been found in a well-preserved condition in the forests near Kudopi village in Sindhudurg district of coastal Konkan region, an official said here Tuesday.

There are more than 60 big and small images of Mother Goddess, birds and animals, found in a single location of around 20,000 square feet, considered one of the biggest such concentration anywhere in the country, Satish Lalit, leader of an expedition team which made the discovery last May, said.

"Though similar carvings have been found in other parts of India, this is the first find on a red soil laterite plateau. These are petro-glyphs unlike the picto-graphs found in places like Amravati," Lalit, a member of Rock Art Society of India (RASI), said.

With this significant historical find dating back to over 6,000 years from now, Sindhudurg district, around 490 km from Mumbai on the Maharashtra-Goa border, will be catapulted onto the global rock-art map.

Last week (Nov 17) Lalit, who is also the media advisor to Maharashtra Chief Minister Prithviraj Chavan, presented his findings before the RASI's 17th National Congress held in Badami, Karnataka.

Italian archaeologists say they have discovered a cemetery that reveals complex funeral rites dating back more than 3,000 years in Pakistan's Swat valley, recently controlled by the Taliban.

The Italian mission began digging in the 1950s at Udegram, a site of Buddhist treasures in Swat, the northwestern district formerly known as the Switzerland of Pakistan for its stunning mountains, valleys and rivers.

Archaeologists were aware of a pre-Buddhist grave site in Udegram, but only recently discovered the collection of almost 30 graves, tightly clustered and partially overlapping.

"Some graves had a stone wall, others were protected by walls and enclosures in beaten clay," Luca Maria Olivieri, head of the Italian mission, told AFP.

"The cemetery... seems to have been used between the end of the second millennium BCE and the first half of the first millennium BCE," he added.

Olivieri says the tombs point to the culture that predates the Buddhist Gandhara civilisation that took hold in northwest Pakistan and eastern Afghanistan from the first millennium BCE to the sixth century AD.

A new book written by the Pope questions one of the fundamentals of the Christian religion. The head of the Roman Catholic Church argues the Christian calendar is based on a miscalculation and is therefore wrong.

In the book Benedict XVI goes on to suggest Christ was born several years earlier than is commonly thought.

In the final instalment of the Pope's Jesus of Nazareth trilogy dedicated to Christ's infancy, the pontiff writes of an error made by 6th century monk Dionysius Exiguus or Dennis the Small, who apparently "made a mistake... by several years" calculating the beginning of our calendar.

"The actual date of Jesus' birth was several years before," he claims.

The concept is not new. Many historians and scholars agree with Pope Benedict XVI, believing Jesus Christ was rather born sometime between 6BC and 4BC.

Dionysius Exiguus invented the new Christian calendar as an alternative to the one that was current at the time. It was based on the years of reign of Emperor Diocletian, a tyrant who persecuted Christians. The Exiguus system eventually replaced the Diocletian in Europe around the year 800 and started the use of Anno Domini.

The allegation Dionysius Exiguus made a mistake is still a questionable theory, as no one knows how exactly Dionysius made his calculations.

The book hit the stores on Wednesday after it has been translated into other languages from original German. The first part was published in 2007 and was annotated as a "personal search for the face of the Lord." The second instalment was published in 2011.

Ancient Balinese history was not uppermost in Ida Rsi Bhujannga's life until plans to build a septic tank at his home turned into an archeological discovery that has scientists bewitched.

The elderly high priest says he is now fascinated by his community's history, which the rare find of dozens of massive stones has uncovered. These meter-long stones are believed to be from a 14th century temple complex that may have been the largest ever constructed on the Island of the Gods.

"I have become very interested in archeology since this was found, because we must know our history here in Bali. As a priest I need to know about this history so I can teach people," said Bhujannga.

He is speaking of ruins of a Hindu temple unearthed recently during excavations into rice fields to extend his home in Penatih village, Denpasar. Workers struck the huge mudstone foundations of the temple at just 70 centimeters below the surface, and in doing so have altered the Denpasar history books.

Head of Bali's Archeology Unit, Made Geria, says the discovery is unique due to the scale of the stones used in the ancient temple's foundations and their location.

The ancient dwelling was uncovered during an archaeological excavation in a field on the outskirts of Edinburgh. A large oval pit nearly seven metres in length and studded with postholes is all that remains of the dwelling that has been dated to the Mesolithic period, around 10,252 years ago.

A survey of the site was being conducted in preparation for the building of the Forth Replacement Crossing in a field in Echline, South Queensferry, just north of Edinburgh.

Rod McCullagh, a senior archaeologist at Historic Scotland, said: "This discovery and, especially, the information from the laboratory analyses adds valuable information to our understanding of a small but growing list of buildings erected by Scotland's first settlers after the last glaciation, 10,000 year ago.

"The radiocarbon dates that have been taken from this site show it to be the oldest of its type found in Scotland which adds to its significance."

Seals made up as much 80 percent of the Viking diet in Greenland, new analyses of Norse skeletons reveal. The finds suggest that the settlers' mysterious disappearance from Greenland 500 years ago was hardly due to an inability to adjust to the icy environment.

"Even though the Norse are traditionally thought of as farmers, they adapted quickly to the Arctic environment and the unique hunting opportunities," explained researcher Jan Heinemeier of Aarhus University in a statement. "During the period they were in Greenland, the Norse ate gradually more seals."

Through analyses of the carbon isotope ratios in bone samples from 80 Norse skeletons, the researchers determined that a large proportion of the Vikings' diet came from seafood, with seals making up between 50 and 80 percent by the 14th century.

The first Norse transplants brought farming and domestic animals such as cattle, sheep, goats and pigs from Iceland to Greenland. But the new findings challenge the view that these settlers stuck to this lifestyle until increasingly harsh conditions, and possibly a "Little Ice Age," drove them to starve or settle elsewhere.

New York - A wrecked schooner long buried on Fire Island - a barrier island off of Long Island, N.Y. - now lies fully exposed following Hurricane Sandy's attack on the beach.

The weathered hull of the shipwreck lies about 4 miles (6 kilometers) east of Davis Park, between Skunk Hollow and Whalehouse Point, in the Fire Island National Seashore, as first reported by Newsday.

The remains are thought to be the Bessie White, more than 90 years old, said Paula Valentine, public affairs specialist for the park. Historic photographs and news accounts don't agree on the year of ship's grounding, but here is an outline of its story:

The ship, a four-mast Canadian schooner, went aground in heavy fog about a mile west of Smith's Point, Long Island, in either 1919 or 1922. The men escaped in two boats. One capsized in the surf, injuring one crew member, but everyone (including the ship's cat) made it to shore safely. But the crew couldn't save the three-year-old ship or its tons of coal. The ship was salvaged in the following weeks.

The bus-size ship's skeleton has poked up through the sand before, such as after a nor'easter in 2006, exposing long boards and metal pegs, Valentine told OurAmazingPlanet.

Homo heidelbergensis developed the weapon 500,000 years ago, long before Neanderthals and Homo sapiens made them, a study finds.

It was among early man's greatest technological feats: a fully engineered weapon that combined a wooden shaft, mixed adhesives and a stone that had been chiseled to a lethal point.

To many anthropologists, the creation of the stone-tipped, or hafted, spear was a watershed moment in human evolution. Not only did it amplify the killing power of early hunters, it also demonstrated clearly that they had developed the capacity for complex and abstract reasoning.

Pinning down this moment in prehistory has been difficult, however. It was long held that Neanderthals and Homo sapiens first lashed stone tips to spears 200,000 to 300,000 years ago. But a study published in Friday's edition of the journal Science contends that a third species, Homo heidelbergensis, developed the technology about 500,000 years ago.