Heritage

Workers renovating the basement of a former brewery in Belgium have stumbled across a remarkable cache of gold bars and coins concealed inside a wall, with the haul reportedly valued at around 39 million.

The remains of a village that disappeared beneath one of England’s largest reservoirs nearly half a century ago have emerged once again, as severe drought sends water levels falling at Rutland Water.

An unofficial Harry Potter landmark on a Welsh beach proved influential enough to alter plans for a major electricity connection between Britain and Ireland.

A rare 1776 printing of the US Declaration of Independence — one of just 11 known to survive and the only copy outside the United States — has been discovered at The National Archives in Kew, England.

A new study published in the journal Science has revealed that the world once experienced a remarkable "golden age" of linguistic diversity, with researchers estimating that tens of thousands of languages were spoken between 1,000 and 3,000 years ago.

The tragic story of a Cambridgeshire woman accused of witchcraft more than two centuries ago is shedding light on how fear, superstition and social exclusion continued to fuel violent persecution long after Britain's witch trials had officially ended.

Recent record-breaking temperatures and prolonged dry weather have dramatically revealed the hidden outline of a spectacular 17th-century formal garden beneath the South Lawn at Chatsworth House, England, offering a rare glimpse into one of the estate's earliest landscape designs.

A newly published study has uncovered fresh evidence that the Nazi SS likely misidentified the remains of a medieval woman as those of King Henry I in an attempt to bolster its ideological campaign during the 1930s.

An international expedition has captured the first detailed 3D images of the wreck of Terra Nova, the final ship of British Antarctic explorer Captain Robert Falcon Scott, using advanced Canadian underwater imaging technology.

A team of Chinese researchers has successfully reconstructed a long-lost Ming Dynasty goldsmithing technique, shedding new light on the remarkable craftsmanship behind some of imperial China's finest jewellery.

A fifteenth-century manuscript held for decades in the collection of Heidelberg University Library has been identified as part of the famed Bibliotheca Palatina, one of the most important libraries of the Renaissance.

New research suggests Dante Alighieri’s Inferno may have done more than shape literary history — it may also have anticipated concepts in planetary impact science centuries before modern meteoritics emerged.

Researchers in the UK say they have reconstructed 42 missing pages from a major early Christian manuscript, using imaging and dating techniques to reveal text unseen for centuries.

A royal seal from the reign of Edward the Confessor, long thought lost, has been rediscovered in the French National Archives, offering historians a remarkable new window into the final years of Anglo-Saxon England.

Writing might feel easy to overlook today, with so much communication happening through voice notes and video. But for most of human history, it has been one of the main ways people stored knowledge and told stories. Without it, much of what we know about the past would simply be gone.