Excavations near an eleventh-century church in Lyminge, Kent, have exposed the foundations of an ancient predecessor. The Anglo-Saxon building dates to the mid-seventh century, just a few decades after Christianity, which had largely disappeared from Britain following the departure of the Romans in the early fifth century, was reintroduced by St. Augustine of Canterbury. One of the oldest stone churches in England, the seventh-century building was partially unearthed and then reburied in the nineteenth century, but a new project led by Gabor Thomas of the University of Reading is reinvestigating and documenting the site using modern archaeological methods. “Only a handful of stone churches dating from the earliest phase of English Christianity survive to the present day,” says Thomas. “Very few opportunities have arisen to explore these sites archaeologically.”

The church is thought to have been foundedby Æthelburga, princess of Kent and queen of Northumbria, whose empty tomb may have been identified in a small annex attached to the building’s exterior. Additional work nearby has uncovered traces of the monastic community that developed around the church.

An 8,000-year-old wooden platform has been discovered on the seabed off the Isle of Wight. The platform, which has been excavated by researchers from the Maritime Archaeology Trust (MAT) and taken to a laboratory for study, lay under more than 30 feet of water. At the time it was built, however, sea levels were much lower, and the area was heavily wooded and abutted a waterway. The newly identified structure, which measures about seven feet by three feet and may have originally been substantially larger, consists of layers of split wood resting on a perpendicular log foundation. It was identified by divers after it eroded out of the seabed. Building the platform would have required woodworking skills that were not thought to have been developed in this region until several thousand years later. “This is the most cohesive, most intact Mesolithic structure to have been excavated in the United Kingdom,” says Garry Momber, MAT’s director. The platform was situated near a boatbuilding site, where the wood scraps used to construct it would have been found.

Before the rise of Alexandria in the fourth century B.C., the ancient port city of Thonis-Heracleion at the mouth of the Nile was the gateway to Egypt for foreign traders. The city and a suburb, Canopus, also served as a center of Egyptian religious life before a series of natural disasters submerged them by the eighth century A.D.

Recent excavations in a channel south of Thonis-Heracleion’s main temple to the god Amun-Gereb have uncovered debris from its destruction around 140 B.C. Wedged among the building’s blocks and columns were hundreds of mostly intact ritual artifacts, ceramics, and bronze coins from the reign of Ptolemy II (r. 285–246 B.C.). Across from the temple’s entrance, archaeologists discovered Doric columns belonging to a circular Greek temple. Thonis-Heracleion’s surfeit of sanctuaries, including temples dedicated to Hercules and Osiris, was a result of official favor bestowed on it for its economic significance. “The city was of prime importance to the pharaonic dynasties, which relied on it for taxes and customs duties,” says Franck Goddio of the European Institute for Underwater Archaeology.