Holy Moses! It is now being announced that in July, a massive, unprecedented hoard of Anglo-Saxon art in gold, silver, and precious stones was unearthed in Straffordshire. The "Staffordshire Hoard" is one of the great finds of my lifetime, tied only perhaps by the Ivory Pomegranate of the Temple of Solomon, the inscription of which is now debated as being perhaps a modern forgery. But in sheer scale, there's nothing like the Hoard. The artwork is on the scale of the Book of Kells, with fabulous interlaced figures. Check it out: The Staffordshire Hoard

Largest hoard of Anglo-Saxon treasure found in UK
Sep 24, 12:39 PM (ET)

By RAPHAEL G. SATTER

LONDON (AP) - An amateur treasure hunter prowling English farmland with a metal detector stumbled upon the largest Anglo-Saxon treasure ever found, a massive seventh-century hoard of gold and silver sword decorations, crosses and other items, British archaeologists said Thursday.

One expert said the treasure found by 55-year-old Terry Herbert would revolutionize understanding of the Anglo-Saxons, a Germanic people who ruled England from the fifth century until the Norman conquest in 1066. Another said the find would rank among Britain's best-known historic treasures.

"This is just a fantastic find completely out of the blue," Roger Bland, who managed the cache's excavation, told The Associated Press. "It will make us rethink the Dark Ages."

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A CNS story on the maintenance of the Christian catacombs around Rome that caught my eye as I just got back in. I enjoyed a long evening tonight with Dan, Amy, and Pat, Amy's mother, turning the conversation away from dissertating and just playing a recent incarnation of Trivial Pursuit, after enjoying a fashion show of Amy's dress purchases from Macy's for her upcoming business trip, and Dan's surf and turf experiments of bacon-wrapped fillets, pan-seared scallops, spinach, risotto, zucchini and Pinot Noir. (Followed by a Chianti, followed by a Sprecher's Root Beer, followed by the sherry Dan got for their anniversary....)

Indiana Jones and the Christian catacombs? Not quite
By Cindy Wooden
Catholic News Service

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- Sometimes a job is just a job, even when from the outside it looks like it involves the stuff of an Indiana Jones movie.

Fabrizio Bisconti is the newly named archaeological superintendent of the Pontifical Commission for Sacred Archaeology, which oversees the upkeep and preservation of 140 Christian catacombs from the third and fourth centuries scattered all over Italy.

Most of the time, he said, the job is just work and study.

Staff members can spend a full month with surgical tools and cotton balls cleaning a third-century sarcophagus, but then there are those stunning, shocking, awe-inspiring moments of discovery.

Mid-June brought one of those "wow" moments when restorers cleaning a ceiling in the Catacombs of St. Thecla found what turned out to be the oldest known image of the apostle Paul. The fresco was hidden under a limestone crust.

Bisconti said treasure hunting and exploring were not his passions as a youth; he was into literature. But as a university literature student, he took an archaeology course "and fell in love."

"Certainly, there is great emotion when you find something new, but for us archaeology is our job, the subject of our studies," he said.

Bisconti said most of what he and his fellow archaeologists do all day involves very slow, painstaking precision care of the oldest intact Christian monuments and artwork.

Very little remains of any Christian church built before the fifth century, but the 140 catacombs in Italy offer clear evidence of how early Christians worshipped, how they lived and, especially, what they hoped and believed about death.

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