Artifacts in Turkey best of 2008 list

Hurriyet Daily News with wires

One of the finds was a well-preserved funerary stele from the eighth century BC and the other, two Imperial Roman marble heads belonging to Emperor Marcus Aurelius and Faustina the Elder, wife of the emperor Antoninus Pius.

The marble heads were unearthed in Sagalassos, a classical metropolis in central Turkey, by the team of excavator Marc Waelkens of the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium. In 2007, they discovered a head of emperor Hadrian, part of a colossal statue that once stood in the city's Roman baths. They will be return next year hoping to find other remains, those of Faustina the Younger, Marcus Aurelius's wife in particular.

Stele of Kuttamuwa
The funerary stele of Kuttamuwa, the other artifact that made the list, was unearthed in Zincirli, by students from the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute. The basalt monument has a 13-line inscription in which Kuttamuwa refers to food offerings made where his stele was displayed, requesting "a ram for my soul that is in this stele."

Other notable finds of 2008 include bits of the sacred blue pigment the Maya used during human sacrifices, 14,300-year-old human feces, the earliest shoes and the oldest oil paintings of the world, among others.