, recently recovered from the bottom of the South China Sea, is threatening to inflame a diplomatic row over an area believed to be rich in oil.

Divers working for the French oil company Elf, stumbled across the wreck of a 15th Century Chinese galleon containing a hoard of priceless porcelain and ceramic pieces.

The ship went down off the coast of Brunei and is thought to contain one of the largest hauls of buried treasure ever uncovered.

Using the same two-seater submarine as those used to survey the Titanic, archaeologists uncovered an Aladdin’s Cave of intricately painted ancient pottery.
For more than two months, a daily haul of hundreds of artefacts were hauled to the surface. Back on land, a vast hanger was built to clean and catalogue the discoveries, thought to be worth millions of dollars. “It’s a fascinating project,” says John Perry, Managing Director of Elf Petroleum Asia.

“The artefacts themselves, in their day may have been ordinary things in the street but today they have a timeless beauty, which is so hard to define but so real to touch.”

For Brunei, a nation keen to lessen its dependence on oil revenue, the discovery has become a source of new national pride.

The artefacts provide the tiny sultanate with something money alone cannot buy – symbols of a cultural identity which, officials hope, will boost tourism.

A few tantalising pieces of evidence for why Manchester came to dominate North-West England in the industrial age, an event long regarded as something of a mystery, have been pieced together as a result of recent archaeological and historical work in the city.

Traditionally Manchester was thought to have developed only from about 1750, having been a very minor settlement in the Middle Ages – far less important than established towns nearby such as, for example, Preston. The recent work, however, suggests that Manchester was already one of the region’s principal centres by the mid-16th century, and may have flourished commercially for centuries before that.

Two excavations have now produced evidence suggesting a wealthy and vigorous city in the later Middle Ages. Discoveries in Hangman’s Ditch, the city’s early medieval boundary, include 14th and 15th century gold pins, imported pottery, a rare decorated sword scabbard, and vast quantities of leatherwork – apparently the discarded contents of an entire leathershop. The collection resembles those found from major cities such as London.

Meanwhile, investigations in the moat at Denton Old Hall in Tameside, dating from the 16th century, have produced the timber, rubble, metalwork and objects of an earlier building that had been demolished to make room for a grand new home in the fashionable style of the period – another indicator of prosperity in the region.

The discoveries, by the University of Manchester Archaeological Unit (UMAU), build on the work of archaeologist Mike Morris, whose analysis of tax returns and similar documents of the period produced the first indications of Manchester’s medieval vitality, and were published in the book Medieval Manchester in 1983. More recent analysis of the city’s street pattern by UMAU have suggested the possibility that the town had a large planned market in the 13th century, similar to that known for Preston.

According to John Walker, Director of UMAU, the social conditions of late medieval Manchester led naturally to the entrepreneurship of the industrial age. The absence of guilds, strong local lords or a powerful church allowed an unrestricted, socially mobile community to flourish, turning to craftwork and industry in an area of poor land. The view that Manchester was an insignificant place owed partly to the absence of information about the medieval town, as many of the town’s official documents were burned while temporarily stored in London during the Great Fire of the 17th century.

Robert Connolly, who is working with the Egyptian authorities to remains of Tutankhamen and the two stillborn children, will discuss the new findings at the Pharmacy and Medicine in Ancient Egypt Conference at The University of Manchester on September 1, 2008.

Mr Connolly says: “The work carried out by Catherine Hellier in Norway and I suggests that the two fetuses in the tomb of Tutankhamen could be twins despite their very different size and thus fit better as a single pregnancy for his young wife. This increases the likelihood of them being Tutankhamen’s children.

“I studied one of the mummies, the larger one, back in 1979, determined the blood group data from this baby mummy and compared it with my 1969 blood grouping of Tutankhamen. The results confirmed that this larger fetus could indeed be the daughter of Tutankhamen.

“Now we believe that they are twins and they were both his children. The forthcoming DNA study on them by Dr Zahi Hawass’s group in Egypt will contribute another key piece to this question.”

Mr Connolly, Senior Lecturer in Physical Anthropology at the University of Liverpool’s Department of Human Anatomy and Cell Biology, adds:  “It is a very exciting finding which will not only paint a more detailed picture of this famous young King’s life and death, it will also tell us more about his lineage.”

More than 100 delegates from 10 countries, including the Director of the Cultural Bureau of the Egyptian Embassy in the UK and researchers from Egypt’s Conservation of Medicinal Plants project in Sinai and the British Museum, are attending the conference, hosted by the KNH Centre for Biomedical Egyptology at The University of Manchester, in conjunction with the National Research Centre in Cairo, Egypt, and sponsored by The Leverhulme Trust.

Arnhem Land, jutting into the Arafura Sea at the top of Australia, has always been a special place for Aboriginal people. Just how special has been reinforced by the discovery of an extraordinary collection of rock art recording life in the area for the past 15,000 years, until 50 years ago. Alongside ancient paintings of thylacines, a mammal long extinct on the mainland, are images documenting modern-day inventions – a car, a bicycle wheel, a biplane and a rifle – as well as portraits of a missionary and a sea captain. Scientists documenting the rock art, spread across at least 100 sites in the remote Wellington Range, say it ranks among the world’s finest. It also appears to rewrite Australian history, undermining the widely held assumption that the continent was isolated and largely unvisited until the First Fleet arrived in 1788. The paintings suggest that the people of northern Australia have been interacting with seafaring visitors from Asia and Europe for hundreds, possibly thousands, of years. A team of scientists on an expedition to the Range recorded 81 images of ships, ranging from the vessels of Macassan traders from Sulawesito dugout canoes, 19th-century British tall ships, 20th-century steamers and Japanese pearling luggers. They even found paintings of a luxury cruise ship and a World War II destroyer. The scientists surveying the paintings with the help of a local Aboriginal elder, Ronald Lamilami, say they represent possibly the longest continuous record in the world. “This seems to have been a key location where people went back again and again, adding to the art over thousands of years and many hundreds of generations,” Professor Paul Tacon, an archaeologist from Griffith University in Queensland, said last week. “Each time they went back, they added new imagery and new experiences to the growing history book that they were creating. Many Aboriginal people across northern Australia describe these sorts of sites as their history books, or libraries.” The rock art has been known about since the 1970s, when a leading expert, George Chaloupka, was taken to the area by local people. But he saw only a tiny proportion of it, and records of its whereabouts were lost. It was only recently that they were rediscovered by a doctoral student, Daryl Guse. Tacon’s team, which travelled to Arnhem Land last month, was overwhelmed by the sheer volume of the art. In one rock shelter alone, they found 1500 paintings, comprising “more ‘contact era’ art and more varied imagery than any other site in the world”, according to Tacon. “This area is astounding. Every time we went out, we had a plan to survey a particular stretch of the range, but we could hardly move at all, because we were continually finding sites. “Over a few days, we found 100 previously undocumented sites, and we’ve only just scratched the surface. “There are hundreds, possibly thousands, of sites waiting to be revealed. This area is of World Heritage significance, and it rivals the best of any area in Australia. It’s right up there with the best rock art regions of Europe, South Africa and elsewhere.” The art contains subjects and styles not found elsewhere in Australia. Much of it consists of multiple layers applied over the millennia. On one wall is a biplane painted over a kangaroo. One early depiction of a ship includes a wealth of interior detail, suggesting that Aboriginal people had been boarding vessels for generations.

The Department of Archaeology and Museums was receiving international backing from UNESCO, the International organization for conservation of cultural heritage (ICCROM), United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) and from the contributor countries such as the USA, Japan, Korean, Thailand, Germany and Norway. In a meeting it was disclosed that the organization had managed to mobilize world opinion regarding the rich cultural heritage of the area and was now able to organize international exhibitions of cultural heritage abroad.