VIDEO: Unexplained Archaeological Discoveries

Occasionally, archaeologists unearth items that leave even leading experts completely stumped.

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From the first ever computer to the hundreds of mysterious stone spheres scattered across Costa Rica, this video brings you ten of the most bizarre, perplexing discoveries in history!

The most interesting one is for sure the Antikythera mechanism!

According to Wikipedia, the Antikythera mechanism was discovered in 45 metres of water in the Antikythera shipwreck off Point Glyphadia on the Greek island of Antikythera.

The wreck was found in April 1900 by a group of Greek sponge divers, who retrieved numerous large artefacts, including bronze and marble statues, pottery, unique glassware, jewellery, coins, and the mechanism.

All were transferred to the National Museum of Archaeology in Athens for storage and analysis. Merely a lump of corroded bronze and wood at the time, the mechanism went unnoticed for two years while museum staff worked on piecing together more obvious statues.

On 17 May 1902, archaeologist Valerios Stais found that one of the pieces of rock had a gear wheel embedded in it. Stais initially believed it was an astronomical clock, but most scholars considered the device to be prochronistic, too complex to have been constructed during the same period as the other pieces that had been discovered.

Investigations into the object were dropped until British science historian and Yale University professor, Derek J. de Solla Price became interested in it in 1951. In 1971, both Price and Greek nuclear physicist Charalampos Karakalos made X-ray and gamma-ray images of the 82 fragments. Price published an extensive 70-page paper on their findings in 1974.

It is not known how the mechanism came to be on the cargo ship, but it has been suggested that it was being taken from Rhodes to Rome, together with other looted treasure, to support a triumphal parade being staged by Julius Caesar.

The Antikythera mechanism is generally referred to as the first known analogue computer. The quality and complexity of the mechanism’s manufacture suggest that it has undiscovered predecessors made during the Hellenistic period.

Its construction relied on theories of astronomy and mathematics developed by Greek astronomers, and it is estimated to have been created around the late second century BC. In 1974, Derek de Solla Price concluded from gear settings and inscriptions on the mechanism’s faces that it was made about 87 BC and lost only a few years later.

Jacques Cousteau and associates visited the wreck in 1976 and recovered coins dated to between 76 and 67 BC. Though its advanced state of corrosion has made it impossible to perform an accurate compositional analysis, it is believed that the device was made of a low-tin bronze alloy.

The original mechanism apparently came out of the Mediterranean as a single encrusted piece. Soon afterward it fractured into three major pieces. Other small pieces have broken off in the interim from cleaning and handling, and still others were found on the sea floor by the Cousteau expedition.

Other fragments may still be in storage, undiscovered since their initial recovery; Fragment F came to light in that way in 2005. Of the 82 known fragments, seven are mechanically significant and contain the majority of the mechanism and inscriptions.