It was a day of rejoicing yesterday for archaeologists and history fans as spectacular artifacts surfaced in the United States and Britain.
Archaeologists recovered five more cannon from the wreck of Blackbeard's flagship, the Queen Anne's Revenge.
The largest of the guns weighs about 1360kg. The wreckage of the ship is in Beaufort Inlet, North Carolina.
Project director Billy Ray Morris says historians think the largest cannon was made in Sweden, indicating Blackbeard had guns from different countries. State officials say about 280,000 artifacts have been recovered from the wreck.
Blackbeard, who was the world's most notorious pirate, captured a French slave ship and renamed it Queen Anne's Revenge in 1717.
Volunteers with the Royal Navy killed him in Ocracoke Inlet the next year, five months after the ship sank.
The wreck was found in 1996.
In London, archaeologists discovered the finest Romano-British sculpture unearthed in the capital. The spectacular 65cm-tall sculpture of a Roman eagle with a snake in its beak was found at the bottom of an ancient Roman ditch just south of Aldgate station in the eastern part of the city and will go on show at the Museum of London from today.
Originally, the eagle had almost certainly adorned either the interior or the roof of a grandiose tomb belonging to a prosperous and very important early Londoner who died in the late first or second century AD.
He must have been of substantial status and influence, because he had acquired a burial plot right beside one of the main roads leading out of London, about 50m outside the probable city boundary.
Indeed it is likely the Roman city authorities gave him the honour of being buried on public land. That would suggest he had been a senior political figure in Roman London - potentially one of the joint mayors (the magistrates appointed by the local city council to run the city's finances, oversee religious matters and act as judges).
The eagle and snake imagery is likely to have reflected the man's powerful position in life. The eagle, a Roman symbol of power, is seen in the sculpture fighting a snake, sometimes perceived in the Roman world as representing danger and the powers of the underworld.
The eagle's presence on or in the tomb may have therefore also been seen as protecting the structure and the prominent Roman interred within it.
- Independent, AP