The hand-held lasers concentrate flickering beams of light onto the stone, with the heat they generate lifting away black deposits of pollution to reveal the white Carrara marble beneath.
Cast almost entirely of lead, the pendant is decorated on both sides with an identical image of a menorah framed within a circular border.
Officers seized around 10,000 archaeological artifacts, including 7,000 coins issued by various Greek city-states that existed on Sicily in ancient times.
The site is widely identified with the ancient village of Bet Zecharia, where the Seleucid army and the forces of Judah Maccabee clashed in what is known as the fifth Maccabean battle.
"We think humans brought pyrite to the site with the intention of making fire. And this has huge implications, pushing back the earliest fire-making," said archaeologist Nick Ashton.
Research focused on human remains found at the Troisième caverne of Goyet, a cave site in present-day Belgium that contains one of the largest known assemblages of Neanderthal bones in northern EU.
Archaeologists uncovered the first known thalamegos near Alexandria’s ancient port, a 35-meter pleasure boat matching Strabo’s account and preserved with Greek graffiti and timberwork.
Israel’s Heritage Minister, Rabbi Amichai Eliyahu, called the discovery: “tangible and moving evidence of Jerusalem’s might and stature during the Hasmonean period.”
The experts who analysed the coins believe, based on the dates on the coins, that the discovery unburied a treasure which was buried between A.D. 280 and 310.
Research published in the Internet Archaeology Journal found that the pits are man-made and were constructed during the late Neolithic period, making them over 4,000 years old.
The slaves lived on the ground floor, in rat-infested 16-square-meter cells that contained up to three people, but archaeologists think their nutrition was enhanced to keep up their productivity.
