A mystery continues to surround the curious excavation of a strange artifact and those who recovered it from the depths of an ancient tomb in China. When archaeologists reportedly recovered a modern-looking, mud-encrusted artifact from a 400-year-old sealed tomb, their astonishment was apparent. For some, this type of discovery could have only meant one thing-it was evidence of time travel. Was the discovery real? Was it a hoax? Could the find have been an intriguing artifact out of place and time?
In 2008 it was reported by several news outlets that a team of archaeologists had made a puzzling discovery. Reports described the team as comprised of archaeologists and journalists filming a documentary at a dig at a sealed tomb dating to the Ming Dynasty in Shangsi, southern China. As one of the coffins was being cleared of soil before being opened, a strange thing happened.
"When we tried to remove the soil wrapped around the coffin, suddenly a piece of rock dropped off and hit the ground with metallic sound," said Jiang Yanyu, a former curator of the Guangxi Autonomous Region Museum, according to reports. "We picked up the object, and found it was a ring. After removing the covering soil and examining it further, we were shocked to see it was a watch."
The strange metallic object was said to be a small golden ring, with a watch face on its front, approximately two millimeters thick. Tiny hands on the watch showed time had frozen at 10:06. Most astonishing of all, the back of the diminutive watch was said to have the word "Swiss" or "Switzerland" written in English. "Swiss Made" is the term used in recent decades to show that product has originated in Switzerland, especially relating to watches.
How was it possible that a tomb sealed for 400 years and dating to the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) had come to hold an artifact that could only have been created after the establishment of the present state of Switzerland, (in 1848; previous to then it was known as The Old Swiss Confederacy) and the ring-watch is said to date back only a century?
OOPArts are "out-of-place-artifacts," a description of unique and little-understood objects from the archaeological record which fall into the 'anomalous' category. To some, these objects have been found when and where they should not be (such as the Antikythera mechanism, the Maine Penny, and even the Nazca Lines), and thus challenge the conventional understanding of history, and may even reveal that humanity (or otherworldly beings) had a different degree of civilization or sophistication than described and understood by officials and academia.
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