The aqueduct, near Lincoln’s Nettleham Road, has been known about for centuries, and archaeological investigations of it were carried out in the 1950s and 70s, with no firm evidence for their ever carrying water being found. However, with the recent start of a housing development on the site, the time came for sections of the piping to be removed and studied thoroughly.

Excavations also revealed that a road thought to have been a Roman construction is in fact post-medieval.

Simon Johnson, principal archaeologist at Pre-Construct Archaeology, who carried out the work, explained that visible calcium deposits suggest the pipes did carry water.

“There’s been persistent questions over whether the aqueduct ever functioned,” he said. “We’ve got at least one section where there is furring around the full circumference, suggesting it was used. Who knows for how long? You’re looking at decades to produce that sort of deposit, I should think.”

Ballard has tracked down the ruins of several ships, including ancient wooden ones, and even found new life forms - 10-foot-long tube worms - deep below the ocean's surface.

This August, the world-famous underwater explorer-scientist, will excavate two Byzantine shipwrecks, which will be presented in streaming video online at immersionpresents.org. Ballard expects to find ships with perfectly mummified crews, who will look asleep rather than mummified in the Egyptian sense of the word.

He plans to create the first underwater museum, allowing the public to view these artifacts without having to remove them from their preserved state in the ocean.

But he never lost his first love. Over a 30-year period, he traveled to the Middle East, Asia and Europe, amassing a collection of antiquities that has led to a new exhibit at the Hallie Ford Museum of Art, "Ancient Glass: Selections from the Collection of Richard Brockway.

The works on view at Hallie Ford's Study Gallery are small but precious: drinking vessels, tableware, toiletry vessels, beakers and storage bottles from Egypt, the Near East, Greece and Rome, selected to demonstrate the evolution of glass artists' skill and mastery of glassblowing techniques.

Although not considered valuable in their own time, the works have amassed value over time.

"Everything in here is very functional, very utilitarian," Olbrantz said.

"These pieces would have been like our dishes, our pots and pans."

Still, these are among the earliest glass works in history, often simple but elegant in their shapes and speaking to us across thousands of years of history.

Little is known about the early years of glass, although by 2,500 BCE, solid glass beads and amulets were being made, and the oldest fragments of hollow glass vessels appeared in the 16th and 15th centuries BCE in Egypt and Mesopotamia.

At the beginning of the 18th century BCE, Egyptians developed a method for producing hollow glass vessels, making a core mold of compacted clay or dung and winding molten glass around it.

Among the notable pieces in the exhibit is a gleaming blue Ushabti from the New Kingdom. The tiny mold-cast work is a mummy-shaped figure meant to be placed in a tomb to do the work of the deceased in the afterlife. A complete collection would consist of 401, one for each day of the Egyptian year, plus 36 foremen.

A small but striking piece is the Eye of Horus, a mold-cast work of the late period, probably originally found on a statue or statuette of Horus, the falcon-headed god of Upper and Lower Egypt.

Among the Roman works is a large single-handed pitcher, from the first through third centuries CE, a work that Brockway has donated to the Hallie Ford Museum. The free-blown piece has an applied neck coil and handle.

Among the largest pieces is a Light Blue Cinerary Urn, a Roman work from the first through third centuries CE, a free-blown work.

The urn was used to hold cremated ashes but has transcended its mundane past to become a work of art visibly touched by the centuries.

A companion piece, also elegant and simple, is a light blue elongated storage vessel, a Roman work from the fifth to sixth centuries."

"It is the first time such a monument is discovered, not only in Cephalonia but in all the Ionian Sea islands," the culture ministry said in a statement on Wednesday.

The tomb, which included more than one grave, measures about 8 by 6 metres (yards) and included glass jars, clay pots, gold jewellery, copper items and coins, it said.

"It is a touching detail that the (stone) door still opens and closes to this day just as in antiquity," the ministry said.

The finds were revealed during digging for construction in the town of Fiscardo and the theatre, which extends underground beyond the lot, appears to be in excellent condition, the ministry added.

"From the finds so far, we see that Fiscardo was an important naval station between Greece and Italy in antiquity," it said.

In the past, archaeologists have found near the site a group of Roman urban dwellings - a paved open-air space surrounded by houses, a bath and a cemetery.

So far, walls delimiting the thermal area of the villa have been uncovered, while the caldarium and fridigarium, the latter with an almost perfectly preserved and superbly decorated mosaic floor depicting Medusa heads at its four corners, a marble pool and nymphaeum, have been totally excavated.

Further excavations conducted by archaeologists from La Sapienza and Foggia universities who originally worked on the site, will begin again in July when it is hoped to discover the full extent and historical importance of the villa.