Not really "indigenous" but one of my favorite stories of history within history is the unearthing of the classical Greek/Roman statue of Laocön in Rome in 1506

Not really "indigenous" but one of my favorite stories of history within history is the unearthing of the classical Greek/Roman statue of Laocön in Rome in 1506. It was witnessed by Michelangelo and immediately recognized as a lost masterpiece from Latin texts that were known and still studied. So in a sense, the scholars at the time (can't really call them scientists, but essentially the experts of the time) knew they were looking at a significant masterpiece that they knew of only through the historical record. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laoco%C3%B6n_and_His_Sons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laoco%C3%B6n_and_His_Sons