Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Antioch mosaics are a grouping of over 300 mosaic floors discovered during archaeological excavations of Antioch on the Orontes, in modern Turkey, between 1932 and 1939. They were created around the 3rd century AD and found under layers of silt at the site of the ancient city, just outside the modern city of Antakya.
About half of the Antioch mosaics are in the Hatay Archaeology Museum in Antakya, Turkey. The remainder are distributed among the Worcester Art Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Baltimore Museum of Art, Harvard University, and Princeton University Art Museum, among other institutions.
A consortium of five museums and institutions conducted the excavations: the Worcester Art Museum, Princeton University, the musée du Louvre, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and Harvard University's affiliate Dumbarton Oaks. The expeditions ran from 1932 to 1939.
The largest Antioch mosaic in the United States is The Worcester Hunt, held at the Worcester Art Museum. It measures 6.26 meters by 7.11 meters.
Antioch was destroyed by earthquakes in 526 and 528 AD. The ruins accumulated deep layers of silt over the following centuries, which buried the city's structures. The mosaic floors, pressed flat against the earth, were the primary surviving element of most houses by the time excavations began in 1932.
The Antioch mosaics bridge the artistic traditions of ancient Greece and Rome with the emerging visual language of early Christianity. Their designs range from realistic figurative scenes to purely geometric patterns, and the tesserae are made from both white and colored marble as well as white and colored limestone.