On the slope below the cemetery of SantβElpidio a Mare, in Italyβs Le Marche region, recent heavy rains loosened the hillside enough to expose something no one was looking for: a rounded ceramic vessel, decoration still visible, sitting almost intact in the displaced earth. It looked, at first, like debris. It turned out to be [β¦]
In a quiet corner of Hadrianβs Villa, wedged between the so-called Amphitheater and a low bench of volcanic tufa rock, sits a marble slab measuring roughly 40 by 35 centimeters (about 16 by 14 inches). It has not moved in some 1,900 years. Two lines of carved capital letters explain why archaeologists are excited: FVLGVR [β¦]
In 2022, medical CT scanners let Egyptologists peer inside sealed sarcophagi without ever lifting a lid. In 2026, the same basic technology β pointed not at a pharaohβs mummy but at two silver brooches from a German field β has just done something similar for archaeology north of the Roman frontier. The brooches came out [β¦]
Around 1590 BCE β more than 800 years before Rome was founded, and before Tutankhamun was even born β a small number of people in what is now southeastern Poland started eating a cereal that had never grown in their fields. It wasnβt a local crop, and it didnβt belong to any plant known elsewhere [β¦]
In 2019, workers doing routine ecological restoration at a quarry in Chinaβs Yunnan province hit something under the soil: bones and stone tools. Nobody realized at the time that this unassuming hole β known as Bianfu Cave, βbat cave,β after its former residents β would turn out to hold the largest collection of Denisovan remains [β¦]
Before 2025, paleontologists had confirmed exactly two footprints anywhere in the world made by an adult Tyrannosaurus rex β one in New Mexico, one in Montana. Isolated prints, each capturing a single instant, with no way to tell how the animal that made them actually moved. That changed with a discovery in the badlands of [β¦]
For the first time, astronomers have pointed NASAβs two flagship space telescopes at the same patch of sky beyond Neptune and let them work as a team. Hubble handled the visible light. Webb handled the infrared. Together, they picked out 27 previously unknown trans-Neptunian objects, or TNOs β small, icy bodies that drift in the [β¦]
A team from the University of York and Curtin University, in Australia, has settled one of the most persistent puzzles in British archaeology: the exact origin of the towering standing stones known as the Devilβs Arrows, near Boroughbridge, in North Yorkshire. High-resolution geological analysis of microscopic minerals has confirmed that the three surviving pillars β [β¦]
Picture a moonless night, far from any city. Look straight at the point in the sky opposite the Sun β the antisolar point, where the Sun would appear if you could see it through the Earth. There, faintly, you might make out an oval-shaped glow, 8 to 10 degrees across. For scale, thatβs roughly the [β¦]
At the foot of Mount Aragatsotn, in the Armenian highlands, sits the site of Aruch β a castle that was never just a castle. Between the 12th and 13th centuries, it housed a high-status residence, complete with stone-slab floors and cisterns. Over time, though, that elite space was carved up into smaller rooms, and holes [β¦]
Deep inside Ojo GuareΓ±a, one of the largest cave systems in Europe, in the northern Spanish province of Burgos, archaeologists have spent eleven consecutive summers digging through a single Neanderthal layer. This yearβs season, which wrapped up in late August 2026, pushed the excavated area of that layer β known as level 4D β to [β¦]
When the French Egyptologist Auguste Mariette surveyed the necropolis at Saqqara in the mid-19th century, he catalogued hundreds of mastaba tombs and marked one more on his map that he never got around to excavating. It stayed there, noted but untouched, for more than 160 years. A joint Spanish-Egyptian mission has now finished what Mariette [β¦]
On the Turkish coast of the Black Sea, there is a Roman city called Pompeiopolis. Despite the name, it has nothing to do with the Pompeii buried by Vesuvius in 79 AD. This one takes its name from Pompey the Great, the Roman general who founded it in 64 or 63 BC as one of [β¦]
When we think about Roman society, the image that usually comes to mind is that of a world dominated by men: senators, magistrates, generals, and emperors. According to the traditional narrative, women occupied a secondary place, confined to the domestic sphere and excluded from public life. However, a recent study based on the analysis of [β¦]
A small object made of dark stone, carved with astonishing precision almost 3,500 years ago, has provided researchers with one of the clearest windows yet into the religion of ancient Crete. It is the inscription known as IO Za 2, engraved on a tiny libation table made of dark green serpentinite, measuring just 4.3 centimeters [β¦]
Atop an ancient grain storage building, in a settlement of the local Yampara elite, archaeologists Sonia Alconini and Walter SΓ‘nchez-Canedo have uncovered an exceptional find: a set of six copper bells folded into a pyramidal shape, deposited as a ritual offering more than five centuries ago, during the expansion of the Inca Empire through the [β¦]
More than two thousand years ago, in the middle of the Iron Age, the Celts built a large fortified settlement on two peninsulas that extended into the Rhine River, near what is now the Swiss city of Schaffhausen. This place, known as the oppidum of Altenburg-Rheinau, is considered by archaeologists to be a true commercial [β¦]
The waters surrounding Elba Island have once again yielded evidence of its millennia-old past. A dolium from the Roman era and a presumed shipwreck, still under study, have been located on the seabed of the Tuscan Archipelago during the underwater heritage monitoring operations that the ABAP Soprintendenza for the provinces of Pisa and Livorno has [β¦]
Excavations carried out during the past month of July in the monumental complex of Guadalupe (Extremadura, Spain) have brought to light the foundation remains of the former HospederΓa of the Catholic Monarchs (Guesthouse of the Catholic Monarchs), a lost historic building that has nothing to do with the current HospederΓa del Real Monasterio that operates [β¦]
A team of archaeologists has discovered in northern Turkey a settlement of hunter-gatherers who lived in the KoskarlΔ± cave approximately 14,000 years ago. The remains found during the first excavation campaign, conducted in 2024, confirm that the site was inhabited by human groups during the Epipaleolithic period, a transitional stage between the Upper Paleolithic and [β¦]
Login
