Around 4,200 years ago, in the dry south-east of the Iberian Peninsula, a society began building cities on hilltops, stockpiling grain on a large scale and arming its warriors with halberds (blades like axe heads mounted on long poles) and metal swords. Archaeologists call it El Argar. Further north, in what are now La Mancha, [β¦]
Around 1200 BC, the eastern Mediterranean fell apart. The great empires of the Bronze Age collapsed, many cities were destroyed or emptied, writing disappeared from much of the region, and long-distance trade shrank to almost nothing. Archaeologists call what came next the dark age, and the name is earned: with few texts and almost no [β¦]
Ancient geographers listed many cities called Arsinoe, from Cyprus to Cilicia (in what is now southern Turkey), from Ephesus to the Gulf of Suez. Most of them were linked to the Ptolemies, the dynasty that ruled Egypt after the death of Alexander the Great. One, however, lies far from the Nile. It stood in the [β¦]
In a lab at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) in Japan, a slab of diamond smaller than a pencil eraser hangs from a carbon fiber rod about 5 centimeters (2 inches) long. The rod is attached to a graphite plate that floats in mid-air above four magnets. Nobody touches it. When a [β¦]
The shoulder blade is such a wide and flat bone that in some areas it becomes almost translucent when held up to the light. That is why it is rare to find it whole, even in modern burials, and why it so surprised archaeologists from the University of Cambridge that from Shanidar Cave, in Iraqi [β¦]
Tucked among the Greek temples that made Agrigento famous, on the south coast of Sicily, there is a narrow valley of orange and olive trees. An international team has been digging there for three years. The third season in the Kolymbethra valley and on the Case Montana plateau ends on October 24. According to the [β¦]
Some medieval books canβt be read by anyone, and one of them has become almost a trademark of the genre: the Voynich manuscript, kept at Yale University and dated to the 15th century. It has inspired novels and theories of every kind. Specialists often place another volume right behind it on the list of enigmas, [β¦]
A man in Behbeit el-Hagar, a village in Egyptβs Gharbia province, was working on a plot of land in front of his house when he came across a block covered in carvings. He told the local antiquities inspectorate. What came out of the ground afterwards, according to a statement from Egyptβs Ministry of Tourism and [β¦]
A team of archaeologists digging at the site of Ursoaia, in Romaniaβs IaΘi County, has uncovered a nearly 6,000-year-old pottery kiln unlike anything previously found in the region. Described in a paper published this month in the journal Antiquity by Diana MΔriuca Vornicu, Felix-Adrian Tencariu and colleagues from the Romanian Academy and Alexandru Ioan Cuza [β¦]
All roads lead to Rome. Itβs one of the oldest sayings in the Western world, and according to a new study in Nature Communications, it isnβt quite true. Led by Adam PaΕΎout, a researcher at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, the team found that cities like Antioch, Ancyra (modern Ankara), Byzantium (modern Istanbul), and Corinth [β¦]
Before Rome existed, before Phoenician ships ever reached the western Mediterranean, and around the same time the first fortified villages of the Argaric culture were rising in southeastern Iberia, a farming community on a rocky ridge in inland Morocco was already digging a ditch and piling up earth. What they were defending against is still [β¦]
Anyone planning to build in Pontecagnano Faiano, near Salerno, has learned to expect a tomb underneath. That happened again this year, and this time the find was unusual enough that archaeologists had only seen its like twice before in more than sixty years of excavation. Preventive digging ahead of a private housing development uncovered a [β¦]
In the German state of Brandenburg, barely a hundred meters (about 330 feet) from the border with Saxony-Anhalt, the Havel River curls around a low rise of land that locals call the Pilatsch. For generations, a local legend held that a knight named Pilatus lived there, ambushing boats on the river and locking captured boatmen [β¦]
A team led by the National Museum of Denmark has worked out, for the first time, what people actually cooked in the pots of Hama, an ancient city in western Syria, roughly 4,500 years ago. By analyzing animal bones, plant remains, and fat residues absorbed into the vessel walls, the researchers found a surprisingly varied [β¦]
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¦]
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