Archaeologists rarely identify a settlement from one object. They combine buildings, hearths, tools, food remains, activity areas, and patterns of rebuilding to understand a site.

The post How Do Archaeologists Tell a Settlement From a Ritual Complex? appeared first on Curiosmos.

Nearly 1,000 bones and teeth from three Granada caves show that Neolithic cannibalism was not one practice or one event. The dates and traces point to different stories.

The post What Happened in These Neolithic Caves? Human Bones Record More Than One Kind of Cannibalism appeared first on Curiosmos.

Twelve entrances opened onto the horizon at Chleby. The excavators link their directions to the Sun and Moon, raising questions about how people gathered there.

The post A 6,000-Year-Old Czech Enclosure Had Twelve Entrances Aligned With the Sky appeared first on Curiosmos.

A person sits on a leopard in a sculpture found inside a small stone building. What did this unusual pairing mean to the people of Karahantepe?

The post Karahantepe’s 11,000-Year-Old Figure Shows a Person Seated on a Leopard appeared first on Curiosmos.

A marble inscription found in its original position at Hadrian’s Villa refers to a lightning strike attributed to Summanus—and the Roman ritual of making the place sacred.

The post Why Did Romans Bury Lightning? A New Inscription at Hadrian’s Villa Offers a Clue appeared first on Curiosmos.

A Charnia fossil from Norway preserves rare ridges along its branches. Researchers trace how an underwater sediment flow may have carried and buried it.

The post Charnia Fossil from Norway: What Did 3D Preservation Reveal? appeared first on Curiosmos.

Imagine turning a piece of ancient wood toward the light and finding the faint remains of someone’s handwriting. What did that person need to say? And how could we place their message on a calendar almost two thousand years later? Ancient inscriptions bring those questions together. Their words can preserve a royal decree, a business […]

The post How Archaeologists Read and Date Ancient Inscriptions appeared first on Curiosmos.

A terrace project in Rebild uncovered about 18.5 kilograms of Viking-Age silver. The objects show how wealth moved, was measured and was hidden in tenth-century Denmark. A new terrace was supposed to change a garden. Instead, a few minutes of digging opened a small window onto the Viking Age. In Rebild, northern Denmark, a homeowner […]

The post Denmark’s Largest Viking Silver Hoard Was Found in a Backyard appeared first on Curiosmos.

The name that keeps pulling archaeologists back to the eastern frontier What if a city that appears in the records of ancient Egypt has been sitting in plain sight, hidden beneath later roads, barracks and stonework? That is the possibility raised by a new discovery at Tell Abu Seifi in northern Sinai. Archaeologists have found […]

The post Did Archaeologists Find Egypt’s Lost City of Mesen? A Ramesses II Inscription Offers a New Clue appeared first on Curiosmos.

Dig into an old settlement in the Amazon and the ground itself can reveal that people lived there. Beneath the vegetation, patches of dark soil contain charcoal, broken pottery and the remains of everyday meals. The houses may have disappeared. The soil they helped create can still support crops. Known as terra preta, or Amazonian […]

The post Terra Preta: The Ancient Amazonian Soil That Stayed Fertile for Centuries appeared first on Curiosmos.

Imagine finding a Roman coin hundreds of miles from the place where it was made. Who carried it there? A soldier, a merchant, or someone whose journey has left no other trace? One coin leaves those questions open. Put thousands of recorded finds on a map, however, and a different story begins to emerge: the […]

The post How Ancient Coins Reveal the Connections That Held Rome Together appeared first on Curiosmos.

What would a melon served in medieval China have looked like? Two seeds recovered from an ancient port are helping researchers approach that question through the fruit’s DNA. A new PNAS study, published September 4, places the seeds within an East Asian cultivated melon lineage. Their genetic traits suggest fruit suited to fresh eating or […]

The post Two Ancient Melon Seeds Offer a Glimpse of Fruit on Song Dynasty Tables appeared first on Curiosmos.

A faded painting may look almost indistinguishable from the rock beneath it while a photograph still records small color differences. Digital enhancement can amplify those differences, making an outline or patch of pigment easier to inspect. The vivid result is useful evidence about the image, but it is not a restored view of what an […]

The post How Image Enhancement Reveals Faded Rock Art—and What It Cannot Recover appeared first on Curiosmos.

A stone can be millions of years older than the monument built from it. Measuring when its minerals formed therefore cannot, on its own, reveal when people dragged it into place. To date a stone circle, archaeologists usually reconstruct the building event from the deposits and objects associated with it. That task involves several different […]

The post How Archaeologists Date a Stone Circle When the Stones Are Millions of Years Old appeared first on Curiosmos.

Prehistoric builders moved the enormous stones of the Devil’s Arrows at least 18 kilometres across Yorkshire, according to new research that identifies where the blocks came from. The finding connects Britain’s tallest surviving prehistoric stone row with Brimham Rocks, rather than closer sandstone outcrops. The study, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society A, traces […]

The post Britain’s Tallest Stone Row Was Built With 25-Tonne Blocks Hauled 11 Miles appeared first on Curiosmos.

Finding an ancient structure does not always mean that archaeologists should uncover all of it immediately. In some cases, the most responsible decision is to leave part of a site in the ground. Soil can protect fragile walls, organic material and pigments, while future researchers may have better tools for studying them without causing irreversible […]

The post Why Archaeologists Leave Some Discoveries Unexcavated appeared first on Curiosmos.

Neanderthals and modern humans did not simply occupy the same landscape and disappear from one another’s story. A study of Üçağızlı II Cave in southern Türkiye points to a longer period of cultural continuity in the northern Levant, where stone tools, shell ornaments and other remains appear across a sequence spanning more than 20,000 years. […]

The post Did Neanderthals and Modern Humans Share a Culture for 20,000 Years? appeared first on Curiosmos.

Archaeologists have returned to a rare Iron Age fort in Shropshire that sits in a wetland landscape rather than on a hill. The University of Birmingham has begun a new, ten-year project at Wall Camp near Telford, reopening a site that had not seen a major excavation since the 1980s. The first three-week season took […]

The post A Rare Iron Age Marsh Fort Is Being Excavated Again After 40 Years appeared first on Curiosmos.

Radiocarbon dating is one of archaeology’s most useful tools, but it is often described as if a laboratory can place an exact year on any ancient object. The method is narrower and more interesting than that. It measures the remaining carbon-14 in material that was once alive, then uses calibration and archaeological context to estimate […]

The post How Radiocarbon Dating Works—and What It Can Actually Tell Us appeared first on Curiosmos.

At Kurd Qaburstan in northern Mesopotamia, archaeologists are finding the kind of evidence that allows a destroyed city to be read from several directions at once. Cuneiform tablets, administrative sealings, a fortified wall and human remains are appearing together in layers associated with the ancient city of Qabra. The project, led by researchers from the […]

The post Cuneiform Tablets and Destruction Layers Reconstruct a Mesopotamian Siege appeared first on Curiosmos.