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.