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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Around 1590 BCE — more than 800 years before Rome was founded, and before Tutankhamun was even born — a small number of people in what is now southeastern Poland started eating a cereal that had never grown in their fields. It wasn’t a local crop, and it didn’t belong to any plant known elsewhere […]

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 […]

Excavations by the University of Catania at the Tava Tepe site, located in western Azerbaijan, have uncovered an archaeological complex that upends established notions about Late Bronze Age communities in the Caucasus region. What was initially interpreted as an isolated domestic structure, dated to around 1300–1000 BCE, has turned out to be the last link […]

In the heart of the granite massif of the Landes de Lanvaux, in the French department of Morbihan, lies the Neolithic cemetery of Coëby, discovered in 1986. This site, preserved for centuries by the dense forest cover that shielded it from intensive agriculture, contains around 95 megalithic monuments from different periods, from the Neolithic to […]

The archaeological survey work carried out in the area of Carrarzu Iddia, in the municipality of Bortigali in central-western Sardinia, has culminated in the discovery of a new Giants’ Tomb that until now had remained completely hidden by the dense Mediterranean scrub. The monument is situated on the southern slope of Crastu Littu, an elevation […]

A discovery at the Minferri site, in the town of Juneda in Lleida, has completely upended the established chronology for lead metallurgy in the Iberian Peninsula. The research carried out at this Bronze Age site, whose results have just been published in the scientific journal Antiquity, places the production of lead objects between 1900 and […]