Archaeology

Apr 27th, 2024 - Lasers are being used extensively in archaeology for recording and discovering sites as well as analyzing artifacts in great detail. One laser technology that is particularly good at discovering new sites is lidar (light detection and ranging).  In this technique, pulsed lasers are emitted (usually from an aircraft) and the reflected light is used to map out the landscape. This technique can be especially useful when there is a large amount of vegetation covering a site.  In this ... [Read More]

Apr 26th, 2024 - A group of archaeologists, led by researchers from the University of Tokyo, announce the discovery of a part of a Roman villa built before the middle of the first century. This villa, near the town of Nola in southwestern Italy's Campania region, was found beneath a more recent, but still ancient building from the 2nd century. Specific findings at the site, buried by multiple eruptions of Mount Vesuvius, suggest it might have been the home of Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus (Octavian), the ... [Read More]

Apr 26th, 2024 - A 2,200-year-old ornate tomb in eastern China may belong to the ruler of the Chu state, one of the seven powerful kingdoms that vied for supremacy during China's formative Warring States period, an expert told Live Science. The tomb is the largest and most complex ever found from the Chu state and would shed more light on the conditions of the time, according to officials with China's National Cultural Heritage Administration (NCHA) who were quoted by the official state news agency Xinhua . ... [Read More]

Apr 26th, 2024 - A sword unearthed in Spain and nicknamed "Excalibur" after King Arthur 's legendary blade is more than 1,000 years old, researchers say. A rare artifact from the Iberian Peninsula's Islamic period , the weapon illustrates the region's layered history of subjugation. In Arthurian legend, Excalibur is a sword magically lodged in a stone, until a young Arthur pulls it out, earning the right to be crowned king of Britain. Three decades ago, researchers in Valencia, on the east coast of Spain, ... [Read More]

Apr 26th, 2024 - Archaeologists have unearthed a sprawling ancient Roman cemetery in southern France containing 1,430 graves and evidence of funerary banquets held in honor of deceased family members. Excavations of the cemetery, called the Robine necropolis due to its proximity to a canal of the same name, began in 2017 ahead of construction work in the city of Narbonne. The funerary complex was "remarkably well-preserved," having been buried beneath a 10-foot (3 meters) blanket of silt during flooding of the ... [Read More]

Apr 26th, 2024 - Archaeologists have discovered an unusual burial in Germany indicating that prehistoric people were afraid of the deceased returning to life. The burial can be described as a "revenant" grave, one of the archaeologists involved in the discovery told Newsweek . Such examples are sometimes referred to colloquially as "zombie" graves. In the folklore of several ancient cultures, the term revenant refers to an individual who comes back from the dead as a spirit or animated corpse, sometimes to ... [Read More]

Apr 26th, 2024 - Seventy thousand years ago, the sea level was much lower than today. Australia, along with New Guinea and Tasmania, formed a connected landmass known as Sahul. Around this time —approximately 65,000 years ago—the first humans arrived in Sahul, a place previously devoid of any hominin species. Due to the patchy nature of the archaeological record, researchers still don't have a full picture of the routes and speed of human migration across the region. In research published in Nature ... [Read More]

Apr 25th, 2024 - The decipherment of an ancient scroll has revealed where the Greek philosopher Plato is buried, Italian researchers suggest. Graziano Ranocchia , a philosopher at the University of Pisa, and colleagues used artificial intelligence (AI) to decipher text preserved on charred pieces of papyrus recovered in Herculaneum, an ancient Roman town located near Pompeii, according to a translated statement from Italy's National Research Council. Like Pompeii , Herculaneum was destroyed in A.D. 79 when ... [Read More]

Apr 25th, 2024 - In the ancient Maya kingdom of K'anwitznal—a lowland city located in present-day Guatemala—dead royals weren't always treated with reverence, archaeologists say. New research, published last week in the journal Antiquity , suggests some former rulers' treasure-filled tombs were raided and their corpses were burned, with the remains thrown unceremoniously into a new pyramid as part of a symbolic—and likely public—political ritual. "The finding of the burnt royal human ... [Read More]

Apr 24th, 2024 - An archaeological survey has identified traces of hundreds of previously unknown monuments—including five "incredibly rare" prehistoric structures that may have once marked "routes for the dead" into the afterlife. James O'Driscoll with the Department of Archaeology at the University of Aberdeen in the United Kingdom conducted the survey using LiDAR technology in the Baltinglass landscape of County Wicklow, Ireland, which is renowned for its prehistoric remains. The results have been ... [Read More]

Apr 24th, 2024 - Hundreds of skeletons found in cemeteries on the Great Hungarian Plain reveal clues about nine generations of Avars, a mysterious warrior culture that dates back nearly 1,500 years. A new analysis of the remains suggests that men stayed put while women married into the culture and that it was common for people to have multiple partners. In a study published Wednesday (April 24) in the journal Nature , an international team of researchers conducted DNA analysis on 424 skeletons located in four ... [Read More]

Apr 22nd, 2024 - Worker spots muddy lump — and solves 116-year-old puzzle. See the ancient Roman find They called it the Four Gods Stone. A dark brown rock shaped by a carver and weathered by the centuries, it depicted four ancient Roman deities: Hercules, Juno, Mercury and Minerva. In Roman times, the stone once sat atop a prominently placed pillar, known as a Jupiter column, but archaeologists found it buried in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1908. Ever since, the Four Gods Stone sat in a museum. The rest of ... [Read More]

Apr 21st, 2024 - French archaeologists made several astonishing discoveries in Rue de Beaucaire in Nîmes, including roads, skeletal remains, funeral pyres, and well-preserved glassware. According to Archaeology Magazine (via INRAP ) they date back to somewhere between the 2nd and 1st centuries B.C. and 2 A.D. and were made near the Via Domitia, once a major Roman trading route. A previously undiscovered road, about 50-feet wide and constructed of stone slabs, was also uncovered during the latest dig. So ... [Read More]

Apr 15th, 2024 - Archaeologists have uncovered a mysterious prehistoric monument in what has been described as an "unprecedented" discovery. The ancient structure emerged during excavations carried out by the French National Institute of Preventive Archaeological Research (INRAP) in the commune of Marliens, eastern France, which lies about nine miles southeast of the city of Dijon. Excavations at the site have revealed a series of human occupations spanning thousands of years from the Neolithic period (or New ... [Read More]

Mar 25th, 2024 - Colorful paintings of daily life in ancient Egypt have been discovered in a tomb dating back more than 4,300 years. The tomb, known as a mastaba, was found in the pyramid necropolis of Dahshur, about 25 miles south of Cairo, during a recent Egyptian-German archaeological mission. Dahshur is the southernmost of the great pyramid necropolises of the Old Kingdom in the vicinity of the ancient capital of Memphis. The main attractions there are two large pyramids of King Sneferu: the so-called Bent ... [Read More]

Mar 15th, 2024 - Researchers have discovered 10 shipwrecks , including one estimated to be more than 5,000 years old, off the coast of Greece, along with scattered ancient artifacts from around the globe. Using Homer's "Iliad" as a guide, an underwater archaeological team made the discoveries during a four-year survey off the coast of Kasos, a small island in the Aegean Sea, the Greek Ministry of Culture announced  Wednesday. During the underwater missions, teams found the remains of 10 doomed ships, ... [Read More]