In 2019, workers preparing the ground for a gas pipeline and a new parking lot in the village of Loculi, in the interior of Sardinia, began to find ancient structures. Seven years later, those structures belong to an archaeological site of about 700 square metres (7,500 square feet). The remains it holds range from the […]

Bronze is mostly copper with a smaller share of tin, and the copper that prehistoric miners could reach was scattered unevenly across Europe. When researchers ask where the continent’s Bronze Age copper came from, they have usually looked to the Austrian Alps and Wales. Southern Spain, which sits on one of the largest concentrations of […]

Under the soil and corrosion that coat some of China’s most spectacular bronze masks, scraps of cloth have survived for roughly 3,000 years. A team of archaeologists and heritage conservation specialists has now analyzed those residues on objects from the ritual pits of Sanxingdui and found that every sample examined is silk. The study, published […]

In a drawer at the herbarium of Kew Gardens, in southwest London, there is a dry twig collected in Ghana in 1974. (A herbarium is a library of pressed, dried plants, and Kew’s is among the largest in the world.) Its berries are tiny balls, each about the size of a match head, and they […]

An animal stepped on a mudbrick while it was still soft and left its paw prints in the clay. The brick went into the wall of a house. The house burned and collapsed. About 4,000 years later, archaeologists pulled the brick out of the rubble, prints still visible. Turkey’s Minister of Culture and Tourism, Mehmet […]

Many Egyptian tombs reveal the trade of the person inside. A scribe is buried with his writing palette, a soldier with his weapons. The tomb that has just come to light at Saqqara breaks that pattern. In the burial shaft of a man named Weni, archaeologists found several bronze instruments that may have been used […]

In 1977, amateur archaeologists digging at the site of an old Roman fort in Velsen, on the coast of North Holland, uncovered a well. At the bottom lay the almost complete skeleton of a man who was still wearing his military belt. Beside him were a dagger, a ring, a fibula (the brooch Romans used […]

There are more than 8,000 species of amphibians on Earth, and not one of them lives in the sea. Fewer than 2% tolerate any salt at all, and even those have limits. It is a striking gap. Whales, sea turtles and penguins each show that mammals, reptiles and birds can live at sea, with no […]

When the James Webb Space Telescope began photographing galaxies from the universe’s earliest chapters, astronomers ran into a problem. There were more very bright galaxies than their models predicted, and some looked far too massive for such a young cosmos. Part of that puzzle has since faded. Some of those objects turned out to be […]

Beside the airport of Larnaca, on the south-east coast of Cyprus, there is a salt lake. About 3,500 years ago it was a sheltered bay, and on its shore stood a port city of up to 50 hectares (124 acres). That is roughly 90 American football fields, or a square you could walk across in […]

Between 34,000 and 25,000 years ago, much of Europe shared a way of life that archaeologists call the Gravettian. It is recognized by its stone and bone tools, by the way people buried their dead, and by small carved figurines of women known as Venus figurines. They turn up from the Atlantic side of the […]

Line up human and chimpanzee DNA and the first surprise is how little separates us. We share more than 96% of the sequences used to make proteins, the molecules that build and run a living body. And yet the human brain is roughly three times the size of a chimpanzee’s, and it does things a […]

On Tuesday, October 20, a team in southeastern Spain lifted a block of stone out of a wall where it had been sitting for about twenty centuries. The block carries fragments of two lines of text. The letters of the main line are 23 centimeters (9 inches) tall, a little more than the width of […]

When an electron meets a positron, both vanish. Their mass turns into energy and nothing is left of either particle. That is the main reason positrons are so hard to study. There is no jar to keep them in, because the walls of any container are made of ordinary matter, and a single touch would […]

About 2,000 years ago, while Augustus ruled Rome, a leftover patch of ice in the Canadian Arctic stopped shrinking and began to grow. A team from the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, part of Columbia University, argues that this turning point marked the beginning of the next glaciation, what most people would call the next ice age. […]

In November 392, the Roman emperor Theodosius I signed a law banning every pagan rite, including those performed in private. Against that date, the claim now coming from Bulgaria’s National Museum of History sounds startling: that people went on honoring the old gods until around the middle of the fifth century, in a temple built […]

In 160 years of digging at Troy, nobody had found anything you could play. Archaeologists have pulled walls, gates, jewelry, weapons and tableware out of the ground in huge quantities, but never an instrument. This season that changed. The team led by Rüstem Aslan of Onsekiz Mart University in Çanakkale, in northwestern Turkey, recovered a […]

Roman Spain had a network of official roadside stops for officials, soldiers and couriers, yet archaeologists know very few of them for certain. A new study may have added one. The building lies on the edge of Mellaria, a Roman town in the south of the country, on the road between the provincial capitals of […]

On a gravel plain in northern Western Sahara, with no shade for miles, there is a heap of stones 54.5 meters (179 feet) long. Two rows of stone slabs run out from it like the arms of a V that never quite closes. Archaeologists call these rows “antennae”, and the monuments antennae tumuli (a tumulus […]

In the early 5th century, a woman of high rank was buried beside an old Roman posting station on the Via Augusta, in what is now the province of Castellón. Her grave held a glass cup and two gold pins in a style from the Danube region. Her brother died in Mérida, the Roman city […]