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 […]