Around 2,400 years ago, a house with several rooms stood against the defensive wall of a settlement in what is now northern Tunisia. Archaeologists have now recovered almost its entire floor plan, something the Catalan Institute of Classical Archaeology (ICAC) says has been documented for the first time. The finding comes from the second excavation […]
When the cloud of burning ash and gas rolled into the room, the wardrobe was still standing. The wood took almost twenty centuries to rot away, but by then the ash had hardened around it and kept its shape. It is the same principle behind the plaster body casts Pompeii is famous for. When archaeologists […]
When a company plans a business park, the last thing it expects to find underground is a cemetery. That is what happened in 2024 on St.-Florian-Straße in Senden, a town of about 23,700 people in the Neu-Ulm district of Swabia, in the German state of Bavaria. Senden sits on the border with Baden-Württemberg, right next […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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