When the French Egyptologist Auguste Mariette surveyed the necropolis at Saqqara in the mid-19th century, he catalogued hundreds of mastaba tombs and marked one more on his map that he never got around to excavating. It stayed there, noted but untouched, for more than 160 years. A joint Spanish-Egyptian mission has now finished what Mariette […]

On the Turkish coast of the Black Sea, there is a Roman city called Pompeiopolis. Despite the name, it has nothing to do with the Pompeii buried by Vesuvius in 79 AD. This one takes its name from Pompey the Great, the Roman general who founded it in 64 or 63 BC as one of […]

Picture the Colosseum, and the image that comes to mind is almost always the same: a lion bursting into the arena, the crowd roaring, a doomed man backing away. Film and popular history have fixated on that single moment for so long that almost nothing survives in the public imagination about how the animal actually […]

Underwater archaeology is experiencing a silent revolution. For decades, researchers have measured the importance of ancient ports by looking almost exclusively at what they could see: piers, breakwaters, and the size of the inner basins. But an international team of researchers has shown that this approach is incomplete. Ships did not only dock at the […]

The face is gone. Not chipped or worn away by time, but struck — possibly on purpose — until nothing remained of the features that once identified this life-size limestone head, carved roughly 2,400 years ago. What survived instead is the hairstyle: a braid gathered at the nape, with curls falling at the sides. For […]

Chinese legal texts have described nasal amputation as a criminal punishment since the Bronze Age. Oracle bone inscriptions from the Shang dynasty even carved the concept into a single character: a knife next to a nose. For all that documentation, though, no archaeologist had ever found a skeleton that showed it happening — until now. […]

Two tombs, two very different experiences. Walk into one and the space narrows around you, guiding your eyes along a fixed sequence of images. Walk into the other and the sound itself seems to come apart: voices blur, echoes pile up, and a blue demon painted on the wall seems to lunge straight at you. […]

Three decades have passed since the collection of gold jewelry appeared in the Šarkamen mausoleum, and now this Roman imperial complex has once again surprised the archaeological community with a discovery of equal significance. Inside the southwest corner tower of the fortified residential palace of the tetrarch Maximinus Daza, an imperial balneum has been located, […]

In the 1930s, the German Nazi regime launched an ambitious archaeological research program with a clear goal: to prove that Germanic culture was the oldest and most superior in the world. To achieve this, the organization known as Ahnenerbe (Ancestral Heritage) sent two expeditions to Scandinavia with the mission of making plaster casts of the […]

The archaeological find could hardly have been more modest: a small ring made of copper alloy, with a few Greek letters engraved on it and the image of a ceramic vessel. Yet its insignificant appearance conceals an extraordinary story that has kept specialists on tenterhooks since its existence was revealed in 2018. The seal, recovered […]

For nearly two centuries, archaeologists excavating Nimrud, one of the capitals of the Assyrian Empire in present-day northern Iraq, focused their attention on the acropolis mound. There, they unearthed palaces, temples, and massive stone reliefs depicting the deeds of kings. But the city that spread at its feet—an extensive area of 340 hectares surrounded by […]

There are ancient monuments that impress with their size and others that impress with their precision. The Sacred Well of Santa Cristina, in the municipality of Paulilatino, province of Oristano in Sardinia, belongs to the second group. Its basalt stones are carved and assembled with such geometric precision that, according to the site management center […]

An international study published in Nature Communications reveals that minimal changes in solar radiation were enough to relocate the dominant winds of the North Atlantic and permanently alter the pulse of glacial cycles. The work, authored by scientists from the Environnements et paléoenvironnements océaniques et continentaux (EPOC) laboratory, under Bordeaux INP, CNRS, EPHE–PSL, and the […]

The joint archaeological mission between the Supreme Council of Antiquities of Egypt and the Shanghai Museum, which has been working for several seasons in the area of the Temple of Sekhmet in Mit Rahina, has unveiled a series of discoveries that provide new insights into human occupation and productive activities in one of the oldest […]

For decades, experts in ancient art have relied on techniques such as infrared spectroscopy or chromatography to determine what colors and adhesives the Egyptians used. But these tools only offer partial clues: they indicate that a protein is present, but do not reveal which animal or plant it comes from, nor whether it is original […]

Excavations led by the Mehmet Akif Ersoy University of Burdur (MAKÜ) at the archaeological site of the ancient Greek Kibyra, in southwestern Turkey, have brought to light fragments of four marble sculptures from the Roman era, including a complete representation of Emperor Hadrian, 2.14 meters tall, and another of his wife, Empress Sabina. The work, […]

The Egyptian archaeological mission working in the Bubastion necropolis in the Saqqara archaeological area has announced the results of the first excavation season in Sector A, located west of the Bubastion area. The work carried out during this initial campaign has brought to light a tomb belonging to the Old Kingdom, attributed to a figure […]

An international team of researchers has published a study that questions one of the most widespread theories about the disappearance of Neanderthals. According to their findings, climate change and the resulting fragmentation of habitats did not play a decisive role in the extinction of this human species, which occurred approximately 40,000 years ago. The work, […]

In these years, when climate change dominates much of the public conversation, it is worth looking back and remembering that the planet already experienced, just over two centuries ago, a sudden and devastating climatic upheaval, although of a very different origin than today. It happened in 1816, a year that the chroniclers of the time […]

A team of researchers from the Istanbul Technical University has used an innovative computational model to unravel the dynamics that allowed the legendary Neolithic city of Çatalhöyük, in present-day Turkey, to persist for more than a thousand years before undergoing a radical transformation. The results, published in the journal Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, […]