Before Rome existed, before Phoenician ships ever reached the western Mediterranean, and around the same time the first fortified villages of the Argaric culture were rising in southeastern Iberia, a farming community on a rocky ridge in inland Morocco was already digging a ditch and piling up earth. What they were defending against is still […]

Anyone planning to build in Pontecagnano Faiano, near Salerno, has learned to expect a tomb underneath. That happened again this year, and this time the find was unusual enough that archaeologists had only seen its like twice before in more than sixty years of excavation. Preventive digging ahead of a private housing development uncovered a […]

In the German state of Brandenburg, barely a hundred meters (about 330 feet) from the border with Saxony-Anhalt, the Havel River curls around a low rise of land that locals call the Pilatsch. For generations, a local legend held that a knight named Pilatus lived there, ambushing boats on the river and locking captured boatmen […]

One grape variety still grown in Spanish vineyards, hebén, has never gone out of cultivation for at least the last 1,100 years, according to the new study. That takes its lineage back to roughly the year 929, around when the Caliphate of Córdoba was proclaimed in southern Spain. Eleven centuries of unbroken agriculture, and the […]

A team led by the National Museum of Denmark has worked out, for the first time, what people actually cooked in the pots of Hama, an ancient city in western Syria, roughly 4,500 years ago. By analyzing animal bones, plant remains, and fat residues absorbed into the vessel walls, the researchers found a surprisingly varied […]

The site is called Külhöyük, in the Oyaca neighborhood of Ankara’s Gölbaşı district, about 20 kilometers (12 miles) south of the capital. It’s a tell — the term Near Eastern archaeology uses for an artificial mound built up by layer upon layer of human occupation — roughly 250 by 150 meters (820 by 490 feet) […]

Egyptian blue predates the pyramids’ final form. Egyptian artisans were producing it before 3100 BCE, making it, as far as archaeologists know, the first pigment humans ever manufactured synthetically. It’s a compound called cuprorivaite (calcium copper silicate), made by firing silica, lime, copper compounds, and alkaline salts at high temperature until they crystallize into a […]

On May 29, 1108, an Almoravid army crushed the forces of Alfonso VI of León and Castile outside the town of Uclés. Among the dead was Sancho Alfónsez, the king’s only son and heir, a loss so severe that medieval chroniclers ranked it among the worst Christian defeats of the entire Reconquista — the centuries-long […]

On October 9, 2022, two space telescopes, Swift and Fermi, picked up the brightest gamma-ray burst ever recorded. Researchers nicknamed it BOAT — “brightest of all time” — official designation GRB 221009A. The explosion happened in a galaxy roughly 2 billion light-years away, which means its light set out across space before complex life had […]

Gravisca sits on the Tyrrhenian coast of Lazio, in what is today the Porto Clementino area near Tarquinia, roughly 7–10 kilometers (4–6 miles) from the ancient Etruscan city it once served. The site is no stranger to archaeologists: long before Rome arrived, it operated as an emporium, a trading post where Greek merchants — chiefly […]

On the slope below the cemetery of Sant’Elpidio a Mare, in Italy’s Le Marche region, recent heavy rains loosened the hillside enough to expose something no one was looking for: a rounded ceramic vessel, decoration still visible, sitting almost intact in the displaced earth. It looked, at first, like debris. It turned out to be […]

In a quiet corner of Hadrian’s Villa, wedged between the so-called Amphitheater and a low bench of volcanic tufa rock, sits a marble slab measuring roughly 40 by 35 centimeters (about 16 by 14 inches). It has not moved in some 1,900 years. Two lines of carved capital letters explain why archaeologists are excited: FVLGVR […]

In 2022, medical CT scanners let Egyptologists peer inside sealed sarcophagi without ever lifting a lid. In 2026, the same basic technology — pointed not at a pharaoh’s mummy but at two silver brooches from a German field — has just done something similar for archaeology north of the Roman frontier. The brooches came out […]

Around 1590 BCE — more than 800 years before Rome was founded, and before Tutankhamun was even born — a small number of people in what is now southeastern Poland started eating a cereal that had never grown in their fields. It wasn’t a local crop, and it didn’t belong to any plant known elsewhere […]

In 2019, workers doing routine ecological restoration at a quarry in China’s Yunnan province hit something under the soil: bones and stone tools. Nobody realized at the time that this unassuming hole — known as Bianfu Cave, “bat cave,” after its former residents — would turn out to hold the largest collection of Denisovan remains […]

Before 2025, paleontologists had confirmed exactly two footprints anywhere in the world made by an adult Tyrannosaurus rex — one in New Mexico, one in Montana. Isolated prints, each capturing a single instant, with no way to tell how the animal that made them actually moved. That changed with a discovery in the badlands of […]

For the first time, astronomers have pointed NASA’s two flagship space telescopes at the same patch of sky beyond Neptune and let them work as a team. Hubble handled the visible light. Webb handled the infrared. Together, they picked out 27 previously unknown trans-Neptunian objects, or TNOs — small, icy bodies that drift in the […]

A team from the University of York and Curtin University, in Australia, has settled one of the most persistent puzzles in British archaeology: the exact origin of the towering standing stones known as the Devil’s Arrows, near Boroughbridge, in North Yorkshire. High-resolution geological analysis of microscopic minerals has confirmed that the three surviving pillars — […]

Picture a moonless night, far from any city. Look straight at the point in the sky opposite the Sun — the antisolar point, where the Sun would appear if you could see it through the Earth. There, faintly, you might make out an oval-shaped glow, 8 to 10 degrees across. For scale, that’s roughly the […]

At the foot of Mount Aragatsotn, in the Armenian highlands, sits the site of Aruch — a castle that was never just a castle. Between the 12th and 13th centuries, it housed a high-status residence, complete with stone-slab floors and cisterns. Over time, though, that elite space was carved up into smaller rooms, and holes […]