A small piece of clay, not much bigger than a matchbox, took nearly a year for archaeologists to identify. When they finally did, it turned out to belong to one of the most famous documents in the ancient world: the peace treaty that closed out a war between two Bronze Age superpowers, sealed more than […]

Ten years of digging in the same corner of northern Spain tends to turn up plenty. Temples, walls, coins, the occasional grave. Rarely does it turn up something as mundane as a kitchen. But that is exactly what surfaced this summer beneath a plot known as La Era, in Sasamón, a town of roughly 1,000 […]

About 56 miles (90 km) from Brescia and 75 miles (120 km) from Milan, in the Lombard Alps, the forest of Naquane is still turning up surprises after seventy years of excavation. The latest field season, which resumed on August 31, 2026, has uncovered a rock surface that had never been recorded before: a panel […]

Some discoveries impress because of their size or value, while others do so because of the exact place where they appear. The one announced by Sapienza University of Rome belongs to the second group. At the Pyrgi archaeological site, on the coast of Lazio, archaeologists have found a fragment of an antefix bearing the face […]

An international team of astronomers has published a detailed study of VT J1906+0849, a radio source discovered in the VLASS survey (Very Large Array Sky Survey) that doesn’t resemble anything else previously catalogued in the Milky Way. The paper, led by Jessie M. Miller of the California Institute of Technology, combines radio, infrared, optical, and […]

Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) filled his notebooks with insects: dragonflies, bees, wasps, butterflies — almost all of them winged. That focus lines up with what historians already knew about him. Leonardo was fixated on the mechanics of flight, and scholars have long read his drawings of flying insects as studies feeding into his designs for […]

A copper ingot cast somewhere in inland Sardinia during the Bronze Age might, centuries later, turn up in a Scottish tomb or a village in southern Sweden. That is the striking picture drawn by Serena Sabatini, an archaeologist at the University of Gothenburg, in a new paper that pulls together decades of isotopic analyses to […]

Somewhere between an electron and a human being, the rules of physics change. Quantum mechanics allows an atom to exist in two states simultaneously — spinning left and right at the same time, for instance — which is impossible to picture at human scale. Nobody has ever seen a person, or even a speck of […]

Earth has never been a perfect sphere. It bulges slightly at the equator and flattens slightly at the poles, a shape geodesists call an oblate spheroid — think of a basketball very gently squeezed from top and bottom. That bulge isn’t fixed, though, and a new study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid […]

Workers were preparing to build a block of flats in Ligornetto, a small town in the canton of Ticino, right on the border with Italy, when they hit the remains of a Roman factory built almost two thousand years ago. Since June 2026, the Archaeology Service of Ticino’s Office of Cultural Heritage has been excavating […]

While Brutus and his allies were stabbing Julius Caesar to death, a good chunk of the Roman working class was having a picnic. They drank wine, pitched makeshift tents out of branches and cloth, and toasted to as many years of life as cups they could down. It was the feast of Anna Perenna, the […]

Forty years ago, archaeologist Lucien Basch and researcher Michal Artzy published a set of 19 ship graffiti carved into the walls of Kition Kathari, an archaeological site beneath the modern city of Larnaca on Cyprus’s southern coast. Ever since, those images have been cited as textbook examples of Late Bronze Age maritime iconography in the […]

In the district of Monteleone Sabino, a town of under 1,300 people in Italy’s Rieti province, a team of cavers has made its way through a passage first cut into the mountainside more than two thousand years ago. On the other side, they documented a pre-Roman aqueduct, now walkable for roughly 100 meters (about 328 […]

Some 40 miles (65 km) from Thessaloniki, a teenager who would go on to reshape the ancient world once sat listening to lessons on physics, ethics and politics under stone colonnades. That teenager was Alexander the Great; his teacher was Aristotle; and the classroom was a monumental gymnasium carved into the rock near the modern […]

Tharangambadi is a fishing village on India’s Coromandel Coast, in the state of Tamil Nadu. Its name means “place of the singing waves,” a nod to the Indian Ocean lapping at its shore. It isn’t much of a tourist stop, and fishing is still its main trade, but anyone who walks its streets runs into […]

Under Ramesses II, who ruled Egypt between 1279 and 1213 BC and is remembered as one of its most powerful pharaohs, the kingdom kept a chain of garrisons along its western frontier, watching for raids by Libyan tribes and, later, the loosely defined coalition of invaders known as the Sea Peoples. One of those tribes, […]

A team of archaeologists digging at the site of Ursoaia, in Romania’s Iași County, has uncovered a nearly 6,000-year-old pottery kiln unlike anything previously found in the region. Described in a paper published this month in the journal Antiquity by Diana Măriuca Vornicu, Felix-Adrian Tencariu and colleagues from the Romanian Academy and Alexandru Ioan Cuza […]

All roads lead to Rome. It’s one of the oldest sayings in the Western world, and according to a new study in Nature Communications, it isn’t quite true. Led by Adam Pažout, a researcher at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, the team found that cities like Antioch, Ancyra (modern Ankara), Byzantium (modern Istanbul), and Corinth […]

There’s a temperature nothing in the universe has ever touched. It’s called absolute zero, equal to -273.15°C (-459.67°F), the point at which the particles that make up matter would lose all their kinetic energy and simply stop moving. In 1848, the British physicist William Thomson — better known as Lord Kelvin — proposed making that […]

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 […]