Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities has announced the discovery of a Roman-period tomb whose architecture, according to the country’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, has no exact parallel elsewhere in the cemetery where it was found. The tomb sits at Bir al-Shaghala, a site in the Dakhla Oasis, about 750 kilometers (roughly 465 miles) southwest […]

In the 1970s, the small settlement of Stein, in Lower Austria, came close to becoming the site of the country’s second nuclear power plant. The project was scrapped, and the land went back to being another stretch of farmland beside the Danube. Half a century later, those same fields have revealed what they’d been hiding […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

The body has been lying face-down for close to two thousand years. When archaeologists reached tomb 162, on the outskirts of modern Solin, Croatia, they immediately noticed something at odds with the rest of the cemetery: the deceased had not been laid on their back, as Roman custom required, but on their stomach. Around the […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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, […]

The archaeological site of Mellaria, located in the municipality of Fuente Obejuna, in the province of Córdoba, continues to provide insights into the economic and daily life of this Roman city that flourished in the Conventus Cordubensis. Successive excavation campaigns have uncovered a varied collection of lead objects, including commercial tags, balance weights, and small […]

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 […]

As indicated in its statute of autonomy, the flag of Cantabria (in north Spain) is “formed by two horizontal stripes of equal width, white on top and red on the bottom”, with the coat of arms in the center. It is a banner that traces its origins back to the 18th century, but in recent […]

A team of archaeologists from the University of Girona has identified several ceramic fragments in the Roman villa of Collet, located on the Girona coast, which belonged to a large vessel decorated with a handle ending in two snake heads. The piece, dated to the Augustan period (27 BC–14 AD), displays characteristics that link it […]

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, […]

On November 26, 2007, the Austrian National Library did something it hardly ever does: it took the Tabula Peutingeriana out of its climate-controlled display case and allowed the public to see it for a few hours. Due to its extreme fragility, the scroll was exhibited for just one day in Vienna, coinciding with its inclusion […]

The excavations carried out on Street B of the archaeological complex of Side, on the Mediterranean coast of southern Turkey (founded by Greek colonists from Cyme, according to Strabo and Flavius Arrian), have concluded after uncovering a road axis approximately 390 meters long that preserves traces of its architectural evolution between the Roman period and […]