In late July 1926, the Swedish archaeologist Axel Persson and his team had been digging the beehive-shaped tomb at Dendra, in the southern Peloponnese, for three weeks, and they were tired. The floor of the chamber turned out to have been looted, so they turned to the four pits sunk beneath it. In the eastern […]

In each of the Bronze Age Greek communities analyzed, between 5% and 10% of the people buried had not grown up where they died. That is one of the findings of a study in PLOS One by a team that includes archaeologists Serena Sabatini and Kristian Kristiansen of the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. Anja […]

In the mountainous interior of Sardinia, where the Gennargentu massif gives way to the valleys of the Flumendosa river, a site called S’Arcu ‘e is Forros has been surprising archaeologists for more than four decades. Its Sardinian name translates roughly as “the pass of the furnaces” — a fitting label, as it turns out. On […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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) […]

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 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 […]

A team of archaeologists, led by the University of West Bohemia (UWB), has brought to light, near the town of Chleby, in present-day Czech Republic, a monumental structure dating back more than 6,500 years, identified as one of the oldest ritual centers in Central Europe. The first datings on organic material recovered at the site […]

The question of whether brands are an invention exclusive to modern capitalist societies has received a resounding answer from an international team of researchers: they already existed at least 3,200 years ago. A study led by Marta Luciani of the University of Vienna and published in the journal PLOS One has documented how painted pottery […]