In August AD 117, a ship carrying the Roman emperor put in at the coast of Cilicia, in what is now southern Turkey. Its most important passenger was too ill to travel any farther. Trajan had ruled for nineteen years, and under him the Roman Empire reached its greatest territorial extent. He had been born […]

More than 5,000 animal bones from the rubbish heaps of a neighborhood in Salamanca, Spain, show how a wealthy extended family ate some 2,600 years ago. According to a study, young animals, horses and turtles reached the plate only at feasts and ritual gatherings. For most meals, the meat at Cerro de San Vicente came […]

Proposed dates for the arrival of the first humans in the Americas span more than 100,000 years. At one end sits Cerutti, a site in California that Holen and colleagues dated to about 130,000 years ago in a 2017 study in Nature. At the other is Swan Point, in Alaska, at around 14,200 years old: […]

A few inches below the forest floor in the eastern Taunus hills lies a stretch of the Roman frontier that has barely been examined. The Kapersburg fort, near Rosbach vor der Höhe in Hesse, is one of the best preserved on the German limes, the chain of Roman border defences. Research has long concentrated on […]

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 […]

Archaeologists are updating Roman maps of Switzerland after stumbling upon traces of long-buried ruins during the hottest summer in the country’s history, Reuters reported. Drought can reveal hidden archaeological sites through so-called “parch marks”—patterns that appear when vegetation growing over buried structures dries out. This is one of the consequences of this year’s heatwaves, which […]

The reconstructed face of a man who lived over 8,000 years ago was unveiled yesterday in Zhengzhou, the administrative center of Henan Province in central China, shedding light on the region’s prehistoric inhabitants. The sculpture was created based on human remains discovered during excavations at the Jiahu archaeological site in Henan. The reconstruction combined physical […]

Dig a trench for a canal that will run 107 kilometres (66 miles) across northern France and you expect scraps: a stretch of road, perhaps, or a lone farmstead. At Sermaize, in the Hauts-de-France region, archaeologists from France’s National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research (Inrap) found something much rarer. It is a complete workshop, with […]

Of all the animals shown in the tombs and art of ancient Egypt, very few have a name. Almost all of those that do are dogs. A handful of horses are named too, though far fewer survive. Cats, the animal most of us now associate with Egypt, are a different story. The literature offers only […]

A metal detector has pulled a small lead statuette of Venus Pudica out of a forest in the Buda Hills, northwest of Budapest. It is the first religious object recorded at the Roman village of Pilisszentiván–Hárs erdő, a rural settlement in the province of Pannonia. Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) has been excavating it for four […]

Around 1880, men cutting peat at Dejbjerg, in western Jutland (Denmark), began pulling bronze pieces out of the bog that shone as if they were new. Some assumed it was gold. Others had a more down-to-earth suspicion: the equipment of an illicit still, hidden in the marsh to make moonshine. Both versions are recorded on […]

A team led by Academician Vasil Nikolov—who has spent years studying the Old Continent’s first salt-production center—has made a sensational discovery in Provadia-Solnitsata, Europe’s oldest city. They uncovered traces of beer production dating back to the period between 5600 and 4350 BC. According to the researchers, this constitutes the earliest evidence of beer production within […]

Some lakes give up shipwrecks, and Arendsee, in northern Germany, has already given up one. What archaeologists brought to light in 2026 is something else: wood carved by Mesolithic hunter-gatherers up to 10,500 years ago. (The Mesolithic, or Middle Stone Age, is the stretch of European prehistory after the last Ice Age and before farming.) […]

On 28 September 2026, Turkey’s Minister of Culture and Tourism, Mehmet Nuri Ersoy, announced on X the recovery of 2,100-year-old tableware from the Adrasan wreck, a merchant ship that went down off the coast of Antalya. Its cargo was mostly plates, bowls and trays. Thousands of pieces have been brought up since excavation began in […]

Cyrene was one of the wealthiest Greek cities in the ancient Mediterranean, built on a plateau some 9 km (about 6 miles) inland from Libya’s northeastern coast, on what is now known as Jebel Akhdar. According to Herodotus, it was founded in 631 BCE by colonists from the Greek island of Thera — modern-day Santorini. […]

Inside a Roman legionary fortress, almost nobody had a private bathroom. Soldiers washed in communal baths built for the whole unit. In practice, only one person could usually justify baths of any real size for himself: the legate, the general in command of the legion. That’s the context archaeologist Piotr Dyczek gives for a striking […]

Picture ancient Egypt’s funerary cult and the mind jumps to the dead themselves: the offerings, the gods, the pageantry. Easy to forget are the people who actually carried the bread, beer, and incense to the tomb, day after day, for generations. A team from the University of Seville wants to put them back in the […]

Some 2,500 years ago, Babylon trained the sons of its wealthiest families without a single weekly hour devoted to the gods. There was no textbook that worked as a Bible either. Religion was everywhere and in no particular subject, spread through sign lists, writing exercises and arithmetic drills. A study published in the journal Iraq […]

In the small village of Qesarat, in southern Albania‘s Tepelenë district, an Italian-Albanian excavation team has just finished a summer season that turned up something unusual: six decorated floors from a Late Roman building, right at the edge of the Vjosa Wild River National Park. Declared in March 2023, the park protects the last stretch […]

The archaeologists were not looking for a Sarmatian. When they opened the burial mound near the Sea of Azov, they expected Bronze Age graves — and found plenty: thirty-one of them. But one grave didn’t fit. Inside lay a man in his late twenties or early thirties, stretched out on his back with his arms […]