On a gravel plain in northern Western Sahara, with no shade for miles, there is a heap of stones 54.5 meters (179 feet) long. Two rows of stone slabs run out from it like the arms of a V that never quite closes. Archaeologists call these rows “antennae”, and the monuments antennae tumuli (a tumulus […]

In the early 5th century, a woman of high rank was buried beside an old Roman posting station on the Via Augusta, in what is now the province of Castellón. Her grave held a glass cup and two gold pins in a style from the Danube region. Her brother died in Mérida, the Roman city […]

Almost nothing survives of what people wore in the Iron Age. Linen, wool and dyes are all organic matter, and in most soils they simply rot away. Archaeologists therefore tend to reconstruct the history of textiles from the tools that do last, above all spindle whorls: small stone or ceramic discs that weigh down the […]

Some 1,900 years ago, a man named Thrasymedes gave a thin sheet of gold to a god who was neither Greek nor Roman. The deity came from the borderlands of what is now southeastern Turkey. The offering was left inside a Roman army fort on the eastern shore of the Black Sea, in modern Georgia, […]

The church is Santa Eulalia de Esperante, known in Galician as Santalla de Esperante. It stands in a hamlet a few kilometres southwest of Lugo. Until now, historians saw a simple rural church from the high Middle Ages, with one nave, a square east end and a smooth 18th-century front topped by a bell gable […]

In 2006, the Carabinieri, Italy’s national military police, raised the alarm about illegal digging in a forest of oaks and chestnuts near Vetralla, in the province of Viterbo, north of Rome. The Soprintendenza, the state body in charge of archaeology in the region, sent a team to the site for an emergency excavation in May […]

If matter and antimatter had come out of the Big Bang in equal amounts, there would be no stars today. Every particle has an antimatter twin with the opposite electric charge, and when the two meet, both vanish in a burst of energy. A perfect balance would have left a universe of pure light, with […]

Neanderthals left plenty of traces in the western Pyrenees, the mountain range that separates Spain from France. Stone tools, butchered animal bones, the leftovers of their camps. What nobody had ever found in Navarre, the region of northern Spain whose capital is Pamplona, was a single bone of the people themselves. On Monday that changed, […]

About 2,200 years ago, someone pressed a finger into a lump of damp clay to stick down the flap of a suit of armour. The kiln sealed that print, and it has survived intact ever since. Now a team from the museum at the mausoleum of Qin Shi Huang and from Shandong University has used […]

Around 4,200 years ago, in the dry south-east of the Iberian Peninsula, a society began building cities on hilltops, stockpiling grain on a large scale and arming its warriors with halberds (blades like axe heads mounted on long poles) and metal swords. Archaeologists call it El Argar. Further north, in what are now La Mancha, […]

Around 1200 BC, the eastern Mediterranean fell apart. The great empires of the Bronze Age collapsed, many cities were destroyed or emptied, writing disappeared from much of the region, and long-distance trade shrank to almost nothing. Archaeologists call what came next the dark age, and the name is earned: with few texts and almost no […]

Ancient geographers listed many cities called Arsinoe, from Cyprus to Cilicia (in what is now southern Turkey), from Ephesus to the Gulf of Suez. Most of them were linked to the Ptolemies, the dynasty that ruled Egypt after the death of Alexander the Great. One, however, lies far from the Nile. It stood in the […]

In a lab at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) in Japan, a slab of diamond smaller than a pencil eraser hangs from a carbon fiber rod about 5 centimeters (2 inches) long. The rod is attached to a graphite plate that floats in mid-air above four magnets. Nobody touches it. When a […]

The shoulder blade is such a wide and flat bone that in some areas it becomes almost translucent when held up to the light. That is why it is rare to find it whole, even in modern burials, and why it so surprised archaeologists from the University of Cambridge that from Shanidar Cave, in Iraqi […]

Tucked among the Greek temples that made Agrigento famous, on the south coast of Sicily, there is a narrow valley of orange and olive trees. An international team has been digging there for three years. The third season in the Kolymbethra valley and on the Case Montana plateau ends on October 24. According to the […]

Some medieval books can’t be read by anyone, and one of them has become almost a trademark of the genre: the Voynich manuscript, kept at Yale University and dated to the 15th century. It has inspired novels and theories of every kind. Specialists often place another volume right behind it on the list of enigmas, […]

A man in Behbeit el-Hagar, a village in Egypt’s Gharbia province, was working on a plot of land in front of his house when he came across a block covered in carvings. He told the local antiquities inspectorate. What came out of the ground afterwards, according to a statement from Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and […]

The building, named Jandial D, turned up during excavations by the Italian Archaeological Mission of Ca’ Foscari University of Venice in Pakistan, part of the Khyber PATH project. Work began in mid-August 2026 and has exposed an imposing structure: almost 100 meters (about 330 feet) long, close to the length of a football field, and […]

Forest fires and Antarctica are hard to picture together. Today the continent lies under a thick sheet of ice, and the cold preserves almost everything that falls on it. Around 90 million years ago, in the Cretaceous (the last period of the age of dinosaurs), the scene was very different. The planet was going through […]

In AD 52, the hills around Lake Fucino, some 50 miles (80 km) east of Rome, were crowded with spectators from nearby villages and from the capital itself. On the water, two fleets of triremes and quadriremes (warships driven by banks of oars) waited with crews of condemned prisoners, 19,000 of them according to Tacitus. […]