At the foot of Mount Aragatsotn, in the Armenian highlands, sits the site of Aruch — a castle that was never just a castle. Between the 12th and 13th centuries, it housed a high-status residence, complete with stone-slab floors and cisterns. Over time, though, that elite space was carved up into smaller rooms, and holes […]

Deep inside Ojo Guareña, one of the largest cave systems in Europe, in the northern Spanish province of Burgos, archaeologists have spent eleven consecutive summers digging through a single Neanderthal layer. This year’s season, which wrapped up in late August 2026, pushed the excavated area of that layer — known as level 4D — to […]

For years, a small fragment of papyrus lay unnoticed in the collections of the French Institute of Oriental Archaeology in Cairo. No one had looked closely at it until, in early 2026, Belgian papyrologist Nathan Carlig of the University of Liège realized what he had in front of him: a previously unknown fragment of the […]

When the French Egyptologist Auguste Mariette surveyed the necropolis at Saqqara in the mid-19th century, he catalogued hundreds of mastaba tombs and marked one more on his map that he never got around to excavating. It stayed there, noted but untouched, for more than 160 years. A joint Spanish-Egyptian mission has now finished what Mariette […]

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 […]

An international team has re-examined close to a thousand human bones from the caves of Malalmuerzo, Carigüela, and Majolicas, applying direct radiocarbon dating and modern taphonomic analysis — the study of everything that happens to a bone between death and excavation — to material that was first pulled from the ground in the 1970s. The […]

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 […]

In the first quarter of the 11th century, a force of Kievan Rus’ warriors sailed for Constantinople hoping to join the Varangian Guard — the Byzantine emperor’s elite personal bodyguard, foreign troops trusted precisely because they had no stake in local politics, not unlike Rome’s Praetorian Guard centuries earlier. The city turned them away at […]

Underwater archaeology is experiencing a silent revolution. For decades, researchers have measured the importance of ancient ports by looking almost exclusively at what they could see: piers, breakwaters, and the size of the inner basins. But an international team of researchers has shown that this approach is incomplete. Ships did not only dock at the […]

The face is gone. Not chipped or worn away by time, but struck — possibly on purpose — until nothing remained of the features that once identified this life-size limestone head, carved roughly 2,400 years ago. What survived instead is the hairstyle: a braid gathered at the nape, with curls falling at the sides. For […]

Chinese legal texts have described nasal amputation as a criminal punishment since the Bronze Age. Oracle bone inscriptions from the Shang dynasty even carved the concept into a single character: a knife next to a nose. For all that documentation, though, no archaeologist had ever found a skeleton that showed it happening — until now. […]

Two tombs, two very different experiences. Walk into one and the space narrows around you, guiding your eyes along a fixed sequence of images. Walk into the other and the sound itself seems to come apart: voices blur, echoes pile up, and a blue demon painted on the wall seems to lunge straight at you. […]

Galileo Galilei is remembered for pointing a simple two-lens tube at the sky and changing astronomy forever. What he is not remembered for is a four-lens telescope built more than a decade before historians thought such instruments existed — and yet that is exactly what a manuscript unearthed in Spain’s National Library now suggests he […]

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, […]

Two of the most prominent belligerents of World War II ended up clashing despite having initially fought on the same side, and it wasn’t until 1951, six years after the end of the conflict, that they signed an unusual peace. One of them was Italy, obviously, where the government that succeeded Mussolini signed an armistice […]

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 […]

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 paleontologists has discovered on King George Island, in the South Shetland Islands, the first fossil footprint unequivocally attributable to a terrestrial mammal in the Eocene of Antarctica. It is a specimen barely two centimeters long, preserved as a natural mold in fine-grained volcanic sediment, providing direct evidence of the presence of a […]