Under Ramesses II, who ruled Egypt between 1279 and 1213 BC and is remembered as one of its most powerful pharaohs, the kingdom kept a chain of garrisons along its western frontier, watching for raids by Libyan tribes and, later, the loosely defined coalition of invaders known as the Sea Peoples. One of those tribes, […]

A team of archaeologists digging at the site of Ursoaia, in Romania’s Iași County, has uncovered a nearly 6,000-year-old pottery kiln unlike anything previously found in the region. Described in a paper published this month in the journal Antiquity by Diana Măriuca Vornicu, Felix-Adrian Tencariu and colleagues from the Romanian Academy and Alexandru Ioan Cuza […]

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 […]

There’s a temperature nothing in the universe has ever touched. It’s called absolute zero, equal to -273.15°C (-459.67°F), the point at which the particles that make up matter would lose all their kinetic energy and simply stop moving. In 1848, the British physicist William Thomson — better known as Lord Kelvin — proposed making that […]

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 […]

The site is provisionally dated to a six-century stretch, from the 3rd century BC to the 3rd century AD, offering a window into funerary rites practiced by a population that neither buried nor cremated its dead — long before that same principle produced the famous Towers of Silence. The find comes from Odirmon, a site […]

Anyone planning to build in Pontecagnano Faiano, near Salerno, has learned to expect a tomb underneath. That happened again this year, and this time the find was unusual enough that archaeologists had only seen its like twice before in more than sixty years of excavation. Preventive digging ahead of a private housing development uncovered a […]

Winchester Cathedral covers roughly 53,800 square feet (about 5,000 square meters) of floor space, making it one of the largest cathedrals in Northern Europe. At 558 feet (170 meters) long, it’s also the longest medieval cathedral in the world. Neither the congregation nor the more than 365,000 tourists who visit each year to admire its […]

In the German state of Brandenburg, barely a hundred meters (about 330 feet) from the border with Saxony-Anhalt, the Havel River curls around a low rise of land that locals call the Pilatsch. For generations, a local legend held that a knight named Pilatus lived there, ambushing boats on the river and locking captured boatmen […]

One grape variety still grown in Spanish vineyards, hebén, has never gone out of cultivation for at least the last 1,100 years, according to the new study. That takes its lineage back to roughly the year 929, around when the Caliphate of Córdoba was proclaimed in southern Spain. Eleven centuries of unbroken agriculture, and the […]

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 […]

In February 2012, after twenty years of nearly uninterrupted work, a Russian drill broke through the last stretch of ice over East Antarctica and reached something no human had ever touched: the surface of a lake sealed shut long before our species existed. Water surged up the borehole, mixed with the kerosene and Freon used […]

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) […]

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 […]

On May 29, 1108, an Almoravid army crushed the forces of Alfonso VI of León and Castile outside the town of Uclés. Among the dead was Sancho Alfónsez, the king’s only son and heir, a loss so severe that medieval chroniclers ranked it among the worst Christian defeats of the entire Reconquista — the centuries-long […]

On October 9, 2022, two space telescopes, Swift and Fermi, picked up the brightest gamma-ray burst ever recorded. Researchers nicknamed it BOAT — “brightest of all time” — official designation GRB 221009A. The explosion happened in a galaxy roughly 2 billion light-years away, which means its light set out across space before complex life had […]

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 2016, paleontologist David DeMar Jr. was crawling across a rocky outcrop in northeastern Montana, hunting for fish fossils, when he spotted a dark, reddish-brown nodule about half the size of a golf ball. He picked it up and looked at it through his hand lens. On its surface was something he didn’t expect: a […]

On the slope below the cemetery of Sant’Elpidio a Mare, in Italy’s Le Marche region, recent heavy rains loosened the hillside enough to expose something no one was looking for: a rounded ceramic vessel, decoration still visible, sitting almost intact in the displaced earth. It looked, at first, like debris. It turned out to be […]