In April 2009, newspapers around the world ran a headline that read like a cocktail menu: the center of the galaxy tastes of raspberries and smells of rum. The line came from the Guardian, which built it from a press release by the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn. The release was much […]

For decades, one question has nagged at specialists in ancient Mexico: did Teotihuacan — the city that dominated central Mexico from roughly the first to the sixth century AD, with a population that may have reached 125,000 — actually have a writing system, or were its symbols just decorative emblems? The stakes of that question […]

A modest Roman bathhouse on Turkey’s southern coast spent its retirement very differently from how it began. Constructed in the late 2nd or early 3rd century CE, it stopped functioning as a bath sometime after an invasion in the 260s CE and was never used for bathing again. Centuries later, someone gutted much of its […]

In the 1970s, the small settlement of Stein, in Lower Austria, came close to becoming the site of the country’s second nuclear power plant. The project was scrapped, and the land went back to being another stretch of farmland beside the Danube. Half a century later, those same fields have revealed what they’d been hiding […]

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 […]

Archaeologists have spent thirty years puzzling over an unusually grim detail at Göbekli Tepe, the roughly 11,600-year-old site often called the world’s oldest temple. Since excavations began in 1995, diggers have pulled more than 900 individual fragments of human bone out of the earthen fill packed into and around its monumental stone buildings — skull […]

Finding fossils usually means months of fieldwork, a hammer, and a lot of patience. In Finnmark, Norway’s northernmost region, it took none of that. According to the University of Cambridge, a cluster of rocks had broken loose from a cliff above a sheep field. When they split open on landing, they exposed a fossil of […]

In the early 1980s, an American-Yugoslav team dug a trench roughly the size of a tennis court — 16 by 20 meters (52 by 66 feet) — into a low hill near the village of Opovo, in northern Serbia. Between 1983 and 1989, they uncovered six houses, whole or partial, from a settlement dating to […]

The team wasn’t even looking for a grave. Kjersti Væge, project director at the Museum of Cultural History at the University of Oslo, was overseeing a dig at Kongefaret 8, on the Svinesund plateau near Halden, in southeastern Norway — a few kilometers from the Swedish border. The site was thought to hold a Stone […]

In late 2025, conservators from Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum brought an unassuming object to the Diamond Light Source synchrotron in Oxfordshire: a terret, a small bronze loop that Iron Age chariots used to keep a horse’s reins from tangling. It looked modest. It was nearly 2,000 years old. And under X-ray analysis, it turned out to […]

In 1889, a team from the École française de Rome reached a circular earthen mound roughly 30 meters (about 98 feet) across, in the Polledrara necropolis on the southern edge of the ancient Etruscan city of Vulci, in central Italy. They identified it, named it the Tumulo Gsell after French archaeologist Stéphane Gsell, and left […]

In the spring of 2019, workers dredging gravel at Deinham, a site on the Danube in Upper Austria, kept snagging strange double-pointed iron objects in the excavator’s bucket. Instead of tossing them into the scrap pile — the usual fate of corroded iron pulled from riverbeds, since it rarely looks as recognizable as bronze — […]

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 […]

Ten years of digging in the same corner of northern Spain tends to turn up plenty. Temples, walls, coins, the occasional grave. Rarely does it turn up something as mundane as a kitchen. But that is exactly what surfaced this summer beneath a plot known as La Era, in Sasamón, a town of roughly 1,000 […]

Some discoveries impress because of their size or value, while others do so because of the exact place where they appear. The one announced by Sapienza University of Rome belongs to the second group. At the Pyrgi archaeological site, on the coast of Lazio, archaeologists have found a fragment of an antefix bearing the face […]

Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) filled his notebooks with insects: dragonflies, bees, wasps, butterflies — almost all of them winged. That focus lines up with what historians already knew about him. Leonardo was fixated on the mechanics of flight, and scholars have long read his drawings of flying insects as studies feeding into his designs for […]

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 […]

Earth has never been a perfect sphere. It bulges slightly at the equator and flattens slightly at the poles, a shape geodesists call an oblate spheroid — think of a basketball very gently squeezed from top and bottom. That bulge isn’t fixed, though, and a new study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid […]

Workers were preparing to build a block of flats in Ligornetto, a small town in the canton of Ticino, right on the border with Italy, when they hit the remains of a Roman factory built almost two thousand years ago. Since June 2026, the Archaeology Service of Ticino’s Office of Cultural Heritage has been excavating […]

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 […]