Almost nothing is left of a Roman window. The wooden frame rots, the glass (when there was any) shatters and the iron rusts away, so a grille that reaches us in one piece is a rarity. One has now turned up at Augusta Raurica, the Roman city that spreads across the Swiss villages of Augst […]

Here is how a consultation worked. Anyone with a question (whether to travel, close a purchase, go to court, or wait for a sick relative to recover) walked up to a statue of the god Hermes in the town square, threw a handful of sheep bones onto a table, added up the points and looked […]

Near Parabita, a town in the province of Lecce, in the heel of Italy’s boot (the region of Apulia, also spelled Puglia), a limestone cave holds a piece of Ice Age history. Two small bone figurines found there in 1966 belong to the group known as the Palaeolithic Venus figurines. Now a new survey suggests […]

Around 400 BC, Europe was changing, though not in a single direction. Athens had just lost the Peloponnesian War (404 BC), and Roman tradition says the Gauls would sack Rome around 390 BC. Farther north, Iron Age communities reacted in almost opposite ways. In the south of the Netherlands and the southeast of Gaul, people […]

Any pediatrician has seen it: a baby who spends so many hours lying on their back that one side of the head ends up flat. The condition is called deformational plagiocephaly, from the Greek plagios (“slanted”) and kephalé (“head”). It comes from steady outside pressure on a skull that is still soft, not from a […]

About 7.4 light-years from the Sun, a dim ball of gas about as wide as Jupiter drifts through space with no star to warm it. Jupiter is large enough to fit some 11 Earths side by side. (A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, nearly 6 trillion miles.) That puts the object […]

When people talk about Neanderthal technology, they almost always mean stone: points, scrapers, flakes chipped from flint. There is a good reason for that. Stone can last hundreds of thousands of years, while a wooden stick buried in the ground rots away quickly. For decades, a large part of Neanderthal equipment has simply been missing […]

When we think of Greek colonization, we think of Athens, Corinth or the cities of Euboea, which scattered new settlements across the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. Sparta hardly looked abroad at all. It founded a single colony, about 700 kilometres (435 miles) away in a straight line, across the Ionian Sea. And it did […]

In a cave on the Italian side of the Slovenian border, one layer of earth holds the remains of the first farmers. The layer right below it belongs to the hunters who lived there before them. The cave is called Tina Jama. It opens near the summit of Mount Lanaro/Volnik, in the municipality of Sgonico/Zgonik, […]

For more than three centuries, astronomers asking whether the Solar System is stable have received ever more comforting answers. Isaac Newton was not so sure. He suspected that the mutual tugs between Jupiter and Saturn would eventually wreck the planetary order, and that only divine intervention could prevent it. By the late 1700s, Laplace and […]

More than 2,000 years ago, the hilltop where archaeologists are now digging in Sicily’s Valley of the Temples was where the free citizens of Akragas met to decide their city’s business. Akragas is the Greek name for Agrigento. The place is marked by a semicircular set of stone seating that scholars call an ekklesiasterion (from […]

Around 3,700 years ago, anyone crossing the great hall at La Almoloya, a hilltop settlement in the Sierra Espuña mountains of southeastern Spain, had to walk over a man. He lay at the exact point where the two halves of the room meet, his lower body under the hearth and his face about a centimeter […]

The Lighthouse of Alexandria has been gone for more than seven centuries. A series of earthquakes, including those of 1303 and 1323, brought down the tower that had guided ships towards the city for some sixteen hundred years. Its outline has now turned up on the seabed again, shrunk to the size of a ring. […]

Each of these tablets fits in the palm of a hand. The smallest measures a little over 3 centimetres (1.3 inches) across and the largest 11.5 (4.5 inches), and nearly all of them deal with the least glamorous things a museum can hold: sacks of barley, daily wages, the size of ditches. Read together, though, […]

Physicists have been asking an awkward question for decades. If the universe is built from invisible fields, why has each one ended up in the state we find it in, and not in some other? A team at the University of Portsmouth, working with colleagues at Syracuse University and the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, […]

Around 5,000 years ago, when writing was in its infancy and Egypt had just been united under a single king, the first pharaohs picked a patch of desert at Abydos, in Upper Egypt (the southern part of the country, upriver on the Nile), as their final resting place. The spot is called Umm el-Qaab, Arabic […]

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 […]