On 28 September 2026, Turkey’s Minister of Culture and Tourism, Mehmet Nuri Ersoy, announced on X the recovery of 2,100-year-old tableware from the Adrasan wreck, a merchant ship that went down off the coast of Antalya. Its cargo was mostly plates, bowls and trays. Thousands of pieces have been brought up since excavation began in […]

Cyrene was one of the wealthiest Greek cities in the ancient Mediterranean, built on a plateau some 9 km (about 6 miles) inland from Libya’s northeastern coast, on what is now known as Jebel Akhdar. According to Herodotus, it was founded in 631 BCE by colonists from the Greek island of Thera — modern-day Santorini. […]

Inside a Roman legionary fortress, almost nobody had a private bathroom. Soldiers washed in communal baths built for the whole unit. In practice, only one person could usually justify baths of any real size for himself: the legate, the general in command of the legion. That’s the context archaeologist Piotr Dyczek gives for a striking […]

In the small village of Qesarat, in southern Albania‘s Tepelenë district, an Italian-Albanian excavation team has just finished a summer season that turned up something unusual: six decorated floors from a Late Roman building, right at the edge of the Vjosa Wild River National Park. Declared in March 2023, the park protects the last stretch […]

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 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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

In the district of Monteleone Sabino, a town of under 1,300 people in Italy’s Rieti province, a team of cavers has made its way through a passage first cut into the mountainside more than two thousand years ago. On the other side, they documented a pre-Roman aqueduct, now walkable for roughly 100 meters (about 328 […]

Some 40 miles (65 km) from Thessaloniki, a teenager who would go on to reshape the ancient world once sat listening to lessons on physics, ethics and politics under stone colonnades. That teenager was Alexander the Great; his teacher was Aristotle; and the classroom was a monumental gymnasium carved into the rock near the modern […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 a quiet corner of Hadrian’s Villa, wedged between the so-called Amphitheater and a low bench of volcanic tufa rock, sits a marble slab measuring roughly 40 by 35 centimeters (about 16 by 14 inches). It has not moved in some 1,900 years. Two lines of carved capital letters explain why archaeologists are excited: FVLGVR […]

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 […]

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 […]

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, […]