Some lakes give up shipwrecks, and Arendsee, in northern Germany, has already given up one. What archaeologists brought to light in 2026 is something else: wood carved by Mesolithic hunter-gatherers up to 10,500 years ago. (The Mesolithic, or Middle Stone Age, is the stretch of European prehistory after the last Ice Age and before farming.) […]

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 […]

Picture ancient Egypt’s funerary cult and the mind jumps to the dead themselves: the offerings, the gods, the pageantry. Easy to forget are the people who actually carried the bread, beer, and incense to the tomb, day after day, for generations. A team from the University of Seville wants to put them back in the […]

Some 2,500 years ago, Babylon trained the sons of its wealthiest families without a single weekly hour devoted to the gods. There was no textbook that worked as a Bible either. Religion was everywhere and in no particular subject, spread through sign lists, writing exercises and arithmetic drills. A study published in the journal Iraq […]

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 […]

The archaeologists were not looking for a Sarmatian. When they opened the burial mound near the Sea of Azov, they expected Bronze Age graves — and found plenty: thirty-one of them. But one grave didn’t fit. Inside lay a man in his late twenties or early thirties, stretched out on his back with his arms […]

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 […]

Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities has announced the discovery of a Roman-period tomb whose architecture, according to the country’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, has no exact parallel elsewhere in the cemetery where it was found. The tomb sits at Bir al-Shaghala, a site in the Dakhla Oasis, about 750 kilometers (roughly 465 miles) southwest […]

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 […]

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 […]

Nobody expects to find a two-thousand-year-old fortification in the courtyards of a working hospital. But that is what archaeologists have uncovered at the Hôtel-Dieu, on the Île de la Cité, the island in the Seine where Notre-Dame stands. The wall runs for about 20 meters (roughly 65 feet) and shows clear signs of having burned […]

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 mountainous interior of Sardinia, where the Gennargentu massif gives way to the valleys of the Flumendosa river, a site called S’Arcu ‘e is Forros has been surprising archaeologists for more than four decades. Its Sardinian name translates roughly as “the pass of the furnaces” — a fitting label, as it turns out. On […]