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 […]

In 2022, medical CT scanners let Egyptologists peer inside sealed sarcophagi without ever lifting a lid. In 2026, the same basic technology — pointed not at a pharaoh’s mummy but at two silver brooches from a German field — has just done something similar for archaeology north of the Roman frontier. The brooches came out […]

Around 1590 BCE — more than 800 years before Rome was founded, and before Tutankhamun was even born — a small number of people in what is now southeastern Poland started eating a cereal that had never grown in their fields. It wasn’t a local crop, and it didn’t belong to any plant known elsewhere […]

Two skeletons from the Indonesian island of Sulawesi had something strange going on in their mouths. Not cavities. Not the usual wear from a tough diet. Deep, rounded grooves cut into the teeth — a pattern no archaeologist had documented before, and one nobody could explain. The answer, published in Science Advances, pushes the known […]