A bronze sword that spent more than three thousand years underwater has come out of an Italian lake with its edge still sharp. Underwater archaeologists from the Soprintendenza of Viterbo (the state body that protects archaeological heritage in each Italian province) recovered it from Lake Mezzano, a small volcanic lake in Lazio, the region around […]

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. […]