Around 1200 BC, the eastern Mediterranean fell apart. The great empires of the Bronze Age collapsed, many cities were destroyed or emptied, writing disappeared from much of the region, and long-distance trade shrank to almost nothing. Archaeologists call what came next the dark age, and the name is earned: with few texts and almost no […]

Archaeologists said that they had found jars from a shipwreck as much as 4,700 years old, with black residue inside. Outside experts were skeptical but intrigued.

The Hittite generals posted in western Anatolia (the Asian part of modern Turkey) did not mince words. They told their king that the territory was surrounded by enemies. They asked for soldiers, horses and war chariots, and warned that without help the army could be destroyed. They also made it clear that they would not […]

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, […]

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 […]

About 56 miles (90 km) from Brescia and 75 miles (120 km) from Milan, in the Lombard Alps, the forest of Naquane is still turning up surprises after seventy years of excavation. The latest field season, which resumed on August 31, 2026, has uncovered a rock surface that had never been recorded before: a panel […]

Forty years ago, archaeologist Lucien Basch and researcher Michal Artzy published a set of 19 ship graffiti carved into the walls of Kition Kathari, an archaeological site beneath the modern city of Larnaca on Cyprus’s southern coast. Ever since, those images have been cited as textbook examples of Late Bronze Age maritime iconography in the […]

A team led by the National Museum of Denmark has worked out, for the first time, what people actually cooked in the pots of Hama, an ancient city in western Syria, roughly 4,500 years ago. By analyzing animal bones, plant remains, and fat residues absorbed into the vessel walls, the researchers found a surprisingly varied […]

The site is called Külhöyük, in the Oyaca neighborhood of Ankara’s Gölbaşı district, about 20 kilometers (12 miles) south of the capital. It’s a tell — the term Near Eastern archaeology uses for an artificial mound built up by layer upon layer of human occupation — roughly 250 by 150 meters (820 by 490 feet) […]

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 […]

In the 1930s, the German Nazi regime launched an ambitious archaeological research program with a clear goal: to prove that Germanic culture was the oldest and most superior in the world. To achieve this, the organization known as Ahnenerbe (Ancestral Heritage) sent two expeditions to Scandinavia with the mission of making plaster casts of the […]

There are ancient monuments that impress with their size and others that impress with their precision. The Sacred Well of Santa Cristina, in the municipality of Paulilatino, province of Oristano in Sardinia, belongs to the second group. Its basalt stones are carved and assembled with such geometric precision that, according to the site management center […]