Underneath the foundation level was an eclectic assemblage of artefacts, including a whetstone of fine-grained sandstone, a spindle whorl made of cannel coal, a possible gaming piece or counter crafted from a sherd of green glaze pottery, two 17th-century coins, and an iron dagger.…
'The analysis has much wider implications in the study of Neolithic ceramics, but we will need many more fingerprint examples before any firm conclusions can be drawn.’…
As part of the project ‘Secrets of the Ice’, the Innlandet County-based Glacier Archaeology Programme (GAP) have been conducting surveys at Lendbreen since 2011, when the ice began melting away and exposing remarkable finds dating from the Roman Iron Age to the late medieval period.…
What makes this discovery particularly exciting is that, even though animal carvings from this period are known from continental Europe, such realistic prehistoric depictions were not thought to exist in Scotland before now.…
There are plans for the redecoration of Caerphilly’s Great Hall to restore its original medieval splendour, and for the installation of new interpretations offering enlivened insights into the history of the castle...…
Its contents are written in Latin, Scots, and Gaelic, and include contemporary annals, poetry, lists of Scottish kings and battles, and chronicles recording the deaths of prominent members of Highland society.…
The practice appears to have begun in central Europe sometime before the 6th-century AD, and then spread across the continent before reaching its peak around two-hundred-years later.…
The discoveries are significant as they reveal the long history of maritime trade in Singapore well before the establishment of the East India Company in 1819.…
In the largest study of north-western Arabia’s mustatil to date, archaeologists have recorded more than 1,000 of the enigmatic rectangular structures across 200,000km2 of land, shedding light on one of the oldest widespread monument-building traditions. These prehistoric structures take their name from the Arabic word for ‘rectangle’, and while they…
This dramatic work has been acquired by the J Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, where it is now on view. Artemisia trained with her father Orazio Gentileschi, and her Lucretia joins two of his works in the Getty collection.…
A 38cm-long bronze finger has rejoined the hand of Constantine the Great in the Capitoline Museums in Rome. The ancient digit, once part of a 12m-high statue of Constantine of which several sizeable fragments survive, was acquired by the Louvre from the Italian collector Giampietro Campana in 1863 but, in…
The discovery of the gold object in an Early Bronze Age grave was unusual, as precious metals are rare in the region at this date.…
In the latest season of fieldwork this year, a team led by Artur ObÅ‚uski, director of the PCMA UW, cleaned the dome of a large tomb and the wall of the church’s apse, revealing paintings with two rows of monumental figures, possibly apostles.…
New dating research has revealed that, rather than being an ancient fertility symbol or depiction of the mythical hero Heracles, the giant is in fact medieval.…
The Les Pradelles hyena bone is ‘potentially the earliest known example of this type of mark-making’, and suggests Neanderthals possessed the cognitive abilities for numeracy.…
The footprints were left by a group children, aged between six to seven years old, playing in the cave recess sometime during the Middle-Upper Palaeolithic c. 60,000-15,000 years ago.…
The project began in 2001 and has now carefully restored 12 of the 13 tapestries, which have lined the walls of the Long Gallery at Hardwick Hall since 1562.…
For many years, a life-sized, anatomically accurate and skilfully carved skull of white Carrara marble was on display at Schloss Pillnitz, a castle in Germany. Its artist was unknown.…
Analysis of sediment samples taken from the Cerne Abbas Giant has shed new light on the origins of the Dorset hill figure, suggesting that the chalk outline may have been created in the late Anglo-Saxon period. Current Archaeology's Carly Hilts reports.…
‘Now, using digital photographs of pottery, computers can accomplish what used to involve hundreds of hours of tedious, painstaking, and eye-straining work by archaeologists, who physically sorted pieces of broken pottery into groups, in a fraction of the time and with greater consistency.’…