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BELOW Baalbek Reborn offers a virtual tour around the temple complex at Baalbek. At its heart is the Temple of Jupiter, one of the largest temples in the Roman Empire.

Baalbek Reborn: Temples

A new app offers an opportunity to experience an ancient site in its Roman heyday.

Jerash: revealing a ‘peripheral’ part of an ancient city in northern Jordan

In AD 749, the ancient city of Jerash was hit by a devastating earthquake. Excavating private houses that collapsed during the disaster has revealed a wealth of information about the Umayyad city. These, though, are just some of the finds encountered during recent archaeological work in the north-western part of the site, as Achim Lichtenberger, Eva Mortensen, and Rubina Raja reveal.

Current World Archaeology Photo of the Year 2021: Results

Despite travel limitations over the last year, we’ve been transported to a wide variety of places...

LEFT & ABOVE The majority of the chariot, including the ornate decorations on the back of the vehicle, was preserved by volcanic material from Mount Vesuvius.

Ceremonial chariot found in Pompeii

This is a unique find, representing the only vehicle of this type found in Italy to date.

BELOW The earthquake and tsunami of 2011, which caused damage to many archaeological sites across Japan, is the subject of a new museum that opened in Fukushima this spring.

Ten years on from disaster

Urajiri is in the town of Minami Soma, impacted both by the tsunami and the meltdown, evacuated as it was in the exclusion zone around the stricken power plant. Archaeology is providing a focus for rebuilding community identity.

Understanding Hawaiian temples: a new angle on the role of ritual sites

The temples of Hawaii are renowned for their varied forms and orientations, but could it be that this veneer of irregularity masks a pattern that sheds fresh light on these monuments? Patrick Kirch and Clive Ruggles told Current World Archaeology's Matthew Symonds what systematic study of the temple sites reveals.

A new world of communication

One of the most breathtaking experiences in my archaeological life was to mount the steps and look out over the assembled ranks of the terracotta army.

Top The grave goods found in Grave 38, including this rare silver diadem (above), have shed further light on the economic divisions that existed in Argaric society and the power held by the wealthiest individuals.

Emblems of power in Argaric society

The Antiquity paper presents a new theory about the significance of these diadems as emblems of power and suggests that they may reflect the central position of these women in the governance of Argaric society.

BELOW An official ban on climbing Uluru, which is a site of great spiritual significance for the Aboriginal people of Australia, was passed in 2017 and came into force in 2019.

Protected places and prehistoric pints

Abydos was not only the earliest brewery and the forerunner of the great royal cemeteries... it was also the birthplace of the funeral wake and possibly too of the mass hangover.

The city of Chersonesos

The photograph shows the 1935 Basilica, named after the year it was excavated and believed to date to the 6th century AD.

Below Orokolo Bay shoreline in Papua New Guinea acts as the main highway connecting a series of coastal settlements. When archaeologists arrived seeking to excavate past village sites, they discovered that the locals were already using traces of past events to illustrate their oral histories.

Archaeology: Western science or global practice?

Delving into ancient sites to illuminate the past is generally seen as a Western innovation. But just how novel is this approach? Excavating in Papua New Guinea has prompted Chris Urwin to make the case for many different archaeologies.

BELOW A montage of 39 photographs of the 17,300 year old kangaroo (LEFT) and an accompanying illustration (RIGHT). This drawing, which was radiocarbon dated using fossilised wasp nests, was revealed to be the earliest piece of in situ rock art found in Australia.

Australia’s ancient rock art

Researchers in Australia have used wasp nests on a cave wall to identify the earliest known example of in situ rock art in the country: a painting of a kangaroo created over 17,000 years ago.

Saint-Bélec Slab

What is it? This engraved stone dating to the early Bronze Age (c.1900-1650 BC) is known as the Saint-Bélec Slab. Made of grey-blue coloured schist, the slab is c.2.2m long, 1.53m wide, and 0.16m thick. New research suggests that the…

Queen Adelaide’s castle in the Tuscan marches

Thanks to modern scientific analyses, the every-day circumstances of Tuscany’s Dark Age peoples are no longer mute. One thing is certain from this excavation: objects and nature played an active part in transforming the primitive experiences of Tuscany’s 9th-century peasants and their early feudal masters into some of the most sophisticated lifestyles in Europe by the 12th century.

Megaliths and Geology

One of the essentials of building a megalithic chambered burial monument is the choice of materials used to construct it. It is now considered that stone (boulders, stone erratics and fragments, and quarried stone) used in the construction of megaliths was…