Fresh excavations at Valkenburg are shedding surprising new light on a seemingly well-known site. Wouter Vos, Edwin Blom, Brecht Cornelisse, Jasper De Bruin, Jeroen Loopik, Arjan Ruiter, Adrie Tol, and Lourens Van der Feijst lay out the arguments for an unsuspected legionary fortress, and its possible role in the invasion of Britain.
New dating of the Shigir Idol, the oldest known wooden monumental statue in the world, has revealed that it was created even earlier than previously thought.
It would be fair to say that Nero’s reputation survives him. But could it be that this notorious imperial bad boy has been unfairly condemned by history? While the charge sheet levelled against him by the ancient historians is truly horrifying, archaeology paints a more nuanced picture, as Thorsten Opper told Current World Archaeology's Matthew Symonds.
Tests indicate that the woman was between 20 and 30 years old and was 26-28 weeks pregnant at the time of death.
Excavations in the Bronze Age cemetery at Hala Sultan Tekke, Cyprus, are shedding light on trade networks and complex burial practices, as Peter M Fischer and Teresa Bürge explain.
This, the third volume to tackle the legacy data from Malta (Tanasi et al. 2011; 2015), effectively lays the groundwork from which to launch renewed archaeological investigations. Its reinterpretation of past excavations highlights the fragile nature of the archaeological remains…
Your observations, your objections, and your opinions.
This ring is a significant discovery because it represents the earliest gold object from a clear and well-dated context discovered in this region so far.
At the excavated mustatil, archaeologists uncovered an assemblage of cattle horns and skull fragments interpreted as an offering, perhaps related to a ‘cattle cult’, further supporting the ‘ritual’ interpretation of these sites.
In a warning of what might occur again in the future, a paper in the journal Nature blames climate change for interpersonal violence among Nile Valley dwellers in the Late Pleistocene.
Growing Up in the Ice Age represents both the first book-length work on the lives of children throughout the Plio-Pleistocene, and a superlative example of how the study of children can be fully integrated into more traditional areas of Palaeolithic…
How do we interpret archaeological sites? Excavations conducted 50 years ago at Cloggs Cave, in south-eastern Australia, revealed what seemed to be a temporary hunting camp. Fresh research, though, points to this cavity having been used as a secluded place of magic and danger, accessed only by a few powerful individuals. Russell Mullett and Bruno David told Current World Archaeology's Matthew Symonds what has changed.
The site, which was first excavated in the 1940s, has a unique stratigraphic record containing evidence of human activity from the Early Stone Age to the present day.
Generically, monuments are organised using four recognised architectural elements: the mound, the entrance or façade, the passage, and the chamber. I suppose a fifth element could be landscape. These clear building traits are repeated across much of Atlantic Europe. However, there…
Medieval people had a rather gloomy outlook: life was hard, the main thing was to avoid disaster, the future would probably be worse than the past.
Eight of the ten beads were found at Punyik Point, a site in the Brooks Range, located on ancient trade routes from the Bering Strait to the Arctic Ocean.
Current World Archaeology's Amy Brunskill visits a new exhibition at the V&A presenting 5,000 years of art and design in Iran.
It was abandoned in Late Antiquity, around the 5th century AD.
The designs of these outfits are based on two high-status graves, which contained some of the best-preserved Viking Age textiles in Denmark: a male burial from Bjerringhøj, dated to AD 970-971, and a female grave from Hvilehøj, dated to the late AD 900s.
The Rosetta Stone that proved key to the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs, discovered by a French military engineer in 1799 (now in the British Museum), and the gold mask of Tutankhamun, discovered by British Egyptologist Howard Carter in 1922 (now…
Upper Palaeolithic flints, Eneolithic tombs, and remains of a Bronze Age semicircular hut, as well as a tomb with a Villanovan shield, show that the place evolved over time, before being bafflingly abandoned in the earlier Iron Age.
For some unaccountable reason, perhaps a case of mistaken identity, Polly and I were ushered into a private room to sit down to afternoon tea with the junta.
A seemingly unassuming lump of corroded bronze has confounded investigators for more than a century, ever since it proved to contain precision gearwheels that simply should not have existed in the ancient Greek world. A new study, using cutting-edge techniques, has now revealed what this machine could do, and how it did it, as Tony Freeth explains.
It is evident that the sites were reused over time, well into the historic period, and had retained some kind of ritual significance when the later burials took place in the 9th-13th century AD.