The biggest dig at Pompeii in a generation is working to expose nearly an entire block of the ancient city. Archaeologists are making astonishing discoveries that shed powerful new light on life and death in the shadow of Vesuvius, as Giuseppe Scarpati and Sophie Hay told Matthew Symonds.
Ancient Egypt owed many debts to the creatures that lived in and beside the Nile. Both wild and domesticated animals offered an abundance of food, raw materials, and inspiration. But just as animals helped shape ancient Egypt, so too humans had an impact on the species roaming the Nile valley, as Gina Criscenzo-Laycock and Juliet Spedding told Matthew Symonds.
What can artificial intelligence bring to archaeology? Maurizio Forte introduces recent work dedicated to reconstructing ancient landscapes, and weighs some of the risks and rewards.
The discovery of an unsuspected family link to Christiansborg Castle, Ghana, led to a project examining a forgotten aspect of the transatlantic slave trade. Rachel Ama Asaa Engmann introduces us to ‘autoarchaeology’.
An ornately decorated mastaba has been discovered in the cemetery at Dahshur, the southernmost of the necropolises associated with Memphis, an ancient Egyptian capital. The tomb was discovered during recent excavations by the German Archaeological Institute (DAI), Cairo, which has…
I was delighted to be invited to the fifth Shanghai Archaeology Forum last December, happily revived after the COVID closedowns. This meeting is becoming a major fixture in the archaeological calendar, for every two years the advisory committee is asked to adjudicate all the nominations for field discovery and research awards.
I have embarked on an odyssey to revisit Viking Denmark decades after I first became familiar with it through editing Klavs Randsborg’s landmark book The Viking Age in Denmark (1980). Randsborg’s book was regarded as heresy at the time, but…
Our Neanderthal cousins may now be extinct, but they are rarely out of the news. Writing in The Conversation, archaeologist Steven Mithen tackles the perennial question of why Homo sapiens flourished while Neanderthals died out by examining the differences between the brain cavities of the two species
Rubina Raja & Søren M Sindbæk on archives and urban archaeology
Mesoamerica is often considered the ‘homeland’ of chocolate due to its significance for many ancient cultures in this region, but the cocoa tree, Theobroma cacao, in fact originated in the tropical rainforests of South America. Until now, though, our understanding…
A mammoth discovery A remarkable collection of mammoth bones has been found in a wine cellar in Lower Austria. Excavations at the site in Gobelsburg, carried out by archaeologists from the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW), have revealed a dense…
A purple dye workshop dating back some 3,600 years has been discovered on the Greek island of Aegina. Tyrian purple, a natural pigment produced by sea snails, was a highly valued commodity across the Late Bronze Age Mediterranean. Recent excavations…
Analysis of prehistoric pottery is improving our understanding of the changing culinary practices and ceramic usage of people living in central Germany between the Early Neolithic and the Late Bronze Age, c.5500-750 BC. The area of present-day Saxony-Anhalt was a…
DNA analysis of human remains from a mass burial at Chichén Itzá in Mexico is revealing new details about the ritual practices of the ancient Maya, as well as their genetic links to modern populations. In 1967, the remains of…
Archaeologists working in Berenike, Egypt, have discovered the remains of several letters written by Roman centurions. In the early centuries of the 1st millennium AD, the ancient port of Berenike, located on the west coast of the Red Sea, was…
Archaeologists working in Villedieu-sur-Indre in central France have uncovered a remarkable set of pits filled with the remains of c.2000-year-old horses. The excavations were carried out over an area of 1.3ha by a team from Inrap in advance of a…
Researchers working in Venezuela and Colombia are documenting some of the largest prehistoric rock engravings in world. Amy Brunskill spoke to Philip Riris, who led the research, to find out more.
REVIEW BY JONATHAN VALK Assyria stands out in history as the fountainhead of empire. It was perhaps the first state to subdue the bulk of its world, extending in every direction until its frontiers consisted almost entirely of sand, sea,…
REVIEW BY SIMON NORTON Ten years ago, Year 3 primary school teachers in the UK, like myself, were handed a revised National Curriculum which included a brand-new Unit of Study on ‘Prehistoric Britain’. For many teachers of seven-year-olds, this was…
REVIEW BY DENNIS B BLANTON This new book from William Kelso is in the tradition of popularised portrayals of archaeological discoveries linked to the ‘Virginia adventure’. Beginning in the 1960s, Ivor Noël Hume published several evocative, book-length accounts of studies…
What is it? This perforated baton made of mammoth ivory is believed to be a Palaeolithic tool used to make rope. The baton is 20.4cm long, 3.6cm wide, and 1.5cm thick. Four holes of slightly different sizes have been drilled…
Across 7 North American archaeological culture (6)9 Huntress of Greek mythology (8)10 Germanic people defeated by the Huns (10)11 Port, now in Israel, conquered by Alexander in 332 BC (4)12 Father of Aeneas in Greek mythology (8)13 Extinct language of…
An exhibition at the Getty Villa Museum brings together painted vessels from three major ceramic traditions to explore these dynamic objects and the stories they tell.