Two remarkably detailed bird figurines have been discovered at Hohle Fels cave in south-western Germany. The cave, which is part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site ‘Caves and Ice Age Art in the Swabian Jura’, has produced an array of…
An exhibition at Cliffe Castle Museum showcases artworks dating back 24,000 years, bringing together Continental artefacts with two key British finds. Carly Hilts reports.
REVIEW BY HANNA MCNULTY What if Ice Age art was not confined to glass cases or academic articles, but displayed in galleries alongside contemporary artists? In Ice Age Art Now, Jill Cook curates just that experience. Spanning the final 20,000…
There are lots of great ways to get stuck into history and heritage this summer, from new exhibitions and activity days to lectures and conferences. Or, if you’re looking for opportunities to get involved from home, there are a wide variety of resources available, including virtual site tours and digital offerings from museums, podcasts, and TV shows. Amy Brunskill has put together a selection of some of the latest options.
Neolithic site uncovered in Sweden Archaeologists working in the Swedish village of Hammar have excavated the remains of a unique ceremonial site associated with the Funnel Beaker Culture. A large number of finds from the site, which is located on…
Analysis of engraved stone slabs from the 15,800-year-old site of Gönnersdorf, located on the banks of the Rhine in west-central Germany, has identified a set of carvings that appear to depict fish nets or traps. Gönnersdorf has produced a rich…
Earliest engravings? A series of marks, found in the La Roche-Cotard cave on the north bank of the Loire River in France, could be the earliest examples of Neanderthal engravings yet found. Surveys of the cave walls in 2013 and…
A rare example of Upper Palaeolithic portable art has been found at an open-air site in south-eastern France. Bellegarde, located between Nîmes and Arles, was discovered in 2015 by Inrap archaeologists. Excavations across c.2,000m2 of the multi-phase site have produced…
When Jean-Luc Champerret explored the Lascaux caves soon after their rediscovery, he saw not paintings but ancient writing. With the publication of his extraordinarily imaginative interpretation, Simon Coppock revisits the caves and their elusive, poetic markings.
What is it? This 51,000-year-old engraved toe bone is one of the oldest works of art ever found. The bone, which is the second phalanx of a giant deer, is 56.8mm long, 38.9mm wide, and 30.9mm thick, and weighs 36.1g.…
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.
A Sulawesi warty pig painted in red ochre on an Indonesian cave wall may be the world’s oldest known representational image of an animal, dating back at least 45,500 years, according to a study recently published in Science Advances. Archaeologists…