Earthen platforms uncovered at a site in eastern China are believed to reflect efforts by early states to use ritual events as a way to unify their expanding territories. The three large platforms were discovered during excavations of the site…
A recently published study has shed new light on the ways in which kinship was tied to monuments from Ireland in the Neolithic period, suggesting that biological relationships and social status were not strong factors in deciding who was buried…
If the past is a foreign country – as the novelist L.P. Hartley famously suggested in the opening line to The Go-Between (1953) – then prehistory is surely a whole other world entirely. With little physical evidence often to guide…
‘Samurai’, meaning ‘one who serves’, derives from the Japanese verb samurau, ‘to wait on’. These warriors were the elite military class of feudal Japan, akin to the knights of medieval Europe. A samurai (the word is both singular and plural)…