Across 5 Egyptian falcon-headed god also known as Horus (8)8 Roman goddess of the dawn (6)9 English river taking its name from the Old English for ‘winding’ (6)10 Spanish cave system containing Palaeolithic art (8)11 Building in Oxford housing varied…
Your observations, your objections, and your opinions on CWA.
Fresh knowledge about global trade and travel is coming to light in the Jordanian desert. A survey project is revealing information about the chronology of a small fort or fortlet and presumed caravanserai at the site of Khirbet al-Khalde in southern Jordan. Taking us through archival data, new archaeological finds, and the use of drone imagery, the co directors of the project Craig Harvey, Emanuele Intagliata, and Rubina Raja unravel new narratives about this fascinating desert site.
Archaeological survey of ice patches in the Mount Edziza Provincial Park, Tahltan Territory, British Columbia, Canada, has identified an array of perishable artefacts associated with ancient obsidian mining dating back thousands of years. Exploitation and trade of Mount Edziza obsidian…
In the first of a two-part feature, Richard Hodges untangles the early evolution of the famed Benedictine monastery of Monte Cassino.
Hiding in plain sight Look carefully at Renaissance paintings and you will see all sorts of fascinating cultural details, from the most obvious – the clothing that was fashionable at the time the painting was made, the jewellery, the hairstyles,…
In 1296, the Chinese Emperor Temür Khan despatched a diplomatic mission to Angkor. Zhou Daguan was a member, arriving in August 1296 and leaving the following July. On his return, he wrote a memoir of his visit, a unique eye-witness…
Rubina Raja & Søren M Sindbæk on cognitive technologies
The city of Sydney has changed beyond recognition since it was founded as Britain’s first Australian penal colony in 1788. Carly Hilts set out to explore some of the surviving traces of its earliest years.
A new exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York examines
the artistic and cultural relationships between medieval Africa and Byzantium.
REVIEW BY ECKART FRAHM Mesopotamian history, Amanda Podany argues in the introduction to her new book, ‘is more of a weathered mosaic than a grand narrative’. What she provides in her long but never boring account, which covers events and…
REVIEW BY SHERRIE-LEE EVANS Archaeology in Antarctica is an invaluable resource for anyone interested in the history of archaeological practice in Antarctica and the sub-Antarctic. The authors have researched published, unpublished, and oral accounts of all past archaeological work in…
REVIEW BY ANDREW SELKIRK What fields are left for Barry Cunliffe to conquer? After the Celts and the Bretons, Europe between the oceans, the Atlantic Ocean, the Scythians, and the Steppe, he has now turned his attention to Africa, and…
REVIEW BY GERALD LALONDE Activity of the Earth’s tectonic plates affects geography, and geography affects the activity of humans. Sliding of the Africa–Arabia plate under the Eurasia plate in the Miocene and Oligocene ages raised mountains from the Pyrenees in…
Analysis of early Viking Age combs from Hedeby has revealed new evidence of links between the town at the base of the Jutland peninsula and distant upland regions of northern Scandinavia.
An Early Bronze Age sanctuary that functioned as a solar calendar has been discovered in the Netherlands. Cristian van der Linde tells us more.
New research at a site in Finnish Lapland, c.80km south of the Arctic Circle, suggests that it could represent one of the largest Stone Age cemeteries discovered so far in northern Europe. Tainiaro, in northern Finland, was originally excavated in…
Beaver remains at a site in central Germany are changing our understanding of the diets of hominins in Lower Palaeolithic Europe, as well as the antiquity of the exploitation of beavers. Extensive excavations between 1969 and 2002 at Bilzingsleben, an…
Sacred baboons Baboons were long venerated in ancient Egypt and their mummies have been found in several cemeteries. A new study published in PLOS ONE () has analysed a collection of 36 such mummies from the site of Gabbanat el-Qurud,…
Stone beads found near Lake Turkana in Kenya are offering a new way to study how early pastoralists in the area interacted with the landscape around them at a time of environmental and cultural change around 5,000 years ago. The…
Excavations at the archaeological site of Pachacámac, near Lima, have uncovered a remarkable collection of well-preserved burial bundles dating to the time of the Wari Empire (AD 800-1100). Pachacámac, which was occupied from c.200 BC up to the Early Colonial…
An exceptional discovery has been made during the laying of a water pipeline in northern Naples, in Giugliano, an area that has never before yielded this type of find. The archaeological excavations, requested by the Superintendency for the Metropolitan Area…
What are they? Each of these two modified tiger shark teeth was once part of a handled knife. They were found in contexts dated to 7,000-5,000 years ago, associated with the Toalean culture, hunter-gatherers who lived in south-western Sulawesi, Indonesia,…
Across 6 Homo ___, early human species, the name meaning ‘handy man’ (7)8 Undeciphered script found on tablets in Crete (6,1)10 Earliest epoch of the Tertiary period (10)11 Recess in the wall of a Roman basilica (4)12 ___ Ware, 6th-century…
Newgrange and Michael O’Kelly Re: ‘Clare Tuffy and Newgrange’, CWA 117 I had the privilege of working with Professor O’Kelly at Newgrange in 1969. The restoration was just starting, and we were excavating around the exterior of the mound. O’Kelly…
Sanxingdui has produced a wealth of startling Bronze Age artefacts. Many of these treasures were deliberately smashed or burnt before being buried, raising questions about what they were used for and how they met their end, as Tianlong Jiao and Shengyu Wang told Matthew Symonds.
We all enjoy stories about new discoveries, and it is these that tend to grab the news headlines, but there is another kind of story that gets far less coverage: those that contradict an earlier claim. In that category is…
It is often thought that AD 900-1100 was a time when nothing much happened in the area that is today the Netherlands; many overviews of Dutch history have a tendency to skip straight from the Romans to the later Middle…
The Caucasus is a region where nations have often found themselves sandwiched between competing great powers. Christoph Baumer examines the political intrigues and military struggles that led to the rise and fall of the Kingdom of Georgia, while taking in some of the key monuments from the era.
Fifty years ago, I received a life-changing letter. David Peacock, my tutor at Southampton University, offered me a doctoral scholarship to study the imported Frankish pottery from Hamwic, the 7th- to 9th-century emporium at Southampton. The newly formed Southampton Archaeological…
In 2019, excavations at Kalambo Falls in Zambia produced a range of wooden objects. These included structural elements that have been dated using cutting-edge technology to an almost unbelievably ancient era. The results force us to rethink everything we thought we knew about the capabilities of early humans, as Larry Barham and Geoff Duller told Matthew Symonds.
The rivalry between Young and Champollion in the race to translate Egyptian hieroglyphs is legendary. But what motivated these two scholars, and what qualities did they bring to the endeavour? Andrew Robinson goes in search of the personalities behind an extraordinary intellectual achievement.
Examining artefacts from Myanmar reveals how a tale of power, wealth, people, and the rise and fall of empires played out over centuries, as Alexandra Green told Matthew Symonds.
Archaeological investigations at a site in the Norwegian countryside have uncovered evidence of a rich history stretching back thousands of years. Amy Brunskill spoke to Jes Martens and Christian Løchsen Rødsrud, who led the research, to find out more.
Analysis of human and animal footprints carved into rock faces in Namibia has revealed that they contain a wealth of hidden details. Engravings of human and animal tracks are found in prehistoric rock art around the world, but these images…
Ever since the redoubtable Madeleine Colani explored the wonderful karst country of Hoa Binh Province, west of Hanoi in northern Vietnam, a century ago, the hunter-gatherers of Southeast Asia have received rather a poor press. With a background in the…