Buried Roman baths
It was abandoned in Late Antiquity, around the 5th century AD.
World
Fashioning the Viking Age
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.
A History of World Egyptology
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…
The Lost City of Norchia
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.
Tea with the junta
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.
The Antikythera Mechanism: an ancient Greek machine rewriting the history of technology
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.
Dating the Plain of Jars
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.
New theory emerges about how humans learned to count
The Les Pradelles hyena bone is ‘potentially the earliest known example of this type of mark-making’, and suggests Neanderthals possessed the cognitive abilities for numeracy.
Palaeolithic children’s footprints discovered in Spanish cave
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.
Nero: the people’s princeps?
Roman literature gives us an overwhelmingly negative view of Nero, but was there any good to this matricidal ruler? As a new exhibition on the emperor opens at the British Museum, Minerva's Editor Lucia Marchini speaks to curators Thorsten Opper and Francesca Bologna to find out more about how and why this figure, popular with the people, came to be known as an enemy of the Senate and the state.
Bringing back the Birdman: restoring colour to the sacred cult of Easter Island
Early visitors to Easter Island recorded strange designs of a mysterious being. Now, using the latest technology and ancient records, Paul Horley, Georgia Lee, and Paul Bahn have restored glorious colour to the sacred site of Orongo, home of the mystical birdman.
Baalbek Reborn: Temples
A new app offers an opportunity to experience an ancient site in its Roman heyday.
Jerash: revealing a ‘peripheral’ part of an ancient city in northern Jordan
In AD 749, the ancient city of Jerash was hit by a devastating earthquake. Excavating private houses that collapsed during the disaster has revealed a wealth of information about the Umayyad city. These, though, are just some of the finds encountered during recent archaeological work in the north-western part of the site, as Achim Lichtenberger, Eva Mortensen, and Rubina Raja reveal.
Current World Archaeology Photo of the Year 2021: Results
Despite travel limitations over the last year, we’ve been transported to a wide variety of places...
Ceremonial chariot found in Pompeii
This is a unique find, representing the only vehicle of this type found in Italy to date.
Ten years on from disaster
Urajiri is in the town of Minami Soma, impacted both by the tsunami and the meltdown, evacuated as it was in the exclusion zone around the stricken power plant. Archaeology is providing a focus for rebuilding community identity.
Understanding Hawaiian temples: a new angle on the role of ritual sites
The temples of Hawaii are renowned for their varied forms and orientations, but could it be that this veneer of irregularity masks a pattern that sheds fresh light on these monuments? Patrick Kirch and Clive Ruggles told Current World Archaeology's Matthew Symonds what systematic study of the temple sites reveals.
A new world of communication
One of the most breathtaking experiences in my archaeological life was to mount the steps and look out over the assembled ranks of the terracotta army.
Emblems of power in Argaric society
The Antiquity paper presents a new theory about the significance of these diadems as emblems of power and suggests that they may reflect the central position of these women in the governance of Argaric society.
Protected places and prehistoric pints
Abydos was not only the earliest brewery and the forerunner of the great royal cemeteries... it was also the birthplace of the funeral wake and possibly too of the mass hangover.
The city of Chersonesos
The photograph shows the 1935 Basilica, named after the year it was excavated and believed to date to the 6th century AD.
Archaeology: Western science or global practice?
Delving into ancient sites to illuminate the past is generally seen as a Western innovation. But just how novel is this approach? Excavating in Papua New Guinea has prompted Chris Urwin to make the case for many different archaeologies.
Australia’s ancient rock art
Researchers in Australia have used wasp nests on a cave wall to identify the earliest known example of in situ rock art in the country: a painting of a kangaroo created over 17,000 years ago.
Saint-Bélec Slab
What is it? This engraved stone dating to the early Bronze Age (c.1900-1650 BC) is known as the Saint-Bélec Slab. Made of grey-blue coloured schist, the slab is c.2.2m long, 1.53m wide, and 0.16m thick. New research suggests that the…
Queen Adelaide’s castle in the Tuscan marches
Thanks to modern scientific analyses, the every-day circumstances of Tuscany’s Dark Age peoples are no longer mute. One thing is certain from this excavation: objects and nature played an active part in transforming the primitive experiences of Tuscany’s 9th-century peasants and their early feudal masters into some of the most sophisticated lifestyles in Europe by the 12th century.
Megaliths and Geology
One of the essentials of building a megalithic chambered burial monument is the choice of materials used to construct it. It is now considered that stone (boulders, stone erratics and fragments, and quarried stone) used in the construction of megaliths was…
Discoveries in the Judean Desert
The newly discovered fragments consist of over 20 pieces of parchment belonging to the Minor Prophets Scroll, including sections of the books of Zechariah and Nahum.
Olga Tufnell’s ‘Perfect Journey’
When 22-year-old Olga Tufnell set off on her first ‘perfect journey’ in 1927 – to join Flinders Petrie’s expedition in Egypt – she had little training in archaeology beyond several years assisting the Petries with their annual exhibition. Over the…
News in brief: Neanderthals and Waterloo
A quick round-up of news stories from around the globe, including a study of how Neanderthals spoke, an analysis of a chesnut tree from the Battle of Waterloo, and the discovery of stone artefacts in South America dating to c. 24,000 years ago.
Lost city in Luxor
The city is situated near to Amenhotep III’s royal palaces and may have provided food and other items to the royal residence, as well as acting as the administrative and industrial centre of the empire.
Discovering Roman women’s lives: from slaves to a senatorial lady in Geneva
How much can we know about the role of women in Roman society? Natalya Kahn examines inscriptions from Geneva to build up a picture of their experiences of life within the Roman Empire.
The Dignity of Labour: image, work and identity in the Roman world
Immediately beyond the Porta Maggiore in Rome, at a busy intersection, lies the impressive tomb of Eurysaces, a baker who lived through the last days of the Roman Republic. In the ensuing centuries, his lavish funerary monument was swallowed up…
Ancient Egyptian animal cemetery
Excavations at an animal burial ground in the Egyptian port of Berenice have uncovered evidence of cats, dogs, and monkeys being kept as pets.
Kolombangara: surveying a forgotten Second World War fortress
Early this year, a team set out to survey long-overlooked fortifications on the island of Kolombangara. Their work is shedding new light on preparations to repel an anticipated Allied invasion, as Nikolaus Hochstein Cox reveals.
Hadrian’s Wall: A Roman frontier revisited
How much do we really know about Hadrian’s Wall? After more than a century of scientific research into this magnificent Roman monument, it might be suspected that few mysteries remain. Instead, the recent ‘Pilgrimage’ along the Wall showed that debate is still in rude health, as Matthew Symonds reveals.
Dating techniques identify possible earliest evidence for cave occupation
Wonderwerk Cave was first excavated in the 1940s. Its archaeological stratigraphy comprises evidence of human activity spanning from the Early Stone Age in South Africa to the present day.