Did Brass-Making Reach China by Sea? Three Crucibles Offer Clues
Three Guangzhou crucibles preserve East Asia’s earliest direct evidence of brass production. The residues confirm local making; the route remains uncertain.
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Ancient Civilizations
Discover the world’s most mysterious ancient civilizations, from lost cities and megalithic structures to forgotten knowledge and unsolved archaeological puzzles.
How Archaeologists Read and Date Ancient Inscriptions
Imagine turning a piece of ancient wood toward the light and finding the faint remains of someone’s handwriting. What did that person need to say? And how could we place…
Denmark’s Largest Viking Silver Hoard Was Found in a Backyard
A terrace project in Rebild uncovered about 18.5 kilograms of Viking-Age silver. The objects show how wealth moved, was measured and was hidden in tenth-century Denmark. A new terrace was…
Did Archaeologists Find Egypt’s Lost City of Mesen? A Ramesses II Inscription Offers a New Clue
The name that keeps pulling archaeologists back to the eastern frontier What if a city that appears in the records of ancient Egypt has been sitting in plain sight, hidden…
Terra Preta: The Ancient Amazonian Soil That Stayed Fertile for Centuries
Dig into an old settlement in the Amazon and the ground itself can reveal that people lived there. Beneath the vegetation, patches of dark soil contain charcoal, broken pottery and…
How Ancient Coins Reveal the Connections That Held Rome Together
Imagine finding a Roman coin hundreds of miles from the place where it was made. Who carried it there? A soldier, a merchant, or someone whose journey has left no…
Two Ancient Melon Seeds Offer a Glimpse of Fruit on Song Dynasty Tables
What would a melon served in medieval China have looked like? Two seeds recovered from an ancient port are helping researchers approach that question through the fruit’s DNA. A new…
How Image Enhancement Reveals Faded Rock Art
What if a rock face that looks empty to us is still carrying a faint memory of paint? A digital photograph can preserve tiny differences between pigment and stone even…
How Archaeologists Date a Stone Circle When the Stones Are Millions of Years Old
A stone can be millions of years older than the monument built from it. Measuring when its minerals formed therefore cannot, on its own, reveal when people dragged it into…
Why Were the Devil’s Arrows Hauled 11 Miles Across Yorkshire?
Why were the Devil’s Arrows hauled 11 miles? Mineral fingerprints point to Brimham Rocks, while archaeology still has to explain the route, methods and motive.
Why Archaeologists Leave Some Discoveries Unexcavated
Finding an ancient structure does not always mean that archaeologists should uncover all of it immediately. In some cases, the most responsible decision is to leave part of a site…
How Archaeologists Reconstruct the Making of Ancient Iron
An ancient iron object can look simple: a blade, nail, tool or fragment of a chain. Making it required a long chain of decisions, from finding ore and fuel to…
How Do Archaeologists Tell Whether an Ancient Building Was a Home, Shrine, or Workshop?
An ancient building does not come with a label on the door. When archaeologists uncover walls, they have to work out what people did inside them from the traces left…
A 112°C Test Could Help Expose Forged Ancient Pottery
Archaeologists and museums may soon have a new way to test suspicious clay objects: a controlled heating experiment that separates pottery more than 1,000 years old from modern material. A…
Saqqara Excavation Reveals an Official’s Tomb and Three Sealed Sarcophagi
Archaeologists working at Saqqara have found the Old Kingdom tomb of a senior official named Sekhentyu-Ptah, along with burial shafts, three sealed stone sarcophagi and more than 100 ushabti figurines.…
A Housing Complex and Possible Wine Press Emerge Beside Egypt’s Temple of Sekhmet
A joint Egyptian-Chinese archaeological mission has uncovered a mud-brick housing complex and a stone installation that may have been used as a wine press beside the Temple of Sekhmet at…
LED Imaging Helps Archaeologists See Buried Layers Hidden in Ordinary Soil
Archaeologists have developed a relatively inexpensive imaging system that can reveal differences hidden inside an excavation trench. Instead of lighting soil with ordinary white light, the prototype photographs it at…
Resin on 1,200-Year-Old Wallaby Teeth Reveals Rare Australian Ornaments
A handful of small teeth found in a Queensland rock shelter have turned out to be something far more unusual than animal remains. Archaeologists identified twelve wallaby incisors coated with…
LiDAR Study Finds Ancient Maya Land Use Still Shapes Belize’s Forests
Some of the forests in Belize may still carry the ecological imprint of ancient Maya land use. A new study combines airborne LiDAR scans with archaeological remains and finds that…
Why Where an Ancient Object Is Found Matters More Than the Object Itself
When people imagine archaeology, they often picture a spectacular object being lifted from the ground: a gold ornament, a carved stone or a decorated pot. For archaeologists, the object is…
A Black Hole Erupted in X-Rays. Its Radio Jets Brightened 296 Days Later
A supermassive black hole in the galaxy NGC 1275 produced a powerful X-ray flare, and its radio emission brightened 296 days later. The long delay gives astronomers a rare way…
Webb May Have Located the Galaxy Behind a 20-Year-Old Gamma-Ray Burst Mystery
For nearly two decades, astronomers have not been sure which galaxy produced the short gamma-ray burst GRB 061201. New observations from the James Webb Space Telescope point to a faint…
What Is a Megalith, and Why Did Ancient People Build Them?
What is a megalith? The word comes from Greek roots meaning “large stone,” and archaeologists use it for monuments built with large stones or substantial stone settings. That definition is…
Medieval Book Fragments Hidden in Guernsey Records Reveal an Island Reading Culture
Seventeen pieces of medieval writing have been found hidden inside early modern records from Guernsey. The scraps were reused as covers and bindings for notebooks and administrative volumes, but they…