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Discover the world’s most mysterious ancient civilizations, from lost cities and megalithic structures to forgotten knowledge and unsolved archaeological puzzles.
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…
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…
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 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…
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…
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…
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…
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 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…
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? 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…
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…
A collection of 50 battered parchment fragments has been joined into a page of Roman law that had been broken apart for centuries. Researchers at the University of Cincinnati matched…
How did Bronze Age trade connect distant cities? It worked through a chain of exchanges rather than one giant market controlled from a single capital. Copper and tin moved toward…
At Sardis in western Türkiye, archaeologists have recovered a statue that spent part of its life as building material. The figure was made nearly 2,500 years ago, broken in two…
How do archaeologists reconstruct an ancient diet? They rarely find a complete meal waiting in a bowl. Instead, they assemble small traces: charred seeds, animal bones, fish scales, grinding stones,…
Murujuga in Western Australia holds one of the world’s largest concentrations of rock art, with engravings made over roughly 50,000 years. New research suggests that historic sulfur pollution may have…
Ancient Egyptian artists were working with a much wider range of materials than the usual picture of "paint and glue" suggests. A new analysis of 28 microscopic samples from 14…
Stone tools from a Saudi Arabian desert site resemble Neanderthal technology, offering evidence of a possible Neanderthal presence 60,000–50,000 years ago.
How did ancient people navigate without modern maps? They did not rely on one magical instrument or a single star. Travellers learned the shape of a coastline, the direction of…
Fragments of clothing have survived inside an eighth-century Viking woman’s grave in western Denmark, giving archaeologists a rare chance to study what she wore. The pieces were found attached to…
Eleven marked obsidian arrowheads from Tepecik-Çiftlik in Turkey reveal deliberate Neolithic incisions, but their purpose remains unresolved.
What can ancient DNA tell us about lost populations? In the right sample, it can reveal relationships that bones alone cannot show: who was related, which groups moved, where populations…
Two fragments of pottery from Etowah, a major Mississippian centre in what is now Georgia, contain traces of cacao DNA. The discovery is the first direct evidence that people at…