The abandoned fieldstone walls of New England are every bit as iconic to the region as lobster pots, town greens, sap buckets and fall foliage. They seem to be everywhere—a latticework of dry, lichen-crusted stone ridges separating a patchwork of otherwise moist soils....
Shiyu provides us with an opportunity to look into the life of the skillful hunters from northern China 45,000 years ago. The people inhabiting the region had a remarkably advanced tool kit, with a range of innovative tools from the Upper Paleolithic, including end-scrapers, awls, and tools of former times, including Middle...
A special find has been made in the Alkmaar Regional Archive: A number of 17th-century book bindings contained pieces of parchment from a manuscript from the 11th century. The original manuscript may have belonged to a princess who fled England after the Norman Conquest....
Researchers at the Francis Crick Institute, working with University of Oxford, University of York and Oxford Archaeology, have developed a new technique to measure the number of chromosomes in ancient genomes more precisely, using it to identify the first prehistoric person with mosaic Turner syndrome (characterized by one X...
The North Arabian Desert oases were inhabited by sedentary populations in the 4th and 3rd millennia BCE. A fortification enclosing the Khaybar Oasis—one of the longest known going back to this period—has just been revealed by a team of scientists from the CNRS and the Royal Commission for AlUla (RCU)....
The spectacular explosion of the mine at Hawthorn Ridge—a fortified German front-line position in the First World War—marked the beginning of the Battle of the Somme, and remains one of the best-known pieces of film from the whole conflict....
When did archery arise in the Americas? And what were the effects of this technology on society?...
A multi-institutional team of anthropologists has discovered that two pieces of ancient Scythian leather excavated at sites in Ukraine were made from human skin. In their project, reported on the open-access site PLOS ONE, the group tested an account by the Greek historian Herodotus regarding certain behaviors of ancient...
Ancient bricks inscribed with the names of Mesopotamian kings have yielded important insights into a mysterious anomaly in Earth’s magnetic field 3,000 years ago, according to a new study involving University College London researchers....
The Dordogne region of southern France is home to over 200 caves decorated with colorful Paleolithic art, but little is known about how old it is. Due to its coloration with iron- or manganese-oxide-based material, radiocarbon dating of the art has not been possible, and it has been generally thought to have been created during...
One of the hottest debates in archaeology is how and when humans first arrived in North America. Archaeologists have traditionally argued that people walked through an ice-free corridor that briefly opened between ice sheets an estimated 13,000 years ago....
For years, scientists have debated whether humans or the climate have caused the population of large mammals to decline dramatically over the past several thousand years. A new study from Aarhus University confirms that climate cannot be the explanation....
Until recently, archaeologists have mostly relied on what they can see at the sites of ancient ruins to unlock the secrets of the past. But lately, new methods have started to allow researchers to use other senses to explore these sites in different ways....
In a groundbreaking archaeological discovery, an international team led by archaeologists from Freie Universität Berlin has uncovered fortified prehistoric settlements in a remote region of Siberia. The results of their research reveal that hunter–gatherers in Siberia constructed complex defense structures around their...
A multidisciplinary study has reconstructed the genomic history of the Balkan Peninsula during the first millennium of the common era, a time and place of profound demographic, cultural and linguistic change....
This summer, archaeologists and a metal detectorist conducted a small survey of Herlaugshagen, at Leka in the northern part of Trøndelag County. They found something amazing....
A team of archaeologists, geologists and historians affiliated with several institutions in Spain has found that the Menga dolmen represents one of the greatest engineering feats of the Neolithic. In their study, published in Scientific Reports, the group used new technology to learn more about the stone that was used to create...
Hunting the now extinct straight-tusked elephant (Palaeoloxodon antiquus) was widespread among Neanderthals, concludes a research team consisting of members of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU), the Leibniz-Zentrum für Archäologie (LEIZA), also based in Mainz, and Leiden University in the Netherlands. The study has...
A research group led by the Nagoya University Museum and Graduate School of Environmental Studies in Japan has clarified differences in the physical characteristics of rocks used by early humans during the Paleolithic. They found that humans selected rock for a variety of reasons and not just because of how easy it was to break...
Scientists should seek answers hidden in the dirt using proven and state-of-the-art archaeological science techniques to support new discoveries about human evolution following recent controversies at a cave site in Africa, says a group of international experts....
The double burial of an adult woman and an infant, dating to about 7000–6800 BCE, discovered in 1934 during construction works at the spa gardens of Bad Dürrenberg, is regarded as one of the outstanding burial finds of the Mesolithic in Central Europe. Because of the unusual equipment with the woman, who was buried in a...
