News Round Up

DURHAM, ENGLAND—BBC News reports that bone fragments unearthed in central Durham have been radiocarbon dated to between 90 B.C. and A.D. 60, indicating that the region was inhabited during the Iron Age. The pieces of bone, identified as parts of an…

The excavation of a ritual platform at the ancient village of Pampa la Cruz on Peru’s northern coast has offered University of Florida archaeologist Gabriel Prieto a unique glimpse of a belief system that may have roots in cultural practices that…

2020 marks 100 years since the creation of the ‘Research Laboratory’ – a space for developing and conducting scientific research and conservation on the British Museum collection. Museum staff were quick to recognise the value of the laboratory’s…

Archaeological work conducted in advance of the construction of a new school in Somerton, Somerset, has uncovered a high-status Romano-British cemetery. The post Romano-British cemetery unearthed in Somerton appeared first on Current Archaeology.

It was not enough for medieval Irish lords to own cows, they also had to steal them. “Stealing cows was important in this society,” says archaeologist Daniel Curley of the National University of Ireland Galway. “It was a ready source of wealth, a…

The modern poet W.B. Yeats (1865–1939) was one in a line of centuries of Irish bards who, like the personal poets of the MacDermot kings, wrote about the Rock of Loch Cé. Yeats called the Rock the “Castle of Heroes” and envisioned it becoming a…

The Plains of San Agustin stretch some 50 miles across west-central New Mexico and are surrounded on three sides by mountain ranges. In the late summer monsoon season, vibrant wildflowers make the brownish-green scrubland pop with color.…

CHINA: Around 200 new terracotta warriors have joined the ranks of the 2,000 that had been previously excavated. The life-size sculptures were unearthed during the latest round of excavations at the 3rd-century B.C. tomb of Qin Shihuangdi in Xi’an.…

RUSSIA: A tiny, 1.6-inch-long sculpted cave lion found in western Siberia’s Denisova Cave is believed to be one of the world’s oldest carved animal figurines. Made from a woolly mammoth tusk, the partially intact carving was originally painted with…

TURKEY: Humans have been wearing animal teeth as personal adornments for millennia. Some 8,500 years ago, people in the village of Catalhoyuk began fashioning pendants from parts of their deceased human brethren. Two human teeth recently found at…

DENMARK: DNA embedded in ancient “chewing gum” from the island of Lolland was used to reconstruct the genome of a woman who briefly chomped on it 5,700 years ago. Scientists were able to use the masticated piece of birch pitch to determine aspects…

PUERTO RICO: Early inhabitants of Puerto Rico ate a lot of clams, but they didn’t boil the mollusks in soup or enjoy them raw on the half shell, as is popular today. Instead, they preferred their clams barbecued. Isotope analysis of 2,700-year-old…

PERU: The number of known Nazca Lines continues to grow, thanks, in part, to artificial intelligence (AI). The mysterious, massive geoglyphs, representing humans, animals, and geometric shapes, were created in the Nazca Desert around 2,000 years ago…

ARCTIC: When the ancestors of today’s Inuit population crossed into North America from Siberia 2,000 years ago, they had a secret weapon that would help them conquer the notoriously harsh Arctic climate: their dogs. Although dogs were already…

In some respects, the life of a Mesopotamian scholar in the seventh century B.C. was not so very different from that of a modern academic. While the former might be responsible for reporting on celestial phenomena and whether they augur well for the…

Recently discovered graffiti carved into a stable door at a farm in Lincolnshire during the first decades of the twentieth century mixes bucolic childhood concerns with matters of far greater import. Looming above images of plows, horses, and a…

Scholars have longed believed that a Bronze Age Aegean painting of a troop of monkeys depicts stylized exotic primates cavorting about a rocky landscape. The fresco adorns a room in a two-story complex at the second-millennium B.C. settlement of…

A fragmentary but poignant insight into the spare moments of nineteenth-century Wisconsin homesteaders has been discovered at Fort McCoy, a United States Army installation about 90 miles northwest of Madison. Archaeologists unearthed four pieces of…

The world’s oldest known cave art created by modern humans, discovered on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi and recently dated to at least 44,000 years ago, has transformed researchers’ understanding of human artistic development. The illustrations…

Elaborate ship burials are among the most famous and most mysterious remains of the Viking Age. During the burial ritual, an individual was laid to rest on the deck of a full-size ship, which was then interred beneath a mound of earth. Over the past…