News Round Up

During a construction project to reconnect the market and forum of the emperor Trajan (r. A.D. 98–117) in the heart of Rome, archaeologists have been clearing what remains of the Renaissance neighborhood of Via Alessandrina, which separated the two…

A 1,000-year-old bundle of drug paraphernalia discovered in southwest Bolivia has been found to contain a truly impressive array of psychotropic substances. On the items in the bundle, researchers have identified traces of tobacco, coca, the raw…

Animal herding, which has been a way of life in northeastern Africa for about 8,000 years, had spread to southern Africa by 2,000 years ago. Whether this pastoral lifestyle was brought south by immigrants or adopted by hunter-gatherers who were…

The waters of the Tigris River in Iraqi Kurdistan have receded and revealed the ruins of a 3,400-year-old palace. A team led by Hasan Ahmed Qasim of the Kurdish Archaeology Organization and researcher Ivana Puljiz of the University of Tubingen has…

A rare view of family life some 14,000 years ago has been made possible by recent studies and 3-D modeling of the traces left by a group of five people who walked, crawled, and explored their way through Grotta della Basura in the Liguria region of…

Among the treasures discovered in King Tut’s tomb is an elaborate pectoral with a central scarab carved from a canary-yellow material called Libyan Desert glass. Found in the sand dunes of Egypt’s western desert, the glass was formed about 29…

Luminaries constituting a veritable who’s who of late medieval Europe are depicted on a cache of 10 gold and 24 silver coins found inside a bronze box buried beneath the floor of a late fifteenth- or early sixteenthcentury house in Dijon, France.…

Peccaries, pig-like mammals native to Central and South America, may have been imported to Barbados by Iberian sailors sometime before the 1627 English colonization of the island. While studying a collection of faunal remains held by the Barbados…

Fifteen people who were killed in a brutal massacre almost 5,000 years ago and buried together in southern Poland were part of an extended family, genetic analysis has revealed. “The people’s bodies are carefully arranged according to family…

The earliest known settlements in southwestern Amazonia date to thousands of years before the rise of agriculture in the area. Researchers have found that between 10,600 and 4,000 years ago, hunter-gatherers settled for at least part of the year at…

Thirty-six mummies dating to between 600 B.C. and A.D. 100 have been discovered by a team of Polish archaeologists in Saqqara, the ancient cemetery of the city of Memphis in Egypt. These mummies received only the simplest embalming, explains…

In a necropolis at the site of Cumae, near Naples in southern Italy, archaeologists have uncovered a painted tomb dating to the second century B.C. Cumae is the oldest Greek settlement in Italy, founded sometime in the eighth century B.C. It is also…

More than 50 years ago, human footprints were found preserved in volcanic ash near the Çakallar volcano in western Turkey. Since then, experts have tried to figure out when the eruption that cemented the prints in the earth occurred. Now, a team…

Sixteen of the mysterious geoglyphs known as the Nazca Lines depict birds—more than any other type of plant or animal. A team of researchers from Japan recently set out to determine which bird species were rendered in the deserts of southern Peru…

HALLE, GERMANY—According to a Live Science report, archaeologist Bruno Glaser of Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg and his colleagues have found evidence that large groups of hunter-gatherers camped for weeks or months at a time at a high…

NAPLES, ITALY—BBC News reports that a 2,000-year-old collection of possible ritual objects thought to have served as women’s “good luck charms” has been discovered under a layer of volcanic material in the high-status dwelling known as Pompeii’s…

MÝVATN, ICELAND—Iceland Review reports that researchers creating a detailed map of Hofstaðir, an archaeological site in North Iceland, recently discovered traces of three buildings and artifacts dating to the medieval and Viking periods. Orri…

When University of Cincinnati archaeologists Sharon Stocker and Jack Davis discovered the Bronze Age grave of a man who came to be known as the Griffin Warrior at the site of Pylos in Greece, they could never have imagined that they would eventually…

INDONESIA: When the 2004 tsunami hit the northwestern coast of Sumatra, it caused almost unimaginable destruction. It also unearthed evidence that a previous tsunami had struck some 600 years earlier. A survey along 25 miles of coast near Banda Aceh…

CHINA: Long before it was popularized in the West by the 1960s counterculture, cannabis was an important part of Central Asian rituals. Researchers have detected trace amounts of the drug on several 2,500-year-old wooden braziers from the Jirzankal…