The prevailing belief: Cacao was more available to, even controlled by, the society’s very upper echelons, royalty. Past efforts to identify cacao in ceramics focused on highly decorative vessels associated with elite ceremonial contexts — think ornate drinking vases — leading to assumptions about how cacao was distributed and who could access it. What about…
In 1881, archaeologists unearthed the skull of a human buried inside a cave in Mladeč, a village in what is now the Czech Republic. At the time, researchers dated the skull to about 31,000 years ago and classified the individual as male. But they were wrong about the Stone Age person’s sex, a new study…
An old adage states that Rome wasn’t built in a day, meaning that big projects take time to complete. The Roman Empire, as an example, was established gradually and grew over hundreds of years from a city-state to a colossal empire stretching from Britain to Egypt.
The mosaic is part of the central dining room from a large 2nd century villa complex situated on the cliffs overlooking Folkestone, England. Beneath the Roman foundations are traces of an earlier Iron Age settlement, occupied by native Britons centuries before the Roman invasion. The complex was first excavated by archaeologists in 1924, however, the…
Excavations were led by Dr. Ola Al-Ajizi from the Faculty of Archaeology at Cairo University, part of a study over the 2021-2022 work season to excavate the areas around the ascending corridor of the pyramid of King Unas. The team found a burial chamber containing the sarcophagus of Ptah-em-uya, a high-ranking official who was the…
Meet Leakey Foundation grantee Dr. Marcelo Tejedor and learn about searching from Patagonia to the heart of the Amazon for the earliest fossil primates in South America.
Similar sites containing stone jars have been identified across India and Indonesia, with the most famous stone jar concentrations being found on the Xiangkhoang Plateau in Laos. Stone jar sites were first discovered in Northeast India in 1929 by James Philip Mills and John Henry Hutton near the village of Ndunglo in the North Cachar…
The site was identified at a Mennonite farming community, where the remains of collapsed Maya dwellings appear as white mounds that pocket the landscape.
Israel has acquired a previously unknown ancient papyrus bearing a Hebrew inscription dated to around 2,700 years ago that had long been in possession of a Montana resident, the country’s antiquities authority said Wednesday.
The early removal of a leg was performed on a young hunter-gatherer.
Archaeologists at the University of Oxford’s School of Archaeology have used satellite imagery to identify and map more than 350 monumental hunting structures known as “kites” across northern Saudi Arabia and southern Iraq—most of which had never been previously documented.
Neanderthals have served as a reflection of our own humanity since they were first discovered in 1856. What we think we know about them has been shaped and molded to fit our cultural trends, social norms and scientific standards. They have changed from diseased specimens to primitive sub-human lumbering cousins to advanced humans.