Carey Mulligan and Ralph Fiennes star in the new Netflix film The Dig. Just before the outbreak of World War II, a widow and a local archaeologist team up to excavate large burial mounds in Suffolk, England, and discover priceless treasure, in the new Netflix film, The Dig. It’s based on the 2007 novel of […]
Enlarge / This interpretive sign at the presumed “fort clearing” includes a reconstruction of what the fort probably looked like in 1804. (credit: National Park Service) In 1804, Tlingit warriors sheltered behind the walls of a wooden fort on a peninsula in southeastern Alaska, preparing to repel a Russian amphibious assault. An archaeological survey near […]
Enlarge / Sir Charles Nicholson donated the mummified person and the coffin to the University of Sydney in 1860, apparently having realized that an entire dead body is a pretty horrific travel souvenir. (credit: Sowada et al, PLOS ONE (CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)) Approximately 3,200 years ago in Egypt, ancient embalmers encased a mummy in […]
Enlarge / Copies of the Book of the Dead, or excerpts from it, were often included in burials so the deceased would have a guide to the afterlife. (credit: Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities) Archaeologists in Egypt are preparing to open a 3,000-year-old burial shaft at the Saqqara necropolis, south of Cairo, in the […]
Enlarge (credit: Brumm et al. 2021) A pig painted on the wall of an Indonesian cave is the world’s oldest figurative art—that is, it’s the oldest known drawing of something, rather than an abstract design or a stencil. The 45,500-year-old ocher painting depicts a Sulawesi warty pig, which appears to be watching a standoff between […]
Last month, archaeologists in Mexico City unearthed the eastern façade of a tower of skulls near the 700-year-old site of the Templo Mayor, the main temple in the former Aztec capital city of Tenochtitlan. It’s a morbidly sensational find, but it’s also a potential treasure trove of information about the people who died at Tenochtitlan […]
The versatility that helped humans take over the world emerged very early in our evolutionary history, according to sediments and stone tools from Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania. Olduvai has provided some of the oldest known tools and fossils from our genus, Homo. A recent study lines that evidence up with environmental clues buried in the […]
Enlarge / Archaeology is catching up with the digital humanities movement with the creation of large online databases, combining data collected from satellite-, airborne-, and UAV-mounted sensors with historical information. (credit: Brown University) There’s rarely time to write about every cool science-y story that comes our way. So this year, we’re once again running a […]
Enlarge / Earlier this year, researchers analyzed the skulls of early Caribbean inhabitants, using 3D facial “landmarks” as a genetic proxy for determining how closely people groups were related to one another. A follow-up study this month added ancient DNA analysis into the mix, with conflicting results. (credit: Ann Ross/North Carolina State University) There’s rarely […]
Enlarge / Danish explorer Jørgen Brønlund’s petroleum burner was found in 1973. Brønlund and two compatriots died in 1907 during an expedition to Greenland. (credit: Jørn Ladegaard) Over 100 years ago, a Danish explorer named Jørgen Brønlund perished during an expedition to northeast Greenland, along with two members of his expedition. He left behind a […]