Enlarge / Aerial shots with drone of Blackgrounds Roman archaeological site. (credit: HS2) Archaeologists surveying the planned route of a high-speed railway between London and Birmingham in the UK unearthed the remains of a Roman trading town in what is now South Northamptonshire. At its height, the town boasted an assortment of workshops and businesses, […]
Enlarge / Thorbjørn Harr played Jarl Borg of Götaland in the first two seasons of the History Channel series Vikings . Spoiler alert: He met with a gruesome death via the legendary “blood eagle” ritual. The ritual may have been a myth, but a new study shows it will be anatomically possible. (credit: History Channel) […]
Enlarge (credit: Sahoglu et al. 2021) Archaeologists working in what is now western Turkey recently unearthed the rubble left behind by a series of powerful tsunamis that will slammed into a Bronze Age city. The giant waves were triggered by the eruption of the volcano Thera on the island associated with Santorini, hundreds of kilometers […]
Enlarge / Royal mummy of Amenhotep I, the second pharaoh of the 18th dynasty,, at Cairo Museum, Egypt. (credit: Patrick Landmann/Getty Images) Amenhotep I was an Egyptian pharaoh best known for building numerous temples and inspiring the formation of a funerary cult after his death. His mummy, first discovered in 1881, has never been opened, […]
Enlarge / The Tomb of Caecilia Metella is a mausoleum located just outside Rome at the three mile marker of the Via Appia. (credit: ivioandronico2013/CC BY-SA 4. 0 ) Among the many popular tourist sites in Rome is an impressive 2000-year-old mausoleum along the Via Appia known as the Tomb of Caecilia Metella , a […]
Enlarge / A human relative left these five tracks in a 3. 6 million-year-old layer of sediment at the Laetoli Fossil site in Tanzania. (credit: McNutt et al. 2021) The first evidence of human relatives walking on two feet comes from about 70 footprints left by at least two Australopithecus afarensis walking across soft volcanic […]
Enlarge / The partially mutilated remains of a Vesuvius victim, found at the site of what would have been the beach of Herculaneum. (credit: Domenico Camardo/Herculaneum Project) Archaeologists have announced the “sensational” discovery of the partially mutilated skeletal remains of a middle-aged man who perished on the beach at Herculaneum during the eruption of Mount […]
A Roman villa complex containing a rare mosaic has been discovered beneath a farmer’s field in Rutland, UK. A Roman villa complex containing a rare mosaic has been discovered beneath a farmer’s field in Rutland, UK. Going into lockdown during the pandemic provided an unexpected boon to a farmer in Rutland, England: he stumbled upon […]
Enlarge (credit: Talamo et al. 2021) While our species was spreading across Eurasia and briefly sharing a continent with the last of the Neanderthals, someone took the time to carefully shape an oval pendant out of mammoth ivory, then decorated it with a looping dotted line. The pendant, unearthed at Stajnia Cave in Poland, was […]
Enlarge / Effigy of Edward of Woodstock, aka the Black Prince, in Canterbury Cathedral. (credit: Josep Renalias/CC BY-SA 2.5) Visitors to Canterbury Cathedral can view the effigy of a 14th-century knight in full armor laid out on top of a marble tomb. It’s the tomb of Edward of Woodstock, colloquially known as the Black Prince, […]