Enlarge (credit: Pompeii Archaeological Park) Just outside the ancient city of Pompeii, archaeologists recently unearthed a small room where at least three enslaved people lived and worked until Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE. The rediscovery of the dreary space near the villa’s stables provides a rare glimpse into the lives of the people at […]
Enlarge / A red paint sample taken from a 1, 000-year-old mask excavated through a Sicán tomb in Peru contains human blood and bird egg proteins, in addition to a red cinnabar pigment. (credit: Adapted from E. Pires et al., JPR, 2021) Ever since a 1, 000-year-old gold mask was excavated from a tomb in […]
Enlarge / The hull of Henry VIII’s favorite warship, the Mary Rose , and many thousands of recovered artifacts are housed in the Mary Rose Museum in Portsmouth, England. (credit: Johnny Black) Henry VIII’s favorite warship, the Mary Rose , sank in battle in 1545. The shipwreck was successfully raised in 1982, along with thousands […]
(credit: Photograph: The British Museum) A curator exploring the shadowy recesses of the British Museum’s archives recently encountered a ghost—or rather, the world’s oldest image of one, etched onto a 3, 500-year-old Babylonian clay tablet. The figure of a tall, emaciated spirit with his hands bound illustrates the text of an ancient exorcism ritual meant […]
Enlarge (credit: 21st Century Fox) An airborne lidar survey recently revealed hundreds of long-lost Maya and Olmec ceremonial sites in southern Mexico. The 32,800-square-mile area was surveyed by the Mexican Instituto Nacional de Estadistica y Geografia, which made the data public. When University of Arizona archaeologist Takeshi Inomata and his colleagues examined the area, which […]
Enlarge / Aerial image of L’Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland, Canada. (credit: Glenn Nagel Photography) Centuries before Christopher Columbus stumbled across the Bahamas, the Vikings established a beachhead at L’Anse Aux Meadows, a site on the northern peninsula of what is now Newfoundland, Canada. A recent study narrows down the date of the Norse arrival in […]
Enlarge / A 2, 700-year-old piece of human excrement found at the Hallstatt salt mines, in which beans, millet, and barley are clearly visible (assuming one wishes to look that closely). Ancient Iron Age miners in what is now Austria were quite fond of beer and blue cheese, according to a new analysis, published in […]
At a site in Yavne, archaeologists have discovered the largest complex of winepresses known in the world, dating back to the Byzantine Period. The Israeli archaeological site known as Yavne dates back in order to the late Bronze Age and late Iron Age and is considered one of the most significant Jewish historical sites after […]
Footprints left behind in layers of clay and silt at New Mexico’s White Sands National Park may be between 23, 000 and 21, 000 years old. That’s based on radiocarbon dating associated with the remains of grass seeds buried in the layers regarding sediment above and below the tracks. If the dates are correct, the […]
Enlarge (credit: Pompeii Archaeological Park) Archaeologists working in Pompeii recently unearthed the tomb and partially mummified remains of a man who died a few decades before the eruption. The man, Marcus Venerius Secundio, according to his epitaph, had once been enslaved, but by the end of his life he’d obtained enough wealth and status to […]