Even before the rise of the great Maya civilization, the people who occupied Central America’s Yucatan Peninsula were applying their engineering skills to make the land more productive and liveable...
“Jesus is God.” An inscription declaring this to be a reality, the earliest and oldest written expression of the Christian faith, has been deemed 'the greatest discovery since the Dead Sea Scrolls'...
History is full of inventive, albeit disturbing, methods of making people squirm, confess, or simply regret their life choices. Among these is the lesser-known but utterly bizarre practice of ‘goat’s...
John Pearce /The Conversation In the amphitheatre of Gladiator II , Ridley Scott trains his lens on fighters and emperors – but no account of ancient gladiators is complete without including its...
In the quiet and peaceful village of Aquileia, in northern Italy near the Adriatic Sea coast, archaeologists from the Austrian Archaeological Institute of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW) found...
A recent discovery at the Drumanagh promontory fort in North Dublin is reshaping our understanding of Ireland’s Iron Age trade networks. The find—a 2,000-year-old charred fig—is the earliest evidence...
A recent discovery in Gibraltar has unveiled one of the most advanced manufacturing sites of the ancient world: a Neanderthal tar distillation oven dating back 65,000 years. Hidden in Vanguard Cave,...
A recent study revealed many new details about the manufacture, material composition, and cultural importance of Late Bronze Age swords recovered during various 20th century excavations on Spain’s...
A series of petroglyphs have been identified in the Alpine Lombardy region at over 3,000 meters (9842 feet), more than 7 years after they were found by a hiker from Como. Found on Pizzo Tresero (...
Michael Hanaghan /The Conversation When Gladiator I was released in 2000, I was a high school Classics student and the film brought Classical literature to life for me. Dramatic depictions of ancient...
In this episode, Dr. Brian S. Bauer, a Full Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago, takes us on a journey through his archaeological investigations of...
One of the most enduring myths of humankind is that pertaining to giants. In almost every major civilization and culture in the world, there are tales of ancient giants, enormous and powerful,...
During the excavations carried out in the ancient city of Hadrianopolis in the Eskipazar district of Karabük, an amulet depicting Solomon on horseback spearing the devil, dating back to the 5th...
It has widely been accepted that climate (in the form of the Late Little Ice Age or LLIA and the Justinianic Plague were the primary culprits of empirical change, causing a massive dwindling of the...
The roots of alphabetic writing may stretch back much further than previously believed. Evidence unearthed at the ancient site of Umm el-Marra in northwestern Syria suggests that the alphabet's...
In a significant operation against the illicit trade of antiquities, Italian police have recovered a trove of Etruscan funerary treasures in Umbria, believed to have belonged to ancient aristocratic...
The sistrum was one of the most sacred musical instruments in ancient Egypt and was believed to hold powerful magical properties. It was used in the worship of the goddess Hathor, mythological...
A Neanderthal cave in northern Spain has yielded 15 marine fossils, indicative that our extinct ancestors might have been collectors, just like we are with certain small objects and memorabilia...
Stephan Blum & Michael La Corte /The Conversation Twenty-four years after Gladiator, Ridley Scott has returned with a sweeping sequel to his epic tale. Thanks to cutting-edge CGI, Rome’s grandeur...
In the society of Ancient Greece, the polis , or the city-state, was perhaps the most distinctive and important political innovation at the time. Emerging around the 8th century BC, this institution...
Until now, no one had ever found a sign of the zodiac encoded in Egyptian rock art. But that has all changed, as scholars from Macquarie University in Australia have identified an ancient Egyptian...
In the Sinah desert stands Kuntillet Ajrud, a remote settlement that was found in 1975 by the archaeologist Ze’ev Meshel of the University of Tel Aviv. The settlement is dated to the 8th century BC...
The legendary Arslan Kaya monument (i.e., lion rock), features a heavily damaged inscription that has been difficult to decipher for ages, and is 2,600 years old. Now, a professor and archaeologist...
A ship that sunk in Norway’s deepest lake several centuries ago has been identified as a føringsbåt, a type of boat that was used to haul cargo and passengers between 1300 and 1900 AD. These...
