Researchers have developed a way to study DNA preserved inside ancient parchment manuscripts without damaging the documents. The work focused on animal skins used to produce manuscripts dating from the eighth century through the early 1900s. By analyzing genetic material from those skins, the team gathered new information about livestock farming, parchment production, and trade … Read more
Archaeologists working at the site of Sheffield Castle have completed a detailed survey of a medieval well hidden beneath the former fortress. The structure once supplied fresh water to people living inside the castle walls and played an important role during periods of conflict, including the English Civil War. Credit: Wessex Archaeology The work was … Read more
A small bone dental bridge found in a 19th century burial in Porto is giving researchers a rare look at early dental care in Portugal. The object, described in the International Journal of Osteoarchaeology, marks the first documented fixed bone dental bridge recovered from a Portuguese archaeological site. Macro stereomicroscopic images of the dental bridge. … Read more
More than 3,000 years after the first nuraghi rose across Sardinia, some of these massive stone towers still shaped community life in ways archaeologists are only beginning to understand. New research at Nuraghe Barru, a site in south central Sardinia, suggests one of these ancient structures did not fade into irrelevance at the start of … Read more
For decades, archaeologists argued that cities grew alongside inequality. As settlements expanded, wealth often moved toward rulers, priests, and elite families. A new study on Mohenjo-daro presents a different story. View of the Mohenjo-daro archaeological site. Credit: Saqib Qayyum, CC BY-SA 3.0 Researchers from the University of York examined housing patterns in Mohenjo-daro, one of … Read more
Peruvian hairless dogs lived beside people at a major Wari Empire settlement on Peru’s northern coast more than 1,200 years ago, according to a study published in the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology. The research gives the first physical evidence of these dogs at Castillo de Huarmey, a large ceremonial and funerary center built between 600 … Read more
Researchers studying Ethiopia’s Afar Rift have reported what could be the oldest known evidence of human cremation. The finding comes from sediments about 100,000 years old in the Middle Awash region, an area with one of Africa’s richest records of early Homo sapiens life. Surveying, sieving, and fossil recovery at the research site. Credit: Ferhat … Read more
More than 5,000 years ago, communities in Central Europe built massive stone tombs that still dominate parts of the landscape. These megalithic monuments from the Late Neolithic period have long been linked with ancestry, family identity, and tightly connected kin groups. A new genetic study suggests a more complicated picture. People buried together in these … Read more
Climate change is rapidly erasing evidence from one of the Arctic’s largest early modern whaling cemeteries, where archaeologists have uncovered signs of harsh labor, poor nutrition, and declining health among the men who worked Europe’s northern whale fisheries. The graves of three whalers buried on Svalbard in the 17th century. Credit: Loktu, L., & Brødholt, … Read more
A debate over the dating of prehistoric cave art has resurfaced after a French researcher challenged several widely publicized age estimates linked to some of the world’s oldest known paintings and hand stencils. The criticism focuses on uranium-thorium dating, often called U-Th dating, a method used to estimate the age of calcite layers formed over … Read more