ARCHAEOLOGY

I am excited to share with you that 2023 marks the 75th anniversary of ARCHAEOLOGY. Countless times over more than two decades, I have looked at the bookcase full of issues bound by year outside my office door. They are neatly lined up in chronologic

By the summer of 1917, during World War I, circumstances in Britain were extremely dire. Since 1914, the lives of 40,860 British merchant seamen, fishermen, and passengers had been lost, and 5,696 ships sunk, most by the dozens of German U-boats patr

While digging beneath an early third-century A.D. officers’ clubhouse at the site of the Roman fort of Vindolanda in northern England, archaeologists unearthed a rare copper alloy mouthpiece belonging to a cornu, or horn. The mouthpiece lay on the fl

A village founded around 8,200 years ago on the banks of the Danube River in Serbia’s Iron Gates Gorge has puzzled archaeologists ever since it was excavated in the 1960s. Called Lepenski Vir, the community seemed to combine traits of local hunter-ga

The Rites of Zhou, an administrative text dating to late in China’s Eastern Zhou Dynasty (771–256 B.C.), includes six recipes for creating bronze objects such as bells, mirrors, and swords based on the combination of two ingredients: Jin and Xi. Some

With a commanding view of southwestern Scotland’s Solway Firth, Caerlaverock Castle was the seat of the powerful Maxwell clan, which held the strategic coastal bastion during the late medieval Wars of Scottish Independence. The triangular fortress, w

Archaeologists have learned more about the earliest known female infant burial in Europe, which was discovered several years ago. The remains of a Mesolithic girl were deposited in a shallow pit in the Arma Veirana Cave in Liguria, in northwest Italy

Researchers from the collaborative IMPERO project, which traces the movement of people along the Ombrone River in Tuscany, have unearthed a rare Etruscan grave that had remained undisturbed for 2,400 years. The discovery was made near the site of Pod

The small hilltop village of Freixo, Portugal, is an unassuming place. A single-lane stone-paved road runs through the heart of the settlement, where a dozen or so buildings spread out from a quaint church square. It is hard to imagine that 1,800 yea

BULGARIA: Much like today’s college students, Roman legionaries had small fridges in their dorms to store leftovers. Excavation of a barracks in the frontier fortress of Novae exposed a small ceramic-tile food storage unit along with fragments of dis

ON A HOT DAY IN THE SUMMER OF 1986, as winds whipped through the low grasses of the Wyoming prairie, two men from the town of Douglas stared in disbelief at the ground below them. They saw an exceptionally large bone jutting out of the steep bank of

IN THE ANCIENT GREEK WORLD, alliances between cities were sometimes a matter of life and death. An army invading a small settlement might only be repelled by assistance from allies, even those a considerable distance away. A drought or breakout of in

THE SPRAWLING, VINE-TANGLED rainforests of today’s Yucatán Peninsula were once home to a densely settled patchwork of rival Maya kingdoms. Between A.D. 150 and 900, known as the Classic period, these dynasties jostled for power, which was seized thro

For thousands of years, the falcon played an important role in Egyptian mythology and religion. The soaring bird, which was closely associated with the sun, was seen as the protector of the sky and the pharaohs, and as a symbol of royal power and div

A long the banks of the Gerzeman River, which runs through a valley in northern Ethiopia’s Semien Mountains, sits the village of Semien Menata. Too small and remote to appear on most maps, it is reachable only by walking paths from nearby larger vill

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 once again raised global fears that conflict would see the targeting of important cultural heritage sites. Since then, news reports have showed pictures of damaged, and even burned, cultural institutions

To find a single coin in an archaeological excavation is not especially unusual, to find a hoard of coins is uncommon, and to find a hoard of gold coins is exceptionally rare. Thus, when archaeologist Yoav Lerer of the Israel Antiquities Authority (I