An Italian archaeologist has compared the impact of the AD79 eruption of Mount Vesuvius on Herculaneum – the ancient Roman beach town close to Pompeii – to the dropping of an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima during the second world war. Such was the heat of the pyroclastic surge produced by Vesuvius […]
“Just here would have been the great hall,” says Chris Ferguson to a Guardian reporter and a dozen indifferent sheep chewing grass in a stunning Northumberland valley. “Over there would have been the royal residence and behind that, a grandstand. We are on top of one of the most important sites of Anglo-Saxon history anywhere […]
Roman statues of a man, woman and child have been uncovered by archaeologists at an abandoned medieval church on the route of the HS2 high-speed railway. The discovery was “utterly astounding”, according to Rachel Wood, the lead archaeologist at the site in Stoke Mandeville, Buckinghamshire. “They’re really rare finds in the UK,” she said. “The […]
It is Britain’s biggest and most famous monastic ruin and one that conjures up bucolic images of peace, reflection and very little noise apart, perhaps, from the occasional waft of Gregorian chanting. In reality, archaeologists have revealed, Fountains Abbey near Ripon was as busy, noisy and industrialised as anywhere in 12th- and 13th-century Britain. The […]
An Australian mathematician has discovered what may be the oldest known example of applied geometry, on a 3,700-year-old Babylonian clay tablet. Known as Si.427, the tablet bears a field plan measuring the boundaries of some land. The tablet dates from the Old Babylonian period between 1900 and 1600 BCE and was discovered in the late […]
Wisdom, as Bob Marley put it, is better than gold. From next month however, the precious metal is central to a major new historical exhibition in Cambridge using loaned artefacts telling the story of an ancient civilization little known beyond Kazakhstan. Golden objects unearthed from ancient burial mounds built by the Saka warrior people of […]
Modern analysis of a 1,000-year-old grave in Finland challenges long-held beliefs about gender roles in ancient societies, and may suggest non-binary people were not only accepted but respected members of their communities, researchers have said. According to a peer-reviewed study in the European Journal of Archaeology, DNA analysis of remains in a late iron age […]
Archaeologists have discovered ancient DNA in the remains of a woman who died 7,200 years ago in Indonesia, a find that challenges what was previously known about migration of early humans. The remains, belonging to a teenager nicknamed Bessé, were discovered in the Leang Panninge cave on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. Initial excavations were […]
Golfers are forever trying to avoid everything from bunkers, the rough and water to other players’ putting lines. In Lincolnshire the hazard was almost an incredibly rare telephone box-sized early bronze age coffin. Historic England on Friday revealed details of a remarkable discovery as works were being carried out on a golf course pond in […]
University of Queensland’s Dr. Anthony Romilio has examined the ‘Meidum Geese,’ a painting from the Chapel of Itet at Meidum in Egypt. The Meidum Geese painting was found in 1871 in a tomb located near the Meidum Pyramid, which was built by the pharaoh Snefru (reign 2610-2590 BCE). The tomb belonged to the pharaoh’s son, the vizier Nefermaat, and […]
