It was in 1985 that the diver Henri Cosquer discovered, along the coast from Marseille, what has been called an “underwater Lascaux” after the famous cave network in the Dordogne. After several failed attempts, he managed to follow a narrow tunnel, 120ft below the surface of the sea, for almost 400ft and emerged in a […]
Archaeologists have discovered the ruins of a vast network of settlements hidden beneath the undergrowth of the Bolivian Amazon, in what has been described as the clearest example yet of the complex societies that thrived in a region once held to be pristine wilderness. The system of monumental centres, towns and villages spans hundreds, if […]
Chickens were originally tempted down from the trees and into domestication by rice, according to research. Chicken is one of the most popular foods in the world today, with more than one billion birds slaughtered annually in the UK alone. But researchers at the University of Exeter, the University of Oxford and Cardiff University say […]
The wreck of a Royal Navy warship which sank in 1682 while carrying the future king James Stuart has been identified off the coast of Norfolk. The wreckage of HMS Gloucester was actually found in 2007 by two brothers, Julian and Lincoln Barnwell, alongside their late father and two friends, following a four-year search which […]
Archaeologists working near the site of an iron age home near Cambridge were perplexed when they uncovered a vast trove of frog skeletons. Quite why more than 8,000 bones had been piled up and preserved is a prehistoric mystery. They were all recovered from a single 14-metre-long ditch, right next to the site of an […]
An Anglo-Saxon burial site containing the remains of more than 140 people interred with some of their most favoured objects, including jewellery, knives and even a personal grooming kit, has been discovered by archaeologists working on the HS2 route. The site, near Wendover, Buckinghamshire, contained a “stunning set of discoveries”, said the historian Dan Snow. […]
Amanda Claridge, who has died of cancer aged 72, wrote a much-praised guide to early Rome that remains a phenomenon. Created with the help of several acknowledged colleagues, it is, as one specialist reviewer said, “a triumph of synthesis and astute perception”. It is long: the first edition of Rome: An Oxford Archaeological Guide (1998) […]
It was an epic battle that has been commemorated in words, poetry and even a legendary Abba song, but 207 years to the day after troops clashed at Waterloo, a gruesome question remains: what happened to the dead? While tens of thousands of men and horses died at the site in modern-day Belgium, few remains […]
Scientists have unearthed an Inca-era tomb under a home in the heart of Peru’s capital, Lima, a burial believed to hold remains wrapped in cloth alongside ceramics and fine ornaments. The lead archeologist, Julio Abanto, told Reuters the 500-year-old tomb contained “multiple funerary bundles” tightly wrapped in cloth. He said those entombed were probably from […]
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 […]
