Archeaology

Marine archaeologists from the Black Sea Maritime Archaeology Project (Black Sea MAP) have discovered the 2,400-year-old intact shipwreck of an ancient Greek vessel on the floor of the Black Sea. The world’s oldest intact shipwreck discovered in the Black Sea. Image credit: Black Sea MAP / EEF Expeditions. During the …

An analysis of ancient food proteins preserved in ceramic vessels found at the key early farming site of Çatalhöyük in central Anatolia, in what is now Turkey, has revealed that this community processed mixes of cereals, pulses, dairy and meat products, and that particular vessels may have been reserved for …

Archaeologists in Greece have discovered what they think is the oldest written record of Homer’s poem Odyssey. The clay tablet contains 13 verses from the Odyssey’s 14th rhapsody. Image credit: Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports. The clay tablet, inscribed around 200-300 CE (Roman era), was unearthed near the Temple …

Archaeologists from the Universities of Copenhagen and Cambridge, and University College London have unearthed the charred remains of a flatbread baked by Natufian hunter-gatherers 14,400 years ago. The results, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, provide the earliest empirical evidence for the production of bread, and …

At the Gault archaeological site in central Texas, archaeologists have unearthed a projectile point technology never previously seen in North America, which they date to be 16,000-20,000 years old. The findings, published in the journal Science Advances, suggest humans occupied the North American continent prior to Clovis — considered the …

New research published in the journal Scientific Reports provides clear evidence that Neanderthals made fire by striking a piece of pyrite, the yellow mineral sometimes known as fool’s gold, against flint tools called bifaces. The occasional use of stone tools as ‘strike-a-lights’ was a technocultural feature shared among Neanderthals in …

A team of scientists in Australia has uncovered new evidence that suggests dingoes (Canis familiaris dingo) arrived on the continent around 3,500 years ago, more recently than previously thought. Balme et al present the results of direct dating of dingo bones from their oldest known archaeological context, Madura Cave on …

In one of the largest studies of its kind, an international team of researchers conducted organic residue analysis of almost 800 ceramic vessels from 46 Jomon culture archaeological sites, dated to between 13,000 and 6,000 BC, in Japan to identify their contents. The results, published in the Proceedings of the …

Archaeological excavations at the Acheulean site of Saffaqah near Dawadmi in central Saudi Arabia have found that Homo erectus, an extinct hominid species that lived between 1.9 million and 143,000 years ago, used ‘least-effort strategies’ for tool making and collecting resources. This is an artist’s reconstruction of Homo erectus. Image …

There are multiple theories as to what caused the collapse of the Classic Maya civilization, such as invasion, war, environmental degradation, etc. In the 1990s, however, researchers were able to piece together climate records for the period of the Maya collapse, and found that it correlated with an extreme drought. …