Newsdesk Archive
As a major new exhibition opens at the British Museum, Charlotte Higgins travels to the Nile Delta to meet the archaeologists uncovering the spellbinding secrets of ancient Naukratis
It is often assumed that women in the ancient world held little power or influence. However, women in ancient Egypt could become highly influential physicians, political advisors, scribes, or even rulers. But like women in many cultures throughout history and today, they had to fight to acquire and hold onto their rights.
Around 60 AD Queen Boudica of the Iceni (a Celtic clan) attacked and razed London, a Roman city of ancient Britain. Now, researchers have just announced that in response to Boudica and her warriors’ wild revolution, the terrified and shamed Romans built a fort with ditches 10 feet (3.05 meters) deep, walls 10 feet high, palisades, and a platform from which to repel attacks.
Researchers analyzing bronze daggers, swords, and axes found in bogs and graves at various places in Sweden over the years have made a surprising find. Some of the artifacts date as far back 3,600 years ago, and they say the objects were made with copper from southern Europe, Turkey, and Cyprus.
One of the caverns in the 75-metre long cave is full of spherical deposits of minerals known as cave clouds that form on rocks in a similar way to stalactites and stalagmites.
A new study claims that humans have inhabited Southern Arabia for 10,000 years longer than traditionally thought.
Previously, it was believed that humans did not settle in significant numbers in Arabia until the development of agriculture, between 11,000 and 10,000 years ago.
A doctoral student at the University of Pennsylvania has identified a new species of fossil dog. The specimen, found in Maryland, would have roamed the coast of eastern North America approximately 12 million years ago, at a time when massive sharks like megalodon swam in the oceans.
Curators at a British museum have discovered what they claim is the youngest mummy from ancient Egypt — a mummified fetus believed to be between 16 and 18 weeks old.
For more than 2,500 years, the tiny body has been resting in a small wooden coffin, the arms crossed over its chest.
The scan results lie in the eye of the beholder if recent reports are to be believed – and there have been some pretty keen eyes looking at the scans taken inside King Tut’s burial chamber, all of them searching for evidence of plastered over doorways leading to hidden chambers. Had Nefertiti’s tomb finally been found? Was the chamber full of priceless funerary objects, as the Boy King’s had been? High intrigue indeed for the world of Egyptology.
It may not have been an easy job but the royal butlers of ancient Egypt's powerful pharaohs certainly earned an impressive burial and were laid to rest in style.
Four tombs belonging to the royal butlers of Queen Hatshepsut and King Ramses II have opened to the public.
Scientists from the University of Texas at Arlington used planetarium software to recreate the night sky of ancient Greece, the better to peg the date when lyric poet Sappho penned one of her most famous verses. They describe their findings in a new paper in the Journal of Astronomical History and Heritage.
An archaeologist studying musical horns from iron-age Ireland has found musical traditions, thought to be long dead, are alive and well in south India.
The realisation that modern Indian horns are almost identical to many iron-age European artefacts reveals a rich cultural link between the two regions 2,000 years ago, said PhD student Billy Ó Foghlú, from The Australian National University (ANU).
For the first couple of centuries of European occupation of Australia the history of its Indigenous people, as written by white fellas, drew heavily on adjectives like ‘primitive’.
As both a white fella and an anthropologist devoting much of my time to writing about human origins, I can only try to imagine the devastating effects this has had on people’s lives.
New work has found material in rock formations that dates back to shortly after Earth formed. The discovery will help scientists understand the processes that shaped our planet's formative period and its internal dynamics over the last 4.5 billion years.
Alt: Volcanoes Spit Out 4.5-Billion-Year-Old Pieces of Earth
Mount Ruapehu on New Zealand's north island is showing signs that it's about to erupt, scientists have warned. The snow-capped volcano was used as one of the backdrops for those punishing Mount Doom scenes in Peter Jackson's Return of the King, and, if seismic activity is anything to go by, the Dark Lord Sauron has been pretty restless of late.
Related: Nobody Saw This Volcano Erupt … Except NASA's Satellites
An odd phenomenon may explain why the Southeastern United States has experienced recent earthquakes, even though the region sits snugly in the middle of a tectonic plate and not at the edges, where all the ground-shaking action usually happens.
International project will use IVF and stem-cell technology in an attempt to resurrect the species
Related: Arctic Bird Shrinking as Planet Warms
Doomsday was at the forefront of many people's minds in the 15th-century.
Various texts from that period describe how doomsday could play out.
But now, a manuscript has been uncovered that illustrates the end of days in a very different way - using maps.
A stone knife, mastodon bones and fossilized dung found in an underwater sinkhole show that humans lived in north Florida about 14,500 years ago, according to new research that suggests the colonization of the Americas was far more complex than originally believed.
A team of scientists from Florida Atlantic University has uncovered the 14,000-year-old bones of Bison antiquus — a large-horned, extinct relative of the modern bison — at the Old Vero Man site in Florida.
A site on the Scottish island of Bute has been identified as a Viking gathering place known as a “thing” in Old Norse, used to make political decisions, promulgate laws and settle disputes.
The mysterious mount, known as Cnoc An Rath, has been known to archaeologists since at least the 1950s.
On reflection, the canteen was probably not the best place to loudly conduct an interview about poo and parasitic worms. The conversation was not intended to spill into the lunch hour, but Dr Andrew ‘Bone’ Jones, an enthusiastic paleoscatologist for over 30 years, had plenty to say.
Scientists have found a microbe that does something textbooks say is impossible: It's a complex cell that survives without mitochondria.
Mitochondria are the powerhouses inside eukaryotic cells, the type of complicated cell that makes up people, other critters and plants and fungi. All eukaryotic cells contain a nucleus and little organelles — and one of the most famous was the mitochondrion.
As an earthworm biologist and soil scientist, Anne Zangerlé has spent most of her research career looking down.
Trekking through the steamy tropical wetlands of Colombia and Venezuela in search of strange, six-foot-tall (two-meter-tall) towers called surales, however, forced her to look up.
Following another's gaze is a hallmark of human learning and socialization from infancy to old age. Humans change how they follow gazes throughout life, and disruptions in the ability to follow someone's gaze are warning signs of autism and other social deficits.
As part of a study facilitated through the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International, a researcher from The University of Western Australia has documented the first detailed evidence of homosexual behaviour in female gorillas.
Some adults learn a second language better than others, and their secret may involve the rhythms of activity in their brains.
New findings demonstrate that a five-minute measurement of resting-state brain activity predicted how quickly adults learned a second language.
Stories can change how we think about the world, about the people they describe, and even ourselves. According to new research, they also influence our attitude to the storyteller. An article published in the journal Personal Relationships suggests that people portrayed as stronger storytellers are considered as higher status than those that aren’t – and this status can make them more romantically attractive, at least in the eyes of women. Cue editing of Tinder bios across the globe.
Long-term members of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) report little or no craving for alcohol, but why this happens remains poorly understood.
The concept began when a small tent community was established some four years ago at the church. When, in 2015, Reverend Jeff Carr conceived the idea, crowdfunding more than $60,000 to construct and place several tiny homes at the campsite, Pickering and the other church members gladly accepted the units.
Related: Colorado city will use $1.5 million cannabis tax revenues to help the homeless
A new study from King's College London offers clues as to why chronic pain can persist, even when the injury that caused it has gone. Although still in its infancy, this research could explain how small and seemingly innocuous injuries leave molecular 'footprints' which add up to more lasting damage, and ultimately chronic pain.
Earlier this week, over a hundred scientists, lawyers, and entrepreneurs gathered to discuss the radical possibility of creating a synthetic human genome. Strangely, journalists were not invited, and attendees were told to keep a tight lip. Which, given the weighty subject matter, is obvious cause for concern.
The government is expected to ban the preventative use of antibiotics in animals to try and tackle the growing problem of drug resistance.
Next week, Lord O’Neill will publish the findings of his second government review into antibiotic resistance, which is likely to set targets for on how much medication farmers and vets can give to livestock.
Finding a cure for viruses like Ebola, Zika, or even the flu is a challenging task. Viruses are vastly different from one another, and even the same strain of a virus can mutate and change--that's why doctors give out a different flu vaccine each year. But a group of researchers at IBM and the Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology in Singapore sought to understand what makes all viruses alike.
Beekeepers across the United States lost 44 percent of their honey bee colonies during the year spanning April 2015 to April 2016, according to the latest preliminary results of an annual nationwide survey. Rates of both winter loss and summer loss—and consequently, total annual losses—worsened compared with last year. This marks the second consecutive survey year that summer loss rates rivaled winter loss rates.
More than 3,000 years ago, the flourishing Bronze Age civilizations of the eastern Mediterranean suddenly met their downfall.
The Trojan War erupted as one of the final events culminating an era of chaos which one archaeologist has named 'World War Zero', plunging the region into a Dark Age soon after.
Related: The Calusa People: A Lost Tribe of Florida that Early Explorers Wrote Home About
The world of archaeology was electrified last year by the news that Tutankhamun’s tomb could contain hidden chambers possibly containing the remains and riches of Queen Nefertiti. It was a story that seemed to have everything: false walls, buried treasure, at least one mummy – and new hope for Egypt’s ailing tourist industry.
One answer: it makes them feel like part of a community
Wikipedia is a fascinating 21st century innovation. With over 38 million articles in more than 250 different languages, it is an undeniably useful global asset. This free-access, free-content, user-edited Internet encyclopedia is so culturally influential that the Wikipedia page for any given topic is usually one of the first search results on Google.
The consequences of not getting enough sleep are evident to all of us—and yet we’re constantly staying up later than what our internal biological clocks are telling us. A new study shows the elusive nature of what’s to blame.
Disrupting brain activity in sleeping mice, specifically during the rapid eye movement (REM) phase, can stop the animals remembering things they learned that day, a study suggests.
It is the clearest evidence to date that REM sleep is critical for memory.
A researcher says it should be considered a real problem, but not everyone agrees
For most people, daydreams are a brief but pleasant escape from reality. And, while it’s tempting to spend entire meetings or lectures in more appealing universes of our own creation, most of us can also rein in our imaginations when we have to.
While much has been made about the dangers of texting and driving, less attention has been focused on the age-old distractions of being absent minded or upset while driving. A team of researchers from the University of Houston (UH) and the Texas A&M Transportation Institute (TTI) focused on all three of these important factors.
Never make a decision when you are hungry. The hormone ghrelin - that is released before meals and known to increase appetite - has a negative effect on both decision making and impulse control, report scientists.
Packing on a few pounds may not be such a bad thing.
As a group, overweight people are living the longest nowadays, suggests an almost four-decade study in Denmark published May 10 in JAMA. And obese people seem to be at no higher risk of dying than those of normal weight.
Researchers report that global elimination of HIV is possible, if countries use the strategy planned by the World Health Organization and the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS. This 'treatment as prevention' approach has brought the HIV epidemic in Denmark to the brink of elimination, the authors said after analyzing two decades of data. However, this approach will only work in other countries if almost all patients adhere to their treatment regimens.
Researchers have created a programmable DNA thermometer that is 20,000x smaller than a human hair. One of the main advantages of using DNA to engineer molecular thermometers is that DNA chemistry is relatively simple and programmable. So, the research team has created various DNA structures that can fold and unfold at specifically defined temperatures.
Scientists have devised a way to build a "quantum metamaterial"—an engineered material with exotic properties not found in nature—using ultracold atoms trapped in an artificial crystal composed of light. The theoretical work represents a step toward manipulating atoms to transmit information, perform complex simulations or function as powerful sensors.
A strange new behavior of water molecules has been observed inside crystals of beryl, a type of emerald, caused by bizarre quantum-mechanical effects that let the water molecules face six different directions at the same time.
Related: Dr. Gerald H. Pollack | The Fourth Phase of Water (YouTube interview)
For the past two years, a mysterious wasting disease has devastated starfish living along the West Coast, turning countless individual animals into goo. But now, a record number of surviving starfish babies is giving some researchers reason for cautious optimism.
Seven Native American tribes in Oklahoma will provide habitat and food on their lands for monarch butterflies, whose numbers have plummeted in recent years due to troubles along their lengthy migration route.
The Nu River, spilling through a scenic gorge sometimes compared to the Grand Canyon, could become a national park, as officials appear to back away from a proposal for multiple dams.
There is a wealth of evidence, collected over the past few decades, that suggests liquid water was abundant in the early history of Mars – one of our nearest and most studied neighbours. However, the size, evolution and duration of standing bodies of water, such as lakes, on Mars' surface are still a matter of great debate. A recent study, using data from several spacecraft operating at Mars, paints a detailed picture of the rise and fall of standing bodies of water in a region of Mars which once hosted one of its largest lakes.
In a universe full of planets, 2007 OR10 is something special. It’s big, just slightly smaller than the size of Pluto. And it’s close, within our very own solar system. So how did it still manage to take astronomers by surprise?
A small water jet on Enceladus, an icy moon of Saturn, spews its fiercest eruptions when the moon is farthest from the planet, a new study suggests, but the overall gas output doesn’t increase much during that time. The study points to a mystery in Enceladus’ plumbing.
Every now and then, a distant star called KIC 8462852 dims by as much as 20 percent. That's huge. Even a passing planet as big as Jupiter would only block about 1 percent of the star's light.
Alt: Alien Megastructure? Dimming Star May Have Less Exotic Explanation
NASA's chief scientist recently announced that "…we're going to have strong indications of life beyond Earth within a decade, and I think we're going to have definitive evidence within 20 to 30 years." Such a discovery would clearly rank as one of the most important in human history and immediately open up a series of complex social and moral questions.
Explosive storms spawned by interactions between the magnetic fields of Earth and the sun can endanger satellites, spacecraft and astronauts in space, as well as power grids on Earth. Now, a fleet of NASA spacecraft has for the first time directly witnessed the mysterious way in which these magnetic explosions occur.
Europe's Swarm mission is providing an unprecedented view of Earth's turbulent magnetic field, scientists say.
The three-satellite constellation is now routinely mapping its convulsions, allowing researchers to probe the mechanisms that drive the "invisible shield" in remarkable new detail.
Geologists tell a pretty broad-brush narrative of Earth’s 4.5 billion-year history. For its first half-billion years, the newly formed planet was a seething ball of lava constantly pelted by giant space rocks, including a Mars-sized object that sheared off a chunk that became the moon. Things calmed down when the Late Heavy Bombardment tapered off some 3.8 billion years ago, but volcanoes ensured Earth’s atmosphere remained a toxic stew of gases with almost no oxygen to speak of.
American history has just been slightly rewritten. Previously, experts had believed that the Native Americans of central Massachusetts spoke a single language, Loup (pronounced “Lou,” literally meaning “wolf”). But new research shows that they spoke at least five different languages.
A place where Vikings settled disputes, made key political decisions, and decided laws has been unearthed on the Isle of Bute, in Scotland.
The history of the Isle of Bute is connected with the Norse King Ketill Flatnose, whose descendants were the earliest settlers of Iceland. The site which was recently discovered has been identified as the location of a Norse parliament, known as a ''thing''.
Here’s how he discovered the lost city: After studying 22 different constellations, Gadoury noticed that they neatly corresponded to the locations of 117 Mayan cities located in Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. When looking at a 23rd constellation, he was able to match two stars to known cities—but a third star remained unmatched. Using transparent overlays, Gadoury pinpointed a location deep in the thick jungles of the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico.
Alt: Experts: Teen's 'Discovery' of Maya City is a Very Western Mistake
Alt: Star pupil finds lost Mayan city by studying ancient charts of the night sky from his bedroom
Alt: 'Lost Mayan city' found by teen may just be a marijuana field
Studying photographs of animals posted online by the general public has proven to be as valuable as traditional fieldwork in research on the locations of species that have evolved with different colours.
Artisanal interpretation of ceramics from the Bronze Age shows that a nine-year-old child could be a highly skilled artisan. This was one of the discoveries presented in a new thesis from Lund University in Sweden. The thesis explores how an artisanal perspective can contribute to archaeology by providing new insights into archaeological artefacts.
A recent expedition to Antarctica has returned with a cache of fossils and data gathered over the course of almost two months of work on the frozen continent.
Before you ask what they found, however, let’s get to the real question: What were they even doing there in the first place?
Neanderthals in Europe showed signs of nutritional stress during periods of extreme cold, suggesting climate change may have contributed to their demise around 40,000 years ago.
Related: The 2 million year melee—neanderthals vs. humans
A tiny stone flake from north-western Australia is a remnant of the earliest known axe with a handle, archaeologists have claimed.
The fingernail-sized sliver of basalt is ground smooth at one end and appears to date from 44 to 49,000 years ago.
Bronze tools found in Sweden dating from 3,600 years ago were made using copper from the Mediterranean, archaeologists have shown. They now also believe that rock carvings of ships found in Bohuslän, Sweden were visual documentation of trade between ancient Scandinavia and the Mediterranean.
Ten years ago, when metal detectorists were out near the village of Stixwould in Lincolnshire, UK, they turned up bronze fragments.
These turned out to be the remnants of not just one precious object, but many: swords, ferrules, and one spearhead after another.
An archaeologist says it wouldn’t surprise him if the mysterious ruins spotted by a diver dated back to the time of the Roman empire — and might even be the ancient city of Rhapta.
Radar scans conducted by a National Geographic team have found that there are no hidden chambers in Tutankhamun's tomb, disproving a claim that the secret grave of Queen Nefertiti lurks behind the walls.
Alt: In Egypt, Debate Rages Over Scans of King Tut's Tomb
More than 3,000 years ago, an ancient Egyptian woman tattooed her body with dozens of symbols — including lotus blossoms, cows and divine eyes — that may have been linked to her religious status or her ritual practice.
The images show scientists as they carefully peel away the cocoon - including birch bark and copper - which led to the mummification of a boy aged six or seven who lived close near to the modern town of Salekhard. The lower part of his face, including his teeth, become suddenly visible for the first time in around eight centuries.
We often attribute our key characteristics to one of our parents: “I get my perfectionism from my dad and my impatience from my mom.” In most such cases, though, we do not really know what combination of nature and nurture led to the family resemblance. Now a study has found that the structure of emotion-regulating regions in the brain may be passed down from mother to daughter, which could have implications for mood-disorder risk.
Google and Amazon were quick to put drones to use delivering orders.
But new research suggests delivery is just one small way drones are going to replace humans. The tiny airborne vessels will soon clean windows on skyscrapers, verify insurance claims and spray pesticide on crops.
It was over almost before it began. Hyperloop One's first public open-air test just happened out in the Nevada desert, and if you blinked you may have missed it. A metal sled accelerated from zero to 116 mph in 1.1 seconds, or about 2.4 Gs of force. It traveled little more than 100 meters, then stopped, kicking up a cloud of sand in the process.
Related: Hyperloop Transportation says it will use a ‘cheaper, safer’ form of magnetic levitation
College of Computing Professor Ashok Goel teaches Knowledge Based Artificial Intelligence (KBAI) every semester. It's a core requirement of Georgia Tech's online master's of science in computer science program. And every time he offers it, Goel estimates, his 300 or so students post roughly 10,000 messages in the online forums -- far too many inquiries for him and his eight teaching assistants (TA) to handle.
Imagine if we could enhance good memories for those suffering from dementia and wipe away bad memories for people with post-traumatic stress disorder.
Researchers have taken a step toward the possibility of tuning the strength of memory by manipulating one of the brain’s natural mechanisms for signaling involved in memory, a neurotransmitter called acetylcholine.
Scientists claim to have developed an invisible elastic film that can be applied to the skin to reduce the appearance of wrinkles and eye bags.
Once applied, the formula dries to form a film that "mimics the properties of youthful skin", Nature Materials reports after a series of small trials.
One group of lady salamanders don't just survive without males—they thrive.
Some Ambystoma salamanders of northeastern North America don't need males to reproduce, instead cloning themselves generation after generation.
A new book explores the physical and chemical reasons behind incredible visual structures in the living and non-living world
The curl of a chameleon's tail, the spiral of a pinecone's scales and the ripples created by wind moving grains of sand all have the power to catch the eye and intrigue the mind. When Charles Darwin first proposed the theory of evolution by natural selection in 1859, it encouraged science enthusiasts to find reasons for the natural patterns seen in beasts of the land, birds of the air and creatures of the sea. The peacock's plumage, the spots of a shark must all serve some adaptive purpose, they eagerly surmised.
Few things seem more ephemeral than shooting stars streaking across the sky.
Yet the scorched remains of 60 micrometeorites have survived 2.7 billion years in the limestone Tumbiana Formation of Western Australia. They are the oldest space rocks ever discovered on Earth.
A specially-equipped 747 has detected atomic oxygen in Mars’ upper atmosphere, NASA reported, marking the first time that the space agency has made that observation in four decades.
The ground isn’t as solid as we'd like to think. It’s split into interlocking puzzle pieces called tectonic plates that ride on top of an underlying layer of rock known as the mantle. Where those plates collide, it produces fault lines and volcanoes, so understanding the movement of the mantle could someday lead to advances in our ability to predict earthquakes and eruptions.
An international team of astrophysicists, including Professor Phil Charles from the University of Southampton, have detected an intense wind from one of the closest known black holes to the Earth.
Nasa's Kepler telescope has discovered more than 100 Earth-sized planets orbiting alien stars.
It has also detected nine small planets within so-called habitable zones, where conditions are favourable for liquid water - and potentially life.
Since the beginning of human history, people have understood that the Sun is a central part of life as we know it. It’s importance to countless mythological and cosmological systems across the globe is a testament to this. But as our understand of it matured, we came to learn that the Sun was here long before us, and will be here long after we’re gone.
The idea that the young Earth had a thicker atmosphere turns out to be wrong. New research from the University of Washington uses bubbles trapped in 2.7 billion-year-old rocks to show that air at that time exerted at most half the pressure of today's atmosphere.
Between a rock and a hard place? A last-ditch approach to slow ocean acidification may involve spreading a mineral along coastlines to suck acidifying protons out of the water.
When considering human impacts on earth systems, disturbance to the carbon cycle grabs the headlines. But another critically important earth process, the nitrogen cycle, has also seen major disruption from human activity.
It’s an invisible wall. For 50 years, physicists have puzzled over why some radar signals sent skywards bounce back 150 kilometres above the ground. It now seems it is down to vibrating electrons.
The bounceback was first seen in 1962, shortly after atmospheric scientists installed a large radar system outside Lima in Peru.
Chances are you’ve seen the gorgeous patterns that sound waves produce when sand is sprinkled on a vibrating metal plate. Now French physicists have produced inverse versions of these patterns using microbeads suspended in a liquid. They described their work in a recent paper in Physical Review Letters.
The United States leads the world in the number of electric vehicles on the road, but the count is still tiny: about 350,000. That's less than 1 percent of all passenger cars and trucks in the country. Recent market research suggests that number will climb steadily over the next several decades. But will it climb fast enough?
Related: Oil firms have 10 years to change strategy or face 'short, brutish end'
Going, going, gone. Five of the Solomon Islands have been swallowed whole by rising sea levels, offering a glimpse into the future of other low-lying nations.
Sea levels in the Solomon Islands have been climbing by 7 millimetres per year over the last two decades, due to a double whammy of global warming and stronger trade winds.
Sinking land and rising water are destroying seaside sites that hold the key to understanding vanished cultures
For decades, Louisiana’s coast has been sinking into the Gulf of Mexico. The rate at which it has been disappearing has only been amplified by modern industrial channelization, the effects of saltwater intrusion, and, in what may prove to be its greatest accelerant, the rising of the sea itself.
The Palace Museum in Beijing, best known as the Forbidden City, recently confirmed the discovery of porcelain pieces and broken tiles dating back to the Yuan Dynasty established by Kublai Khaan in the thirteenth century, thus solving one of China’s greatest mysteries; the location of the Yuan Palace. As it turns out, it was right under the three that followed it – in the center of the royal residence.
A study of one of the world's most important domesticated animals - the dromedary camel - has revealed how its genetic diversity has been shaped by ancient trade routes.
Known as el Mayab before the arrival of the Spaniards, the Yucatán in Mexico was populated by the ancient Maya and perhaps best known for great ancient Maya cities such as Chichén Itzá and Uxmal. But it was not a naturally friendly place for farming. Its shallow soil composition and expansive natural foundation of karstic limestone bedrock made it, to say the least, a challenging environment for gardening and agricultural production.
Almost three decades after Robert Bauval made headlines - and generated plenty of discussion and debate - with his controversial 'Orion Correlation Theory' (the suggestion that pyramids in Egypt were sited in particular locations in order to resemble the stars in the constellation of Orion), a new story is hitting headlines around the world today claiming that a 'lost' Maya city has been located in the Americas, through the matching of star locations to the placement of ancient cities.
Sechin Bajo is an archaeological site in Peru. This site is situated in the Casma Valley of Ancash, a region on the northwestern coast of that South American country. This site is believed to have served as the capital of a pre-Incan culture, and was occupied roughly between 1800 and 1900 BC.