Ancient news stories

The ancient tomb holds the remains of five people, including those of a woman and toddler who were buried with an array of grave goods, such as a crescent moon-shaped pendant, bronze mirror and gold earrings.

Long before the Incas rose to power in Peru and began to celebrate their sun god, a little known civilization was building the earliest known astronomical observatory in the Americas.

One of the most interesting things going on in Australian archaeology is the idea that Aboriginal food production systems may have involved domestication of some plant species. Was there some level of food production going on in Aboriginal groups that goes well beyond hunter-gathering?

“They’ve lived for so long; just think what they’ve seen.” Forester Nick Baimbridge is gazing fondly at a majestic oak that has stood for more than a thousand years. On this wintry afternoon, birds sing from lichen-covered branches and a deer runs through the undergrowth.

One of the great mysteries of late medieval history is why did the Norse, who had established successful settlements in southern Greenland in 985, abandon them in the early 15th century?

Peruvian historian and US archaeologist say the pre-Columbian town was called Huayna Picchu by the Inca people.

Archaeologists in Scotland shed “genuine tears” upon discovering a stone covered with geometric carvings that the Picts, the Indigenous people of the region, designed about 1,500 years ago.

The sprawling ruins of Çatalhöyük – a vast, ancient human settlement in what we now know as Turkey – are much like a precursor to the modern metropolis of today. Yet, over the course of 9,000 years, times have certainly changed.

When the dinosaur-destroying asteroid collided with Earth 66 million years ago, massive amounts of sulfur — volumes more than were previously thought — were thrown high above land into the stratosphere, a new study finds.

A genomic study of Native peoples in the San Francisco Bay Area finds that eight present-day members of the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe share ancestry with 12 individuals who lived in the region several hundred to 2,000 years ago…the study challenges the notion that the Ohlone migrated to the area between A.D. 500-1,000…

While the Conservative party’s proposed dash for wind power is good news for the climate it could be bad news for archaeology, with rapid offshore windfarm development sealing off access to some of the best-preserved and most complete evidence of early human communities in the world.

Individual artifacts might be detectable with an advanced telescope that captures particles made in outer space.

A trio of researchers from Universidad de Cantabria and the University of Cambridge has found evidence suggesting that up to a quarter of all ancient handprints found on cave walls in Spain were made using children’s hands.

A Stone Age woman who lived 4,000 years ago is leaning on her walking stick and looking ahead as a spirited young boy bursts into a run, in a stunning life-size reconstruction now on display in Sweden.

Archaeologists discover burial sites “of remarkable scientific quality” below the fire-damaged cathedral

Imagine a cup of tea. Wrap a piece of string around the circumference of the cup, and measure the length of the string.