A sprawling 3,500-year-old fortress offers tantalizing clues about a culture that once dotted the southern Caucasus mountains with similar walled communities. Archaeologists recently used a drone to map a sprawling 3,500-year-old fortress in the Caucasus Mountains of southern Georgia. The detailed aerial map offers some tantalizing clues about the ancient culture whose people built hundreds […]
More than 4,000 years ago, nearly 40 people died extremely violent deaths in what is now England, with a modern analysis of their bones revealing scalping, tongue removal, decapitation, defleshing, evisceration and cannibalism. “It paints a considerably darker picture of the period than many would have expected,” Rick Schultingan archaeologist at the University of Oxford, […]
Archeological discoveries can reveal the brighter sides of humanity. Collecting tchotchkes, our ancestors potentially comforting or sheltering one another in the face of a cataclysmic disaster, or building owl toys for children show how caring we can be as a species. However, other findings can reveal our darker side. That more bleak part of human […]
A metal detectorist has unearthed a long, bronze sword that was bent into an S shape during an ancient ritual in what is now Denmark. The sword and other artifacts — which were found in a bog near Veksø, northwest of Copenhagen — date to about 2,500 years ago, during the late Bronze Age. They […]
RESEARCH BRIEFINGS 27 November 2024 At the interface between Asia and Europe, the Caucasus region was a melting pot during the Bronze Age and the origin of the earliest steppe pastoralist societies. Ancient-DNA analyses reveal how Neolithic ways of life spread through diverse populations and how mountain–steppe interactions transformed the genetic and cultural landscapes of […]
Schematic diagram of fabric residue and weave structure. Credit: Scientific Reports (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-024-78687-7 China National Silk Museum and the Sichuan Research Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology have confirmed the use of silk in sacrificial rituals by a Bronze Age civilization in the Yangtze River Basin. The findings provide direct archaeological evidence that silk […]
Giemsch, L. & Hansen, S. (eds) The Caucasus: Bridge Between the Urban Centres in Mesopotamia and the Pontic Steppes in the 4th and 3th millennium BC. Proceedings of the Caucasus Conference Frankfurt 2018 (Schnell & Steiner, 2021). Scott, A. et al. Emergence and intensification of dairying in the Caucasus and Eurasian steppes. Nat. Ecol. Evol. […]
A small 4,400-year-old town in the Khaybar Oasis of Saudi Arabia hints that Bronze Age people in this region were slow to urbanize, unlike their contemporaries in Egypt and Mesopotamia, a new study finds. Archaeologists discovered the site near the city of Al-‘Ula in the Hejaz region of western Saudi Arabia and called it “al-Natah.” […]
