Archaeology in the news

Thermal bath complex is latest discovery among ruins of Italian city destroyed by Vesuvius eruption in AD79A large and sophisticated thermal bath complex that was believed to have been used by its owner to woo well-heeled guests has been discovered among the ruins of ancient Pompeii.The baths were found during excavations of a home on Via di Nola in Regio IX, a wealthy district of the city before it was destroyed by the AD79 eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Continue reading…

The mutatio, on Ermin Street linking Silchester and Gloucester, would have provided a place for travellers to rest or change horsesAt Gloucester services on the M5, travellers are resting and refuelling, taking a break from the demands of the road.Just a few miles east, scores of archaeologists are completing a two-year project that has unearthed a forerunner of the site, a 2,000-year-old Roman take on the service station. Continue reading…

Study highlights role of women in Celtic Britain and challenges assumptions most societies were patrilocalFrom Neanderthals to royal courts, history seems awash with women upping sticks to join men’s families, but researchers have found that the tables were turned in Britain’s Celtic communities.Researchers studying DNA from iron age individuals in Britain have found evidence that men moved to join their wives’ families – a practice known as matrilocality. Continue reading…

Hay Wood, Derbyshire: I’d come here for one thing, and found another – a new fallen tree, with nuggetty fungus like nightmarish toenailsOn Boxing Day, deep in the tangled woods above Grindleford, the metal button fastening my trousers pinged off. Sifting the leaf litter, I stowed the button in my jacket pocket, where it promptly escaped again, through a hole I’d forgotten was there. The loss nagged me, so in the new year back I went. I know these woods well and was sure to recognise the distinctive tree I’d been standing under when nature took its course.Yet this was not the same place of 10 days earlier. It was much colder, the sky pregnant with snow, leaf litter glittering with frost. The tip of my walking stick shattered the icy skin of a hollow in the earth, its fragments rattling into the void beneath. These new woods seemed full of lost or fractured things. Every fourth tree seemed broken in some way, or else fallen. Long ago, this hillside was pasture, whose failing walls still thread the forest. A stone fingerpost offered guidance for long-dead generations who walked this path for business, not pleasure. Now it was surrounded by a knot of red deer that ducked away downhill, a youngster stopping briefly to gaze at me, lowering its neck to peer through some branches as its exhalations steamed in the frigid air. Continue reading…

Explorer was buried in home town after his remains were found during construction of UK’s high-speed railFollow our Australia news live blog for latest updatesGet our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcastThe small sheet of lead, which once adorned a coffin that was lost under London for 200 years, now sits in a slick new building in central Adelaide.“Capt. Matthew Flinders RN, died 19 July 1814, aged 40 years,” it says, the ornate writing legible despite signs of age.Sign up for Guardian Australia’s breaking news email Continue reading…

The sand swirled, and cleared. A flash of gold appeared and my heart leaptI was 10 when I went on my first archaeological dig. I’d been exploring a clay pit near Bletchley Park, Milton Keynes, where I grew up, and found the fossilised jawbone of a small ichthyosaurus, complete with tiny teeth. I took it to a local geologist – he was amazed at what I’d found and put me in touch with an archaeologist in Buckinghamshire, who took me to a dig site. I found a bucket full of historical items in a spoil heap. From then on, I went to dig sites every weekend.I like to work with my hands, so pursued a career as a brick- and stonemason; I even taught the trade in a college for three years. In 1984, I was working as a builder when a former student invited me to try scuba diving. It was exciting being able to see underwater. Over the next two years, I trained for a diving qualification and became close with some guys in a scuba club. Continue reading…

A dig near Bicester has uncovered spectacular tracks in what was once a Jurassic lagoonThere are many reasons to be excited about the dinosaur footprints whose discovery was announced last week. They will bring new understandings to the Jurassic world of more than 150m years ago. Their recording united quarry workers and more than a hundred scientists, students and other volunteers in a frenzied week of fieldwork. But there was something else in the images of long, winding trails across a stony plain in the Oxfordshire countryside. It looked to me as if great beasts had lumbered by, not in the distant past but just a few days before. I will never be able to rid my mind of the thought that they are alive now, out there somewhere. Who knew the Cotswolds were home to dinosaurs?Smiths Bletchington’s limestone quarries have been turning up footprints for decades. The best came in 1997, at what is now a site of special scientific interest, in Ardley quarry: more than 40 sets, with trackways up to 180 metres long. The Ardley finds, made before digital recording, are hard to study today. But when the Oxford University Museum of Natural History heard of a nearby discovery late in 2023, it had high hopes. New technologies – including photogrammetry and drone photography – meant that anything of significance could be captured in detail, shared with scientists around the world and saved for posterity, whatever the fate of the actual prints. Palaeontologists from the museum and the universities of Birmingham and Oxford soon confirmed that Dewars Farm Quarry, a couple of miles from Ardley, was an important site. They mounted a dig last summer. Continue reading…

Members of the public are helping to sustain digs across the country, even as volunteering declinesThey were moving forward in a line across the 10 sq metre trench, volunteer excavators elbow to elbow with academics, and Joe Fitzpatrick was at the far edge.He was digging around the hearth of a building, about 60cm (2ft) below surface level, when he hit the earth twice with his mattock and out it popped – a rare bronze spear butt, a metal fitting placed over the end of a wooden shaft to counterbalance the spear head. Covered in Pictish inscriptions, it had remained buried for more than one and a half millennia, and was one of the most groundbreaking archaeological discoveries of 2024 in Scotland. Continue reading…

Using cutting-edge methods, Alexandra Morton-Hayward is cracking the secrets of ancient brains – even as hers betrays her. By Kermit Pattison Continue reading…

Researchers have unearthed 200 large dinosaur footprints in Oxfordshire, believed to be the biggest site of its kind in the UK. They are from two types of dinosaurs, thought to be the herbivorous cetiosaurus and the carnivorous megalosaurus. The longest trackways are 150 metres in length, and only part of the quarry has been excavatedTrackways of large dinosaur footprints found in Oxfordshire quarry Continue reading…

The force recently uncovered a clandestine dig in the middle of NaplesLooking towards the semicircular apse with a frescoed image of a partially identifiable Christ on a throne staring back at them, the archaeologists crouching in the small space deep beneath a residential building in Naples were left speechless. They were amid the remains of an 11th-century church.The archaeologists, however, could not take the credit: the historic jewel, which had just been seized by police, was dug up by tombaroli, or tomb-raiders, illicit gangs who for decades have been plundering Italian cultural sites, in turn fuelling the global market for stolen art and antiquities. Continue reading…

Genetic analysis of Roman soldier or gladiator buried in York reveals 25% of his ancestry came from ScandinaviaPeople with Scandinavian ancestry were in Britain long before the Anglo-Saxons or the Vikings turned up, researchers have found after studying the genetics of an ancient Roman buried in York.The arrival of the Anglo-Saxons brought an influx of Scandinavians to ancient Britain in the fifth century, with the first major Viking raid – which targeted the monastery at Lindisfarne – occurring in AD793. Continue reading…

Delicate 650-year-old pages to be preserved are some of the island’s most important historical textsWork has begun to conserve and digitise one of the oldest paper documents still in existence on the island of Ireland.The ecclesiastical register, which dates back to the medieval period, is about 650 years old. It belonged to the former archbishop of Armagh Milo Sweteman. Continue reading…

Exclusive: Sword is among striking objects unearthed from Anglo-Saxon cemetery near CanterburyA spectacular sixth-century sword has been unearthed from an Anglo-Saxon cemetery in rural Kent, to the astonishment of archaeologists.The weapon is in an exceptional state of preservation and is being likened to the sword found at Sutton Hoo, the Anglo-Saxon burial in Suffolk. Continue reading…

Aldro, North Yorkshire: The ‘major lunar standstill’ only happens every 18.6 years, and once upon a time it would have been an unavoidable eventThere’s a place a short drive from home where I’m often drawn to watch the sunset. It’s been special for thousands of years – a high point on a pre-Roman trade route and a gateway to the chalklands of the Yorkshire wolds. The area is thick with prehistoric archaeology, including mounds, cursuses and earthworks.Here at Aldro, the banks of a vast bronze age ditched enclosure would once have stood out white against both land and sky. It is a truly spectacular vantage point, with unobscured views west and north across the vales of York and Pickering to the dales and the moors. From here it is also possible to see almost all the setting stations of the sun as they track north in summer, south in winter, falling fully west only during the spring and autumn equinoxes. Continue reading…

Previously unseen artefacts show invading forces included communities of men, women, children, craftworkers and merchantsDozens of sites linked to the Viking great army as it ravaged Anglo-Saxon England more than 1,000 years ago have been discovered. Leading experts from York University have traced the archaeological footprint of the Scandinavian invaders, identifying previously unknown sites and routes.The study, conducted by Dawn M Hadley, professor of medieval archaeology, and fellow archaeology professor Julian D Richards, found that the significance of many of the ingots, gaming pieces and other artefacts unearthed by metal detectorists over the years had been overlooked until now. They also discovered about 50 new sites that they believe were visited by the Viking great army. Continue reading…

The altar stone, which we now know is from Scotland, may have been a gift or marker of political allianceFive thousand years after the first monument was created at Stonehenge, it continues to give up dramatic new secrets – such as the “jaw-dropping” revelation earlier this year that its central stone had been transported more than 700km to Salisbury plain from the very north of Scotland.While it had been known for more than a century that the huge sarsens for which Stonehenge is best known come from more than 12 miles (20km) away and its “bluestones” originated in Wales, the discovery that the altar stone, which sits right at its heart, was Scottish caused an archaeological sensation, capturing headlines around the world. Continue reading…

Academics agree that by protecting robotic vehicles and landing sites we will help archaeologists of the futureJust as the outline of an iron-age hut or remains of a Roman sword cause excitement today, archaeologists of the future could be brushing Martian dust off metal and marvelling at one of Nasa’s rovers.Researchers have said that such instruments, as well as other forms of human activity on Mars, including landing sites and debris, must be preserved as part of the archaeological record of space exploration. Continue reading…

Oxford analysis shows evidence of bloody massacre, with hand and feet bones chewed by human molarsA collection of human bones discovered 50 years ago in a Somerset pit are evidence of the bloodiest known massacre in British prehistory – and of bronze age cannibalism, archaeologists say.At least 37 men, women and children were killed at some point between 2200BC and 2000BC, with their bodies thrown into a deep natural shaft at Charterhouse Warren, near Cheddar Gorge. Continue reading…

Trove had been preserved by warm waters and mud at the Tuscan springs near SienaBronze snakes, statues, two gold crowns, jewellery, thousands of coins and perfectly intact eggs are among the latest remarkable discoveries to emerge from the site of an ancient thermal spa in a small town in Tuscany.The trove had been preserved by the warm waters and mud at the springs, believed to have been built by the Etruscans in the second century BC, in San Casciano dei Bagni, a hilltop town close to Siena. Continue reading…