Archaeology in the news

I took on a pseudoscientist because misinformation about history too often goes unchallengedIt’s important to start strong. That’s true of a lot of things in life, but doubly so when you’re an archaeologist starting off a conversation with Graham Hancock, the famed pseudoarchaeology author, in a venue such as the Joe Rogan Experience podcast.For the last decade, scholars and experts have dealt with misinformation and pseudoscience either by trying to ignore it in order not to amplify it or by debunking it once it has spread far enough. But recent misinformation research highlights the importance of prebunking rather than debunking. An audience primed with real facts is armed to understand the issues with pseudoscientific narratives. Continue reading…

Archaeologists and astronomers to study Wiltshire site’s lesser understood connection to the moonThe rising and setting of the sun at Stonehenge, especially during the summer and winter solstices, continues to evoke joy, fascination and religious devotion.Now a project has been launched to delve into the lesser understood links that may exist between the monument and the moon during a rare lunar event. Continue reading…

Archaeologists and guides among critics who say scheme goes against what symbol of democracy should representJackie and Malcolm Love stood amid a bevy of tourists in the heart of Athens taking in the Acropolis with a mixture of awe and admiration. The Greek capital’s greatest classical site was truly magnificent, they said, but the crowds had been such, even in April, that they preferred to experience it from a distance.“We didn’t go, not with all those people,” said Jackie, looking up at the fifth-century monument from the cobbled boulevard below. “We didn’t think it’d be the best thing to do, did we?” she said, nudging her husband. Continue reading…

‘Black room’ with frescoes inspired by Trojan war described as one of most striking discoveries ever made at site in southern ItalyA banquet room replete with well preserved frescoes depicting characters inspired by the Trojan war has been unearthed among the ruins of Pompeii in what has been described as one of the most striking discoveries ever made at the southern Italy archaeological site.The 15-metre-long, six-metre-wide room was found in a former private residence in Via di Nola, which was ancient Pompeii’s longest road, during excavations in the Regio IX area of the site. Continue reading…

Paper dates 82 pottery pieces found in single dig site at between 3,000 and 2,000 years oldFollow our Australia news live blog for latest updatesGet our morning and afternoon news emails, free app or daily news podcastGroundbreaking archaeological research may have upended the longstanding belief that Aboriginal Australians did not make pottery.A paper published in the Quaternary Science Reviews on Wednesday details the finding of 82 pottery pieces from a single dig site on a Great Barrier Reef island, dates them at between 3,000 and 2,000 years old and determines that the pots were most likely made by Aboriginal people using locally sourced clay and temper.Sign up for Guardian Australia’s free morning and afternoon email newsletters for your daily news roundup Continue reading…

Exclusive: four vases in New York auction traced to Gianfranco Becchina, convicted in 2011 of illegally dealing in antiquitiesChristie’s has withdrawn four ancient Greek vases from Tuesday’s auction after a leading archaeologist discovered that each of them was linked to a convicted antiquities dealer.Dr Christos Tsirogiannis, an affiliated archaeology lecturer at the University of Cambridge and a specialist in looted antiquities and trafficking networks, told the Guardian that there was damning evidence within the auction house’s own correspondence with the dealer, which was seized by the police. Continue reading…

Chemical analysis reveals origin of coinage that stimulated trade and helped fuel development of new towns from seventh centurySeveral decades after the Sutton Hoo burial, starting in about AD660, there was a sudden rise in the number of silver coins in circulation in England, for reasons that have long puzzled archaeologists and historians.The new rush of silver coinage stimulated trade and helped fuel the development of the new towns springing up at the time – but where did it come from? Were the Anglo-Saxon kings recycling old Roman scrap metal? Or had they found lucrative sources from mines in Europe? Continue reading…

My brother Stephen Mitchell, who has died aged 75, was a historian, archaeological surveyor and interpreter of inscriptions of the Hellenistic, Roman and early Byzantine periods, particularly in what is now Turkey. Equally at home on a hillside as in a lecture theatre, he once discovered three lost cities of the Pisidian people, high in Anatolia’s Taurus mountains, in a single fortnight.Stephen joined the department of classics at Swansea University in 1976, gaining a professorship in 1993; he held visiting fellowships at the University of Göttingen in Germany and the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton in the US. From 2002 to 2011 he was Leverhulme professor of Hellenistic culture at Exeter University, becoming emeritus professor on retirement. Continue reading…

Letter reveals disappearance of 17th century British pirate was tied to William III’s spy ring, Daniel Defoe and an archbishopIn 1695, Henry Avery led his 160-strong crew to pull off the most lucrative heist in pirate history on the high seas, amassing gold, silver, sapphires, emeralds and diamonds worth more than £85m in today’s money. He became the most wanted criminal of his day but vanished without trace and was the stuff of legend for 300 years.Now shipwreck explorers Dr Sean Kingsley and Rex Cowan claim to have solved what they call the longest cold case in pirate history: the “pirate king” had entered the service of the king of England, William III, as a spy. Continue reading…

Excavations of bronze age graves have found battle-scarred female archers, says the historian Bettany HughesIn Greek legends, the Amazons were feared and formidable women warriors who lived on the edge of the known world. Hercules had to obtain the magic girdle of the Amazonian queen Hippolyte in one of his 12 labours, and Achilles killed another queen, Penthesilea, only to fall in love with her as her beautiful face emerged from her helmet.These horseback-riding, bow-wielding nomads, who fought and hunted just like men, have long been shrouded in myth, but archaeologists are discovering increasing evidence that they really did exist. Continue reading…

Settlement on stilts dropped into River Nene after a fire nearly 3,000 years ago and was preserved in siltA bronze age settlement built on stilts that dropped “like a coffee plunger” into a river after a catastrophic fire has provided a window on our past lives, according to the archaeologist that led the investigation of the Cambridgeshire site.Must Farm, nicknamed the Pompeii of the Fens, offers “exceptional clarity” because of a combination of charring and waterlogging, said Mark Knight, of Cambridge University’s archaeological unit. Continue reading…

Important collection rediscovered during house-clearing includes numerous rare speciesAn internationally important collection of shells, including specimens from Captain Cook’s final voyage, has been rediscovered 40 years after it was thought to have been thrown into a skip.More than 200 shells have been returned to English Heritage, which will put some of them on display in Northumberland this week. Continue reading…

From murdered Vikings to an anchorite with syphilis, how human remains are reshaping historyIn 2008 a stash of human bones was discovered in a ditch running under St John’s College, Oxford. They dated from the Anglo-Saxon period and, once reassembled, revealed themselves as the remains of 35 young adult males. The fact that these men had been thrown into a mass grave, with none of the usual pieties, suggested that they were outlaws of one kind or other. At the time England was engaged in a war of attrition with “the Danes” (a generic description that encompassed people from across Scandinavia), so the most likely explanation was that these unfortunate skeletons belonged to prisoners of war.But on closer examination, explains Alice Roberts in this gripping set of tales from the crypt, the bones told a different story. There was no evidence of the badly healed old fractures that you would expect in fighting men. All the violence – savage lunges to the skull and puncture wounds to the vertebra – had occurred at the moment of death. Further testing on the teeth, which hold clues about childhood environment, showed that these men had grown up on a diet rich in fish protein, unusual for landlocked Oxford. The conclusion must be that they were indeed of Scandinavian origin but, far from being soldiers, they were settled civilians who had met a catastrophic end. Continue reading…

Deliberately fashioned chipped stones date back more than 1m years and may have been used by homo erectusAncient stone tools found in western Ukraine may offer the oldest known evidence of the presence of humans in Europe, according to new research.The chipped stones, deliberately fashioned from volcanic rock, were excavated from a quarry in Korolevo in the 1970s. Archaeologists used new methods to date the layers of sedimentary rock surrounding the tools to more than 1m years old. Continue reading…

Archaeologists fear more than 2,000 carved figures in Vingen could be destroyed when digging beginsOne of the largest and most significant sites of rock art in northern Europe is under “catastrophic” threat.The Vingen carvings, in Vestland county, Norway, are spectacular, and include images of human skeletons and abstract and geometric designs. Even the hammer stones, the tools used by the ancient artists to create their compositions, have survived. Continue reading…

Phrixus and Helle are depicted in vibrant colours with exquisite artistry in remarkable discoveryIn a remarkable discovery at the ancient Roman city of Pompeii, archaeologists have unearthed a fresco depicting the Greek mythological siblings Phrixus and Helle.Gabriel Zuchtriegel, the director of Pompeii Archaeological Park, described the find as a poignant reflection of history unfolding once more. Continue reading…

Eight-metre statue dating from fifth century BC restored and assembled piece-by-piece to be displayed in Valley of the TemplesA colossal statue of Atlas that lay buried for centuries among ancient ruins has been reconstructed to take its rightful place among the Greek temples of Agrigento in Sicily, after a 20-year research and restoration project.The statue, standing at 8 metres (26ft) tall and dating back to the fifth century BC, was one of nearly 38 that adorned the Temple of Zeus, considered the largest Doric temple ever built despite never being completed. Continue reading…

Largest cluster of sunken vessels from the 18th and 19th centuries have been identified, bearing ‘silent witness’ to the colonial pastThey were the ships that carried enslaved Africans on hellish transatlantic voyages through the 18th and 19th centuries, with up to 400 in a single vessel. Now the wrecks of 14 ships have been identified in the northern Bahamas, marking what has been described by a British marine archaeologist as a previously unknown “highway to horror”.The fate of the African men, women and children trafficked in their holds is unknown, but if a vessel was sinking, they were often bolted below deck to allow the crew to escape. Continue reading…

Our tipsters celebrate our distant ancestors at mystical and atmospheric sites from County Fermanagh to CornwallCratcliffe and Robin Hood’s Stride are a collection of gritstone crags and boulders nestled against a Derbyshire hillside not far from Bakewell. It’s a beautiful place with a magical feel. Carved into the base of the cliff is a small chapel – the “hermit’s cave” – and in the next field, the Nine Stones Close stone circle is over two metres high and 3,000 years old. Only four stones remain. Rowtor Rocks, a nearby jumble of boulders, has a plethora of little dwellings carved into the rocks that you can explore. No wonder the local pub is called The Druid Inn…Frances Continue reading…

Previously unknown settlement in Small Hythe was once an important infrastructure linkA “very rare” clay figurine of the god Mercury, one of fewer than 10 ever found in Britain, has been discovered at a previously unknown Roman settlement that once sat next to a busy port – but is now 10 miles from the sea.The site of the settlement, in the modern hamlet of Small Hythe (or Smallhythe), near Tenterden in Kent, now sits among fields, but was once an important link in the Roman empire’s import and infrastructure network in southern England and the Channel. Continue reading…