Archaeology in the news

The environment minister says the report on the Murujuga petroglyphs has been ‘clearly influenced’ by environment campaignersAustralia news live: latest politics updatesGet our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcastAustralia’s environment minister, Murray Watt, has lobbied national Unesco ambassadors in a bid to overturn a recommendation that ancient rock art in Western Australia’s north-west should not receive world heritage listing unless nearby industrial facilities shut down.Delegations from the Australian government and the Murujuga Aboriginal Corporation, a body established to represent five traditional Indigenous language groups, plan to attend a Unesco meeting in Paris next month to argue for an immediate world heritage listing for the Murujuga cultural landscape.Sign up for Guardian Australia’s breaking news email Continue reading…

‘Spectacular’ discovery at site of about 30 graves includes pearls, coins, ceramics and a box containing gold threadA 10th-century burial site believed to have belonged to a Viking noble family has been discovered in northern Denmark, packed with a “spectacular” trove of ancient objects, a museum has said.The discovery came almost by chance when pearls, coins, ceramics and a box containing a gold thread were unearthed during construction work near Lisbjerg, a village located 4 miles (7km) north of Aarhus, Denmark’s second-largest city. Continue reading…

The Dargan cave, in the upper reaches of the Blue Mountains, was previously believed too hostile for human habitationAustralia news live: latest politics updatesGet our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcastWhen Erin Wilkins first stood inside the cavernous Dargan shelter, she was awestruck.“You don’t understand how big it is until you step inside and you’re this tiny little thing inside this massive bowl,” she says. “You just had to sit and take it in.” Continue reading…

Paleographer, historian and expert on ancient Chinese writingQiu Xigui, who has died aged 89, first made his mark as a paleographer, a scholar of ancient writing, through researching Chinese “oracle bones”. These are divinations inscribed on animal scapulae – shoulder blades – or turtle plastrons – the bottom part of their shells. The characters they employ are the earliest known forerunners of the modern Chinese writing system.Their appearance in the antiquities market led to the excavation from the late 1920s of the last capital of the Shang dynasty (c1600-1050 BC) at Yinxu, near Anyang, in Henan province. Continue reading…

Critics had claimed that plan announced in May exposed complex of desert etchings to impact of informal miningPeru’s government has abandoned a plan that reduced the size of a protected area around the country’s ancient Nazca Lines, after criticism the change made them vulnerable to the impact of informal mining operations.Peru’s culture ministry said on Sunday that it was reinstating with immediate effect the protected area covering 5,600 sq km (2,200 sq miles), that in late May had been cut back to 3,200 sq km. The government said at the time the decision was based on studies that had more precisely demarcated areas with “real patrimonial value”. Continue reading…

Collapse of once-feared security apparatus, coupled with widespread poverty, has triggered a gold rushThey come by night. Armed with pickaxes, shovels and jackhammers, looters disturb the dead. Under the cover of darkness, men exhume graves buried more than 2,000 years ago in Syria’s ancient city of Palmyra, searching for treasure.By day, the destruction caused by grave robbers is apparent. Three-metre-deep holes mar the landscape of Palmyra, where ancient burial crypts lure people with the promise of funerary gold and ancient artefacts that fetch thousands of dollars. Continue reading…

Lost for over a century, discovery of wartime letter has rekindled interest in unlocking the secret of the world’s first prototype tankAt the height of the second world war, while British authorities were calling on citizens to donate metal to be recycled into weapons and warships, attention at the army base of Bovington Camp in Dorset turned to a collection of historic vehicles dating from the first war – among them a legendary tank that had been nicknamed “Mother”.Mother was the prototype for the world’s first battlefield tank, the Mark 1, which had been developed by Britain in 1915-6 to break the deadlock of the trenches. The vehicles were a huge technological leap forward that caused a sensation when rolled out on the battlefields (“astonishing our soldiers no less than they frightened the enemy”, as the Manchester Guardian put it) and helped tip the scales in favour of the allies’ eventual victory. Continue reading…

Researchers enlisted help of AI along with radiocarbon dating to produce new insights into ancient textsMany of the Dead Sea scrolls could be older than previously thought, with some biblical texts dating from the time of their original authors, researchers say.The first of the ancient scrolls were discovered in the caves of Qumran in the Judean desert by Bedouin shepherds in the mid-20th century. The manuscripts range from legal documents to parts of the Hebrew Bible, and are thought to date from around the third century BCE to the second century CE. Continue reading…

Shock decision has raised fears ancient site with almost 2,000-year-old geoglyphs will be exploited by illegal minersArchaeologists and environmentalists have expressed their outrage at a shock decision by Peru’s culture ministry to cut by nearly half the protected archaeological park around the Nazca Lines, excluding an area nearly the size of urban Lima, the country’s capital city.The Unesco world heritage site attracts thousands of tourists to see the vast hummingbird, monkey and whale figures in the desert in Peru’s second-biggest tourist attraction after Machu Picchu. Last year, archaeologists using AI discovered hundreds of new geoglyphs dating back more than 2,000 years, predating the famous lines in the sand. Continue reading…

Pyramids and monuments suggest Los Abuelos was a significant ceremonial site, archaeologists sayArchaeologists have unearthed the remains of a Mayan city nearly 3,000 years old in northern Guatemala, with pyramids and monuments that point to its significance as an important ceremonial site.The Mayan civilization arose around 2000BC, reaching its height between AD400 and 900 in what is present-day southern Mexico and Guatemala, as well as parts of Belize, El Salvador and Honduras. Continue reading…

A man 43,000 years ago dipped a finger in red pigment and made a nose on a face-like pebble in Spain, scientists sayOne day around 43,000 years ago, a Neanderthal man in what is now central Spain came across a large granite pebble whose pleasing contours and indentations snagged his eye.Something in the shape of that quartz-rich stone – perhaps its odd resemblance to an elongated face – may have compelled him to pick it up, study it and, eventually, to dip one of his fingers in red pigment and press it against the pebble’s edge, exactly where the nose on that face would have been. Continue reading…

Environment minister Murray Watt is due to make a decision on whether to extend the controversial North West Shelf development in coming daysWant to get this in your inbox when it publishes? Sign up for the Clear Air Australia newsletter hereReliable energy or ‘carbon bomb’? What’s at stake in the battle over Australia’s North West ShelfUnless something remarkable – the federal court, perhaps – intervenes, the Albanese government will this week make a decision that could have ramifications for greenhouse gas emissions and Indigenous heritage that last for decades – or longer. It relates to the future of the North West Shelf, one of the world’s largest liquified natural gas (LNG) projects.Most discussion about it assumes that it is a done deal – that the environment minister, Murray Watt, will give the green light to an application by Woodside Energy to extend the life of the gas export processing facility on the Burrup peninsula in Western Australia’s Pilbara region.Sign up to get climate and environment editor Adam Morton’s Clear Air column as a free newsletter Continue reading…

Jim and Dilys Quinlan, who discovered the stone relief of the goddess of victory, have volunteered at Vindolanda, the site of an important Roman fort near Hexham, for 21 seasons. Dilys said: ‘We’ve spent the vast majority of our annual leave at Vindolanda over the years. As veteran diggers, it is without doubt the most wonderful thing we’ve ever done and, importantly, it’s something we do as a couple.’ The 47cm-tall carving is thought to have symbolised the end of war and to have been part of a much bigger reliefAmateur archaeologists unearth winged goddess at Hadrian’s Wall Continue reading…

Exclusive: Married volunteer diggers discover stone relief at site of Roman fort Vindolanda in NorthumberlandA striking Roman depiction of the winged goddess of victory has been discovered near Hadrian’s Wall by volunteers helping archaeologists on an official excavation.The stone relief was found by a Merseyside couple at Vindolanda, the site of the important Roman fort near Hexham, Northumberland. Continue reading…

West Kennet, Wiltshire: We’re surrounded by miracles here – the otherwordly skills of birds in flight, and the heavyweight construction of our ancestorsUnseen hands have tied coloured ribbons to an oak tree at the foot of a whale-backed hill. Whoever crossed the chalk stream to fasten these pretty streamers in red, blue, gold and white found meaning in this place or with the people who came here before – those unknowables who lugged boulders many times their own weight to the top more than 5,000 years ago.We make the ascent, along a modern processional path between fields of wheat to where they fashioned their mound mausoleum. I dwell, as I invariably do at archaeological sites, on the wild bridge between peoples past and present. There are skylarks here, and when they are not skittering across the ground, they rise and rise. Continue reading…

Celebrity used video of trips to ancient Maya cities to advertise his own-brand snacks, drawing criticism from Mexico’s archaeology and history instituteMexico is seeking compensation from a production company that worked with YouTube celebrity MrBeast, accusing the star of using images of the country’s ancient archaeological sites to advertise a chocolate brand.A video of the social media star visiting Maya ruins has been viewed around 60m times since 10 May on YouTube, where he has 395 million subscribers. Continue reading…

‘Beautifully preserved’ Archaeopteryx has tertial feathers that appear to have been key to making it aerodynamicAn exquisitely preserved Archaeopteryx fossil has delivered fresh insights into how the earliest birds first took flight 150m years ago.The fossil is the first Archaeopteryx in which scientists have been able to identify specialised wing feathers that would have made flight possible. These tertial feathers on the upper arm bone create a smooth aerodynamic line from wing to body and are not seen in feathered flightless dinosaurs that existed alongside the first birds, suggesting that this was a crucial evolutionary change required for lift-off. Continue reading…

Featuring pharaohs and sustainable design, the $1bn museum in Giza, Egypt, is finally opening after years of delays Continue reading…

Knowth, County Meath, Ireland: In among the summer-green fields here is the great mound, constructed by neolithic people with, perhaps, one eye to the skyFrom the top of Knowth’s great mound, my gaze leaps over its smaller satellite mounds and wanders across an expanse of summer-green fields. This is Brú na Bóinne, a vast neolithic complex looped by the River Boyne, where the landscape is dominated by three artificial “hills” that were layered over passage tombs built about 5,000 years ago.The most famous of the three is to the south – Newgrange, which is aligned with the winter solstice sunrise. To the east is Dowth, which aligns with winter sunsets. And then there’s this one beneath my feet, the great mound, containing two back-to-back chambers facing east and west. As ever with such ancient structures, the big question is: what was it for? Continue reading…

British team says new study ‘radically transforms’ understanding of bronze age trade networksIn about 1300BC, the major civilisations of the eastern Mediterranean made a cultural and technological leap forward when they began using bronze much more widely for weapons, tools and jewellery. While a form of the metal had previously been used in smaller quantities by the Mycenaeans and Egyptians among others, bronze was now abundant – but how?Most bronze is an alloy of copper and tin, but while the former was widely available in antiquity, tin is a rare element, with no large sources within thousands of kilometres. This left one big question, referred to by archaeologists as the “tin problem”. Where were the bronze age societies of the Mediterranean getting the tin for their bronze? Continue reading…