Archaeology

Archaeology

blue water lily illustration
Brian C. Muraresku, New York Times best-selling author of "The Immortality Key," unpacks ancient evidence for the widespread ritual use of psychoactive plants.
a black and white photo of an animal skull.
Researchers discovered something modern humans had never before seen—a flashy Neanderthal horn collection.
a close up of a bunch of wooden sticks.
A new discovery pushes back the origin of these technologies by about 40,000 years.
Archaeologists turn to other scientific fields to fill in the picture of how victims lived and why they died.
Great Pyramid
A non-invasive method for looking inside structures is solving mysteries about the ancient pyramid.
The strange bronze artifact perplexed scholars for more than a century, including how it traveled so far from home.
A wide-scale examination of early Neolithic human skeletons reveals the violent history of a supposedly peaceful period.
Could the prevalence of flood myths around the world tell us something about early human migration or even the way our brains work?
A physical map of the Earth showing Alaska, Siberia, and the Bering Strait.
Ancient humans crossed the Bering Strait land bridge from Asia into North America. But some of them went back.
Hand-drawn treasure map, complete with a red X that "marks the spot."
X marks the spot. The Dutch town of Ommeren has been swamped by detectorists armed with shovels looking for $20-million treasure.
Ancient bones reveal that domesticated felines were at home in Pre-Neolithic Poland around 8,000 years ago.
Roman Republic banquet
Studying the display of personal wealth across time can help us better understand the history of socioeconomic inequality.
An unexpected ancient manufacturing strategy may hold the key to designing concrete that lasts for millennia.
If tourism is the lifeblood of the Peruvian economy, then Machu Picchu is the heart pumping that blood — in sickness and in health.
Wealth concentration among elites was common in ancient nations, but the scale on which it took place in Egypt’s 18th Dynasty was unprecedented.
The amazing life of “Gudrid the Far-Traveled” was unjustly overshadowed by her in-laws, Erik the Red and Leif Erikson.
ice
Seneca thought the use of ice was a "true fever of the most malignant kind."
Some of the weirdest characters in Greek mythology were Athenian kings.
The spikes in their mouths would have helped them catch squid or fish.
You don't have to be an emperor to apply these rules to daily living.
With almost every shovel of sand shifted in Egypt, another artifact comes to light.
Beit guvrin
Instead of worshipping Yahweh, the devotees were perhaps dedicated to Mars and Jupiter.
Tracing the origin and development of jaws — and other anatomical features that humans share — sheds some light on how we came to be.  
More than 1,000 years ago, Mesoamerican societies conducted one of history's most interesting experiments in commodity money.
Million Stories
Venerated astrophysicist Carl Sagan entertained the possibility.