https://phys.org/science-news/archaeology-fossils en-us The latest news on archaeology, archaeological research and archaeological advancements. More than forty archaeological sites in Cyprus dating potentially as far back as the Bronze Age that were thought lost to history have been relocated by University of Leicester scientists working for the Ministry of Defence. https://phys.org/news/2024-03-lost-tombs-quarries-rediscovered-british.html Archaeology Wed, 06 Mar 2024 14:48:28 EST news628958903 Ancient stone tools found in western Ukraine may be the oldest known evidence of early human presence in Europe, according to research published Wednesday in the journal Nature. https://phys.org/news/2024-03-ancient-stone-tools-ukraine-date.html Archaeology Wed, 06 Mar 2024 14:30:36 EST news628957816 Archaeologists have excavated the former working-class neighborhood of Vaakunakylä near Oulu, west-central Finland and interviewed its previous inhabitants, revealing the rich heritage of this marginalized community. https://phys.org/news/2024-03-archaeologists-uncover-heritage-marginalized-community.html Archaeology Tue, 05 Mar 2024 12:33:45 EST news628864423 Archaeologists have analyzed chemical residues from ceramic vases at the city of Cotzumalhuapa, Guatemala, revealing physical evidence of tobacco use in Mesoamerica, likely for ritual and therapeutic purposes. https://phys.org/news/2024-03-ancient-mesoamericans-drunk-tobacco-rituals.html Archaeology Tue, 05 Mar 2024 12:11:03 EST news628863061 A short walk from the banks of the Brazos River in Washington County, members of a small crew dressed in sun hats and gardening gloves push buckets of mud through metal sieves, picking out nails, bits of glass and ceramic, and other traces of a log cabin that once served as Sam Houston's presidential office. https://phys.org/news/2024-03-archaeologists-unearth-abandoned-townsite-washington.html Archaeology Tue, 05 Mar 2024 11:22:58 EST news628860173 A new study from the Nihewan basin of China has revealed that hominins who possessed advanced knapping abilities equivalent to Mode 2 technological features occupied East Asia as early as 1.1 million years ago (Ma), which is 0.3 Ma earlier than the date associated with the first handaxes found in East Asia. This suggests that Mode 2 hominins dispersed into East Asia much earlier than previously thought. https://phys.org/news/2024-03-timeline-east-asian-hominins-tool.html Archaeology Tue, 05 Mar 2024 11:22:49 EST news628860167 The identification of an eleventh-century Islamic astrolabe bearing both Arabic and Hebrew inscriptions makes it one of the oldest examples ever discovered and one of only a handful known in the world. The astronomical instrument was adapted, translated, and corrected for centuries by Muslim, Jewish, and Christian users in Spain, North Africa, and Italy. https://phys.org/news/2024-03-rare-eleventh-century-astrolabe-discovery.html Archaeology Sun, 03 Mar 2024 19:00:01 EST news628516526 "The Tale of Genji," often called Japan's first novel, was written 1,000 years ago. Yet it still occupies a powerful place in the Japanese imagination. A popular TV drama, "Dear Radiance"—"Hikaru kimi e"—is based on the life of its author, Murasaki Shikibu: the lady-in-waiting whose experiences at court inspired the refined world of "Genji." https://phys.org/news/2024-03-tools-medieval-japanese-healer-toolkit.html Archaeology Social Sciences Fri, 01 Mar 2024 10:39:42 EST news628511976 If we could stand in a landscape that our Mesolithic ancestors called home, what would we see around us? Scientists have devised a method of analyzing preserved hazelnut shells to tell us whether the microhabitats around archaeological sites were heavily forested or open and pasture-like. This could help us understand not only what a local environment looked like thousands of years ago, but how humans have impacted their habitats over time. https://phys.org/news/2024-02-wood-trees-archaeologists-hazelnuts-reconstruct.html Archaeology Thu, 29 Feb 2024 00:00:02 EST news628356149 Diagnosing anemia in living people is typically a matter of a routine blood test. Retrospectively diagnosing anemia in people who died decades or even centuries ago is much more challenging since there is no blood left to test. https://phys.org/news/2024-02-method-cases-anemia-archaeological.html Archaeology Wed, 28 Feb 2024 17:02:03 EST news628362121 Many museums and other cultural institutions in the West have faced, in recent years, demands for artistic repatriation. The Elgin Marbles, currently housed in the British Museum, are perhaps the most prominent subject of this charge, with numerous appeals having been made for their return to their original home in Greece. https://phys.org/news/2024-02-prehistory-debate-fossils-china-relationship.html Archaeology Political science Wed, 28 Feb 2024 16:48:44 EST news628361321 Thousands of historic and archaeological sites in Georgia are at risk from tropical storm surges, and that number will increase with climate change, according to a study published in PLOS ONE by Matthew D. Howland and Victor D. Thompson of Wichita State University and the University of Georgia. https://phys.org/news/2024-02-climate-threatens-thousands-archaeological-sites.html Archaeology Wed, 28 Feb 2024 14:00:01 EST news628326283 Potters of different cultural backgrounds learn new types differently, producing cultural differences even in the absence of differential cultural evolution. Kobe University-led research, published in PNAS Nexus, has implications for how we evaluate the difference of archaeological artifacts across cultures. https://phys.org/news/2024-02-captures-pottery-culturally-distinct.html Archaeology Social Sciences Wed, 28 Feb 2024 08:35:03 EST news628331701 Blood relations and kinship were not all-important for the way hunter-gatherer communities lived during the Stone Age in Western Europe. A new genetic study, conducted at several well-known French Stone Age burial sites, shows that several distinct families lived together. This was probably a deliberate system for avoiding inbreeding. https://phys.org/news/2024-02-genetic-stone-age-strategy-inbreeding.html Archaeology Wed, 28 Feb 2024 07:02:15 EST news628326130 People living in ancient Eastern Arabia appear to have developed resistance to malaria following the appearance of agriculture in the region around five thousand years ago, a new study reveals. https://phys.org/news/2024-02-dna-ancient-eastern-arabians-reveals.html Archaeology Tue, 27 Feb 2024 11:00:01 EST news628247442 Early hunter–gatherers from the Middle Stone Age in southern Africa were selecting the most suitable material available for stone tools and spearheads more than 60,000 years ago, according to a study by Dr. Patrick Schmidt from the University of Tübingen's Early Prehistory and Quaternary Ecology section. https://phys.org/news/2024-02-physical-quantify-quality-stones-tools.html Archaeology Tue, 27 Feb 2024 09:28:01 EST news628248478 A CSIRO team aboard research vessel (RV) Investigator has helped Heritage NSW solve a 120-year mystery with the discovery of the SS Nemesis, a 73-meter iron-hulled steamship that was lost at sea in 1904. https://phys.org/news/2024-02-year-maritime-mystery-ss-nemesis.html Archaeology Mon, 26 Feb 2024 12:39:03 EST news628173541 The enigmatic Philistine culture, which flourished during the Iron Age (ca. 1200–604 BCE), profoundly affected the southern Levant's cultural history, agronomy, and dietary customs. More than a quarter century of excavations at Tell es-Safi/Gath in central Israel, identified as the biblical Gath of the Philistines and the home of Goliath, has provided a unique window into the world of this ancient civilization. https://phys.org/news/2024-02-seed-fruit-analysis-biblical-home.html Archaeology Mon, 26 Feb 2024 11:53:03 EST news628170781 In dozens of archaeological discoveries around the world, from the once-successful reservoirs and canals of Angkor Wat in Cambodia to the deserted Viking colonies of Greenland, new evidence paints pictures of civilizations struggling with unforeseen climate changes and the reality that their farming practices had become unsustainable. https://phys.org/news/2024-02-ancient-farmers-climate-political-power.html Archaeology Political science Mon, 26 Feb 2024 10:50:32 EST news628167026 Occasionally, police investigators find themselves announcing archaeological discoveries, rather than criminal findings. In 1984, for example, police oversaw the recovery of the Iron Age bog body (a naturally mummified corpse found in a peat bog) later called "Lindow Man" in Cheshire, UK. On January 25, 2024, the Police Service Northern Ireland (PSNI) found themselves doing just that. https://phys.org/news/2024-02-bog-forensics-archaeology-cold-cases.html Archaeology Mon, 26 Feb 2024 10:48:55 EST news628166931 After analyzing DNA from almost 10,000 people from ancient and pre-modern societies, our international team of researchers have discovered six cases of Down syndrome in past human populations. https://phys.org/news/2024-02-ancient-dna-reveals-children-syndrome.html Archaeology Social Sciences Sun, 25 Feb 2024 09:20:01 EST news627739983 It's a small piece of obsidian, just over 5 centimeters long, likely found on a hard-scrabble piece of ranchland in the Texas panhandle. But when SMU anthropologist Matthew Boulanger looks at it, he gets a mental image of Spanish explorer Francisco Vasquez de Coronado making his way across the plains more than 470 years ago in search of a fabled city of gold. https://phys.org/news/2024-02-artifact-linked-spanish-explorer-coronado.html Archaeology Fri, 23 Feb 2024 13:43:05 EST news627918177 When French archaeologists first began digging into the baked earth of their new colonial empire in Algeria in the mid-19th century, they fancied that they'd found kindred spirits in the Roman Empire that had come some 2,000 years before them. https://phys.org/news/2024-02-rethinking-ancient-rome-colonies-africa.html Archaeology Thu, 22 Feb 2024 12:46:03 EST news627828361 A team of archaeologists with the Aranzadi Science Society has found a word inscribed on an ancient Basque bronze hand that resembles a modern Basque word. Their paper is published in the journal Antiquity. https://phys.org/news/2024-02-word-inscribed-ancient-bronze-resembles.html Archaeology Thu, 22 Feb 2024 10:40:01 EST news627817150 How old are these bones? This standard question in archaeology can be answered quite precisely in many cases with the help of the carbon isotope 14C. But there are exceptions. Certain living habits, such as that of prehistoric hunter-gatherer-fisher communities, can distort 14C dating, because carbon in aquatic ecosystems typically contains less 14C than carbon from terrestrial plants and animals. https://phys.org/news/2024-02-approach-carbon-dating-age-prehistoric.html Archaeology Wed, 21 Feb 2024 17:42:03 EST news627759722 In 1274, King Magnus VI, the Law Mender, united the entire Norwegian kingdom under one common law. The Norwegian Code of the Realm remained in force for over 400 years, and in it lie the seeds that would grow into Norway's rule of law and the idea of popular co-determination. https://phys.org/news/2024-02-year-law-laid-foundation-norwegians.html Archaeology Political science Wed, 21 Feb 2024 17:11:04 EST news627757861 Neanderthals created stone tools held together by a multi-component adhesive, a team of scientists has discovered. Its findings, which are the earliest evidence of a complex adhesive in Europe, suggest these predecessors to modern humans had a higher level of cognition and cultural development than previously thought. https://phys.org/news/2024-02-neanderthals-usage-complex-adhesives-reveals.html Archaeology Wed, 21 Feb 2024 14:00:01 EST news627715394 For many years, researchers at MPI-EVA have been collecting and analyzing ancient DNA from humans who lived during the past tens of thousands of years. Analyzing these data has allowed the researchers to trace the movement and mixing of people, and even to uncover ancient pathogens that affected their lives. However, a systematic study of uncommon genetic conditions had not been attempted. One of those uncommon conditions, known as Down syndrome, nowadays affects around one in 1,000 births. https://phys.org/news/2024-02-ancient-genomes-reveal-syndrome-societies.html Archaeology Tue, 20 Feb 2024 11:00:01 EST news627640440 Roughly 14,500 to 10,500 years ago, in the transition from the last glacial period, Epipaleolithic and Neolithic peoples harvesting vegetation from the wetlands of eastern Jordan created a habitat for birds that would otherwise have migrated, a new study published in the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory reveals. https://phys.org/news/2024-02-birds-human-millennia.html Archaeology Mon, 19 Feb 2024 14:33:30 EST news627575607 American humorist and writer Mark Twain is believed to have once said, "History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes." https://phys.org/news/2024-02-history-crisis-math-reveal-societies.html Archaeology Political science Mon, 19 Feb 2024 11:19:11 EST news627563941