Commoners may have played an unappreciated part in the rise of an ancient Maya royal dynasty. Self-described “divine lords” at a Maya site called Tamarindito in what’s now Guatemala left…
Category: Archaeology
50 years ago, Stonehenge’s purpose mystified scientists. It still does
Stonehenge: A calendar or just a crematorium — Science News, November 11, 1972 The monument consisted of a circle of immense, finely tooled stone archways surrounded by a range of…
This ancient Canaanite comb is engraved with a plea against lice
Engraved into the side of a nearly 4,000-year-old ivory comb is a simple wish: Get these lice out of my hair. This faint inscription, written in the early language of…
King Tut’s tomb still has secrets to reveal 100 years after its discovery
One hundred years ago, archaeologist Howard Carter stumbled across the tomb of ancient Egypt’s King Tutankhamun. Carter’s life was never the same. Neither was the young pharaoh’s afterlife. Newspapers around…
Black Death immunity came at a cost to modern-day health
A genetic variant that appears to have boosted medieval Europeans’ ability to survive the Black Death centuries ago may contribute — albeit in a small way — to an inflammatory…
Drone photos reveal an early Mesopotamian city made of marsh islands
A ground-penetrating eye in the sky has helped to rehydrate an ancient southern Mesopotamian city, tagging it as what amounted to a Venice of the Fertile Crescent. Identifying the watery…
How mythology could help demystify dog domestication
In Tom Edison’s Shaggy Dog, a short story by Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Edison discovers that dogs are intellectually superior beings. They’re so smart, in fact, that the canines found the…
Indigenous Americans ruled democratically long before the U.S. did
On sunny summer days, powerboats pulling water-skiers zip across Georgia’s Lake Oconee, a reservoir located about an hour-and-a-half drive east of Atlanta. For those without a need for speed, fishing…
‘The Five-Million-Year Odyssey’ reveals how migration shaped humankind
The Five-Million-Year OdysseyPeter BellwoodPrinceton Univ., $29.95 Archaeologist Peter Bellwood’s academic odyssey wended from England to teaching posts halfway around the world, first in New Zealand and then in Australia. For…
Britons’ tools from 560,000 years ago have emerged from gravel pits
In the 1920s, laborers and amateur archaeologists at gravel quarry pits in southeastern England uncovered more than 300 ancient, sharp-edged oval tools. Researchers have long suspected that these hand axes…
