Recommendable! Originally this video content was shown in 2011 for the first time!
Showing posts with label archaeology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label archaeology. Show all posts
Sunday, October 18, 2026
New Discoveries Reveal Stonehenge's Secrets with Neil Oliver
Thursday, October 15, 2026
Did archaeologists just find North America's second Viking settlement?
Very recommendable!
This video could possibly be an excerpt from a longer 2016 BBC documentary with Dan Snow!
Wednesday, October 14, 2026
4,700-Year-Old Shipwreck Believed To Be Oldest Ever Found Off Turkey
Amazing stuff!
"Archaeologists have found what they believe is the world’s oldest shipwreck, a Bronze Age trade vessel that sank off Turkey’s Mediterranean coast between 4,400 and 4,700 years ago, around the time the Great Pyramid was going up.
The wooden hull is long gone, but more than 30 ceramic jars and three stone anchors still sit on an underwater slope about 98 feet down near Kekova Island in Antalya. Researchers think the 33-foot ship was hauling cargo along the coast, possibly bound for Troy or Crete. ... " (Source)
Monday, September 28, 2026
KI spricht Altgriechisch: Apollo schließt Lücken in 2.000 Jahre alten Texten
Gute Nachrichten!
"In Museen und Bibliotheken weltweit lagern hunderttausende Inschriften und über eine Million Papyrusfragmente aus der Antike. Der Großteil des Materials ist fragmentarisch und schwer lesbar. 92 Prozent der Papyri warten bis heute auf ihre Entzifferung.
Ein gigantischer, unerschlossener Schatz der Geschichte. Doch: Die wissenschaftliche Erschließung erfordert enorm viel Zeit und sehr spezifisches Wissen. Genau hier setzt „Apollo“ an: das weltweit erste große KI-Sprachmodell für Altgriechisch. ..."
Papyrus aus der römischen Kaiserzeit mit einer griechischen Geburtsanzeige, von Apollo rekonstruiert (Römisches Ägypten, 149 n. Chr.)
Monday, September 14, 2026
Beyond the sea walls: Underwater archaeology reveals the hidden scale of ancient Mediterranean ports
Recommendable!
"... To get a fresh perspective from under the sea, researchers launched SHIPs (2023–2028), a multiyear underwater archaeology project combining hands-on fieldwork across the Mediterranean and a major freshwater lake.
By approaching harbors from the water rather than the shore, the project maps the different elements of a port system and examines how they worked together.
They discovered that anchoring areas beyond the formal stone walls played a decisive role in how much traffic a port could handle. Judging a port's capacity by its surviving stone docks alone overlooks the many ships accommodated beyond them.
Ships anchored in sheltered natural bays, were beached along open coastlines or moored in deeper waters beyond the harbor walls. These practices reshaped how researchers view harbor capacity in the ancient harbors of Caesarea, Terracina and Port-Vendres. ..."
From the abstract:
"The SHIPs project examines ancient harbours from a maritime perspective, analysing integrated harbour systems across contrasting environments in the Mediterranean region. Application of standardised analyses demonstrates that extra-basin anchorage zones played a decisive role in determining harbour capacity and enables more robust evaluation and comparative ranking of ancient ports."
Port-Vendres (France): locations of shipwrecks and assemblages.
Saturday, August 15, 2026
No bosses, no problem! Pre-Hispanic farmers built giant water system bottom-up in Colombia. Really!
Amazing stuff! However, the claims about no top-down government etc. are most likely exaggerations or speculative!
When wishful thinking enters the minds of researchers! Dreams/bias of a cooperative collective!
It would be great if it can be confirmed that these fields and water management system were achieved through voluntarily cooperation, but this research is too speculative!
"The pre-Hispanic field systems of La Mojana in the Colombian Caribbean are so vast you can see them from a plane at high altitude. Their canals and raised fields – in use from the first centuries BC until the 11th century AD – cover an astonishing 500,000 hectares, roughly the same size as the Grand Canyon National Park, or three times the size of London. ...
archaeological team argues that the work was most likely locally-led, cooperative, and much faster than previously assumed. ...
Our study is the first to show that these sustainable solutions can be organised locally and collectively. Local people may need resources from the state but not necessarily state intervention.” ..."
From the abstract (emphasis added):
"Pre-Hispanic societies of the Colombian Caribbean lowlands built raised field systems spanning over 500,000 hectares. Their re-adoption may offer a potential solution to modern-day water control in the region. Traditionally interpreted as evidence of large-scale projects requiring centralised planning and coordination, the labour organisation behind their construction is nevertheless not fully understood.
To leverage archaeological knowledge in assessing potential for their re-adoption, we examine the function and labour input requirements of pre-Hispanic canal-ridge systems within a 500-hectare study area.
Conservative estimates indicate the entire system could have been built by local inhabitants in a single dry season.
Maintenance requirements were also modest, with full restoration once a generation requiring a few days annual labour.
We conclude that the sheer scale [???] of these systems cannot be taken as evidence of top-down control, and highlight the potential of low-cost, cooperative, sustainable approaches to water and land management in the Colombian Caribbean."
Fig. 1: Areas of human occupation in La Mojana Region in Colombia.
Fig. 2: Aerial photograph of hydraulic systems in La Mojana, composed of canals and ridges (also known as camellones).
Thursday, August 06, 2026
What are Genetic Markers? 75,000 Genetic Makers Decoded in southern India and Sri Lanka
Amazing stuff!
"75,000 markers decoded: Genetic roots of ancient Tamils unveiled. Human DNA analysis of samples collected from Keeladi and Adichanallur in Tamil Nadu shows that the inhabitants share close genetic proximity to South Indian, Sri Lankan Tamil, and South Asian ancestries. Keeladi archaeological excavation process."
Saturday, August 01, 2026
Hidden Civilisation Discovered Beneath Amazon's Wilderness
Very recommendable! Amazing stuff!
I already blogged here about this discovery.
Friday, July 31, 2026
An ancient civilization of 1-3 millions once flourished in the Amazonia
Amazing stuff!
"The first hint that sprawling ancient populations once occupied the Amazon rainforest in Brazil was found through the most mundane of happenstances. More than 20 years ago, geographer Alceu Ranzi, now at the University of Acre, sat on the right side of a plane flying over the ocean of green. Looking down, he saw a perfect circle inscribed on the ground, an unnatural shape produced only, he felt certain, by humans. He was right.
Decades of subsequent research ... have slowly revealed remnants of peoples that occupied even the forest’s most remote areas. ... what archaeologists call earthworks—a type of architecture carved into the landscape. Now, using a laser-based form of radar known as lidar, researchers suggest ancient Amazonians were widespread in territories previously considered uninhabited. ...
The area surveyed by the researchers cuts through Acre and Amazonas, two northern Brazilian states that border Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia. Although scientists already knew there were earthworks in the region, the new study delineated the western and northern borders of the geoglyph-building society, which researchers had previously named Aquiry. Far away from any major rivers, which historically sustained thriving populations, the scientists did not expect the Aquiry to reach such high numbers. ...
The team identified most of the earthworks in the new study as geoglyphs, ditches made in the ground that form geometric shapes including squares and circles, as well as more complex shapes such as pentagrams and octagons. Some are even more sophisticated, combining, for example, circles inside a perfect square. ..."
From the abstract:
"Numerous geometric earthworks have been found in southwestern Amazonia, evidence of a monument-building precolonial civilization. This knowledge has contributed to the discussion about the deep history and the precolonial urbanism of Amazonia, its sociocultural contexts and its environmental legacy.
Estimates of the geographical extent and population size of the forest civilization have remained weak, because the detection of earthworks has been almost exclusively limited to deforested areas where vegetation does not completely hide the structures.
Here we used canopy-penetrating LiDAR data over 4,430 km of flight to define the geographical distribution and quantity of earthworks in this region better. On the basis of both existing data and our LiDAR documentation, we show that this cultural area alone contains as many earthworks as previously estimated for the whole of Amazonia.
We also propose that the total human population of the area in 100–300 ad was 1.25–3 million people.
If similar results are found elsewhere in Amazonia, the total precolonial population density and its effect on the current Amazonian soil and forest structure, biodiversity and even some modelling of the global climate should be re-evaluated."
Odd shapes hidden in dense Amazon rainforest reveal sprawling ancient civilization "Newly found earthworks suggest about 3 million people might have lived in just about 3% of the forest’s entire area"
An aerial shot shows a square-shaped geoglyph in Acre, a state at Brazil’s northern border
Lidar uses infrared light to uncover the shapes hidden underneath dense tree canopies.
Fig. 2: Diverse earthwork types with their topographical contexts.
Fig. 1: Map of the study area.
Tuesday, July 14, 2026
Ancient Mesoamericans used a-maize-ing strategies to avoid malnutrition
Ama(i)zing stuff!
"Corn flakes for breakfast, tamales for lunch, and some hominy grits with a side of corn bread for dinner? As delicious as this corn-ucopia sounds, such a maize-heavy diet is not without potential health trade-offs: Maize contains very little lysine, an amino acid important for preventing connective tissue disorders and anemia. For the hundreds of millions of people around the world who rely on maize as their primary source of food, finding dietary supplements that can add lysine is vital to prevent malnutrition.
To help understand how the earliest maize-eating societies avoided these consequences, a group of researchers examined the remains of 39 humans who lived in Belize between 1100 and 6100 years ago—just a few millennia after corn was first domesticated in Mexico.
By taking small samples from the skeletal remains and analyzing the ratios of carbon isotopes in their amino acids, the researchers deduced that the people ate animals like turkeys that had themselves eaten corn and concentrated the lysine in their bodies, allowing the amino acid to build up through a process known as trophic magnification. The findings ... suggest that Mesoamericans may have provided maize to food animals long before fully domesticating them around 2200 years ago ..."
From the abstract:
"The adoption of maize as a dietary staple shaped human societies. While a reliable carbohydrate-rich source, its inherent nutritional limitations posed substantial challenges.
Maize is deficient in lysine, an essential amino acid crucial for maintaining balanced health.
Maize-dependent diets, therefore, necessitated complementary dietary strategies. We report amino acid stable carbon isotope data from 39 directly dated humans from southern Belize [6100 to 1100 before present (B.P.)] to investigate how early populations mitigated nutritional deficiencies.
Concentration-dependent mixing model results indicate that protein supplementation from maize-eating animals contributed maize-derived lysine to human diets through trophic magnification (elevated proportions of isotopically distinct nutrients in tissues from trophic transfer).
Our results indicate that such strategies were in place by 6100 B.P., consistent with evidence of early maize cultivation but predating reliance by ~2000 years. Our findings highlight early coevolutionary dynamics linking maize cultivation and human-animal provisioning relationships, deepening understandings of adaptive food systems during agricultural transitions and offering insights into nutritional strategies underpinning sustainable subsistence."
Nutritional Adaptations to Early Maize Cultivation: Earliest Isotopic Evidence of Maize Based Animal Provisioning in the Neotropics Tracing Early Maize-Based Animal Provisioning (original news release)
Fig. 1. Human and turkey maize and nixtamalized maize daily requirements.
Fig. 6. Analytical framework for calculating dietary contributions of maize-based foods and maize-consuming animals to individual lysine δ13C values.
Sunday, July 05, 2026
Egypt uncovers lost Byzantine-era city in an oasis in the western desert
Good news! Exciting! Tourism and archaeology are sometimes in conflict!
I thought, it has become a little quiet regarding new archaeological discoveries coming out of Egypt! Not anymore! 😊
"Archaeologists uncovered a well-preserved fourth-century Byzantine settlement in Egypt’s Dakhla Oasis, revealing homes, a basilica church, coins, and written records that offer a rare glimpse into daily life 1,600 years ago. ..."
"A well-preserved Byzantine-era residential city in the western desert is one of two major archaeological finds announced by Egypt on Saturday.
The recent discoveries at the Dakhla Oasis and at the Marina el-Alamein archaeological site, near Alexandria, are the latest findings which the Egyptian government hopes will boost the country’s vital tourism sector, partially driven by antiquities sightseeing. ...
The unearthed quarters included north-south thoroughfares intersected by east-west streets, forming open squares and public spaces, said Hisham el-Leithy, secretary general of the supreme council of antiquities.
A basilica church, dating back to the mid-fourth century, stands at the settlement’s head, overlooking its main streets, along with remains of two watchtowers to safeguard the outskirts, said Mahmoud Massoud, who chairs the archaeological mission.
The oasis, located in Egypt’s western province of New Valley in the western desert ...
A heavily fortified structure with thick defensive walls, and many houses consisting of reception halls and vaulted roofs were found in the area, Massoud said.
Among them were the house of Tisous, identified as a church deacon and dating to the second half of the fourth century, which archaeologists believe served as a house church before the construction of the city’s basilica.
Archaeologists also uncovered bread ovens, kitchens and stone grinding tools that had been apparently used to produce food. Also found were well-preserved bronze coins bearing portraits of Byzantine emperors, Latin inscriptions and Christian symbols, alongside a group of gold coins dating to the reign of Roman emperor Constantius II, who ruled between 337 and 361, the ministry statement said. ..."
Egypt uncovers lost Byzantine-era city in the western desert "Archaeologists have unearthed fourth-century quarters in Egypt, revealing residential and religious structures, including a basilica church"
Sunday, May 24, 2026
A 6,000-year-old necropolis in central Spain is forcing a radical rethink of who built Europe's first megalithic tombs
Amazing stuff!
Too bad, the University of Salamanca (a very famous and very old university), Spain website is in Spanish only! I don't speak Spanish and I have no time to translate. And Google Translate failed (see screenshot below). Researchers from this university were involved in this study!
The other Spanish University website, i.e. University of Alcalá, was also not very helpful to find additonal information on this research! At least it offered EN translation!
"... Archaeologists working in Toledo, central Spain, have discovered what they believe is the oldest documented monumental necropolis in the interior of the Iberian Peninsula. This ancient site dates back to about the end of the 5th millennium BC (about 4300 to 4000 BC) and challenges a long-held theory that megalithic funerary structures were initially restricted to the coastline before spreading inland. ...
The prehistoric site, called Valdelasilla, sits on a hill overlooking the town of Illescas. It was discovered in 2020 and excavated during that year. ...
The site contains a large circular chamber tomb measuring 6 meters across, surrounded by a large, ditched enclosure measuring roughly 36 meters in diameter. Around it are several smaller funerary chambers made from wood, clay, and compacted earth, and measuring 2 to 3 meters wide. Human remains from at least 46 individuals were found inside 11 of the funerary structures and dated using radiocarbon dating and computer modeling. ..."
From the abstract:
"This study presents an analysis of funerary practices at the site of Valdelasilla (Illescas, Toledo, Spain). The methodology integrates the morphological study of burial structures, anthropological analyses, a consideration of grave goods and the radiocarbon dating of human bone.
The chronological data indicate funerary activity at the site from the Late Neolithic to the Chalcolithic period. Bayesian modelling confirms the establishment of a planned cemetery by the end of the fifth millennium cal. bc, featuring small burial chambers organized around a larger tomb enclosed by a ditch. The burial chambers, which were constructed from wood, clay and small stones, created distinct spaces for the deceased.
This embryonic form of monumentalization, the funerary practices observed and the early chronology link Valdelasilla to other peninsular cemeteries associated with the emergence of megalithism, now identified for the first time on the plateau. The location of the necropolis offers new insights into the role of inland regions in the emergence of Iberian and European megalithism."
Location of the site in the Iberian Peninsula and aerial photograph taken during the excavation work.
Graves, enclosure and post-holes of upper area with the excavation sequence of each of them.
Figure 7.
Grave goods.
(a) Hairpins next to the skull in VLD-T296;
(b) stone beads from chamber VLD-T450;
(c) flint microliths from VLD-T520;
(d) flat rods from VLD-T452.
Saturday, April 25, 2026
This 2,200-year-old Roman wreck hid a repair story that rewrites how ancient ships survived long voyages
Amazing stuff! The abstract of this new research paper is disappointing! It is not even an abstract, but more of a teaser.
This paper even uses what appears to be computer vision to generate images presented in this paper! See below.
"Ever since humans have embarked on sea voyages, they needed to ensure vessels were waterproof, resistant to salty seawater, and could withstand microorganisms or sea-dwellers like worms. Until the mid-20th century, however, the study of non-wood materials used to build ships was overlooked. Even today, little work has been done on materials used for waterproofing.
Now, in a new ... study, researchers ... have examined the protective coating of the Roman Republic shipwreck Ilovik–Paržine that sank around 2,200 years ago off the coast of what is now Croatia. ...
"Studying the coatings, we found two different kinds on this vessel: one made of pine tar, also called pitch, and the other of a mixture of pine tar and beeswax. Analysis of pollen in the coating made it possible to identify the plant taxa present in the immediate environment during the construction or repairs of the ship." ...
The wreck was discovered in 2016 and since then the ship itself and its cargo has been examined multiple times. The current study, however, is the first to combine pollen and molecular analyses to characterize the ship's coating and vegetation present during its production and application on the hull. ..."
From the abstract:
"Introduction: The construction of a vessel (from a boat to a large ship) and its maintenance requires waterproofing of its hull and protection against water corrosion and the aggression of microorganisms, worms and other pests. What could be more logical than using an easily accessible and applicable hydrophobic adhesive material?
Many substances have been used over time such as resins, bitumen, plant tars, pure or mixed with beeswax, fats, inorganic elements. Pliny the Elder already mentions zopissa, a mixture of pitch and beeswax (Natural History XVI, 23).
The strong expansion of shipbuilding between the 13th and 19th centuries generated a veritable industry of plant tars.
Methods: In this research work, a new interdisciplinary approach involving the combined use of molecular, palynological and statistical indicators has been implemented to characterize ancient waterproofing materials. This analytical strategy opens new fields of investigation in naval archaeology.
Results and discussion: Beyond the characterization of materials (nature, manufacturing processes, naval techniques, degree of alteration), it especially reveals information about the surrounding vegetation during the production or the application of the waterproofing material. This approach has been applied to the study of the protective coating of the Roman Republican wreck Ilovik–Paržine 1 (around the middle of the second c. BC) found in Paržine Bay (Ilovik Island, Croatia)."
Fig. 1 View of the excavation of the bow area of the Ilovik-Paržine 1 shipwreck. In the foreground, the cargo of logs and amphoras can be seen. Archaeologists are working near the structure of the bow complex
Friday, April 17, 2026
Unearthed mega-structure hints at communal rule in Romania 6,000 years ago
Amazing stuff!
"Archaeologists working at the ancient settlement of Stăuceni-"Holm" in northeastern Romania have uncovered a mega-structure measuring 350 square meters dating back about 6,000 years. This is one of the few examples of a massive building that has been physically excavated in the region. It is hoped that it will reveal more about the Cucuteni-Trypillia culture (ca. 5000–3500 BC) of Eastern Europe, which is known for its large, well-planned settlements.
A civilization without rulers?
Researchers have studied this culture extensively, yet many mysteries remain about their settlements. There are no palaces, no obvious signs of rich elite burials and precious metals are extremely rare. Even though thousands of people lived together in these early cities, most houses look the same. ..."
From the abstract:
"2021 to 2024, the Cucuteni A3 settlement of Stăuceni-‘Holm’, Botoşani County in north-east Romania was surveyed geophysically and by systematic field collections.
According to the geomagnetic results, on the plateau a settlement with about 45 houses was delimited by several ditch- and palisade systems.
A comparatively large building (350 m2) was located in the area between the ditches, which is meant to be a mega-structure, mainly due to its size and the clearly visible position next to the probable entrance of the settlement.
The mega-structure was partially excavated in 2023–2024. The observations, regarding the architecture and the dating of the feature in particular, provide valuable information for the discussion about the function of these special structures, of which only five others have been investigated in detail by excavation to date."
Thursday, March 26, 2026
What's for dinner? Tooth enamel reveals what early Mesopotamians really ate
Amazing stuff! I believe, there were other studies in the past that analyzed enamel to determine e.g. what food was consumed.
"... In particular, the team focused on zinc isotopes (different versions of the same element) in the enamel, as they detail in their study ... "Zinc isotope analysis of dental enamel provides a viable alternative for reconstructing diet in southern Mesopotamia, where collagen preservation is poor," they write.
The zinc in your teeth changes depending on what you are eating. For example, plants absorb zinc from the soil through their roots and carry a distinctive chemical signature. When animals eat plants, the isotope signal shifts slightly in predictable ways as it moves through the food chain. By measuring those shifts in human teeth, scientists can estimate how much plant versus animal food people consumed. In addition to zinc, the team examined carbon and oxygen isotopes and trace elements such as barium and strontium. ..."
From the significance and abstract:
"Significance
Understanding ancient diets is one of the keys to reconstructing lifeways and social structures. In what are now arid regions like southern Mesopotamia, poor collagen preservation has long hindered direct dietary reconstructions. Here, we apply zinc isotope analysis to human and faunal dental enamel from the third-millennium BCE site of Abu Tbeirah (southern Iraq), offering a method to overcome this limitation. Combined with carbon and oxygen isotopes and trace element ratios (Ba/Ca and Sr/Ca), zinc isotopes reveal an omnivorous diet based on C3 cereals, terrestrial animal protein, and possibly freshwater resources, with no evidence of marine fish consumption. These findings offer individual-level insight into subsistence practices, early-life nutrition, and animal management within a nonelite population in early-urbanized southern Mesopotamia.
Abstract
Reconstructing past lifeways and diets is essential to understanding the emergence of urban societies. However, in what are now arid environments like southern Mesopotamia, poor collagen preservation has long hampered direct isotopic analysis of trophic levels. This limitation has left key gaps in our understanding of subsistence in one of the world’s earliest urban heartlands.
Here, we apply zinc isotope analysis to human and faunal dental enamel from the third-millennium BCE site of Abu Tbeirah (Iraq), integrating δ13C, δ18O, and trace element ratios (Ba/Ca and Sr/Ca). This multiproxy approach reveals an omnivorous diet based on C3 cereals, terrestrial animal products (likely including pigs), and limited freshwater resources, with no or little evidence of marine fish consumption, despite the site’s proximity to the ancient shoreline. Dietary patterns do not vary by sex, suggesting broad access to similar food sources within this nonelite population. Moreover, zinc and carbon isotopes proved valuable in identifying animal feeding practices. Our results provide direct dietary evidence from southern Mesopotamia, overcoming long-standing preservation challenges. The results allow us to evaluate specific expectations about diet and animal management in a collagen-poor context, also highlighting early-life feeding behaviors. They demonstrate the power of zinc isotopes to reconstruct trophic level in collagen-poor contexts, opening broad avenues for bioarchaeological research in early complex societies."
Fig. 2 Scatterplots of isotopic values divided in (A) δ66Zn vs. δ18O in humans, grouped by feeding behavior; (B) δ66Zn vs δ18O, with symbols indicating species and color indicating drinking strategy; (C) δ66Zn vs. δ13C in humans, grouped by feeding behavior; (D) δ66Zn vs. δ13C, with symbols indicating species and color indicating feeding behavior; (E) δ18O vs. δ13C in humans, grouped by feeding behavior; (F) δ18O vs. δ13C, with symbols indicating species and color indicating drinking strategy, compared with available data from Ur
Monday, March 23, 2026
New archaeological dating of ancient Chilean site reopens controversy of first human colonization of South America
Amazing stuff! How exact a science is stratigraphy?
"It is among the most hotly contested topics in archaeology: When did people first arrive in the Americas? A few decades ago, there was consensus that people began populating North America no earlier than about 13,000 years ago, as evidenced by well-dated spearheads with characteristic fluted bases known as Clovis points, named for the city in New Mexico near the archaeological site where they were first identified in 1929.
Then, in the 1970s, an archaeologist named Tom Dillehay claimed to have dated stone tools and other artifacts found at a site in southern Chile to 14,500 years ago—a time when much of North America would have still be covered in impassable glaciers.
Few gave the claims from that site, known as Monte Verde, much credence until an independent cadre of researchers visited it in 1997 and confirmed the dates . The result sent shockwaves through the archaeological community and overturned the so-called “Clovis first” paradigm in favor of a new “pre-Clovis” one. This interpretation spurred scientists to retool their hypotheses for how and when people entered the continent; a coastal migration hypothesis has since gained popularity in its wake. Several other sites throughout the Americas have since been dated to before 13,000 years, and the matter appeared settled. ...
A study published last week in Science saw one such “pre-Clovis” skeptic revisiting Monte Verde—or sites close to it, as the original dig site has since been destroyed—and redating the sediment layers from which the supposedly human made artifacts were said to have come. ...
In the authors’ analysis, the key layers aren’t 14,500 years old, but instead only 8200 to 4200 years old. The confusion, they argued in the paper, was caused by younger sedimentary material being deposited below older layers by a river’s flow, which scrambled the region’s stratigraphy.
Why did it take so long to uncover this? “The simple answer is that the archaeological site is quite remote and was not visited by many archeologists, geomorphologists, or Quaternary geologists (studying the past 2.6 million years) who could have identified the prominent volcanic ash, the exposed wood bed that is the source for the 14,000-year-old radiocarbon ages, and identified that the site is situated on an abandoned floodplain that had to be younger than the landscape surface,” ...
Critically, these dates from Monte Verde have no impact on the other pre-Clovis sites that have been independently dated, but the brouhaha could lead to enhanced scrutiny and calls for their dates to be replicated. ..."
From the editor's summary and abstract:
"Editor’s summary
There is much debate surrounding the dates of human occupation in the Americas. One site that places South American timing in the pre-Clovis period is Monte Verde II in Chile. This site, however, was mostly only studied by a single group, meaning that replication of the dating has been lacking. Surovell et al. independently examined the site using current approaches and a broader scope and concluded that the site could not be older than 8200 years, significantly younger than the previously determined 14,500 years ...
Abstract
Our understanding of the timing of the human colonization of South America has been anchored by the Monte Verde II site in Chile, reported to date to ~14,500 years before the present (B.P.) and regarded as one of the most secure pre-Clovis archeological sites.
We report the first independent investigation of Monte Verde in the nearly 50 years since initial excavations. We argue that radiocarbon and luminescence dates from alluvial exposures, in combination with the identification of a tephra dated to 11,000 years B.P. stratigraphically underlying the archaeological component, suggest that Monte Verde cannot be older than the Middle Holocene (8200 to 4200 years B.P.). With colonization no longer anchored by Monte Verde, our revised chronology supports a more recent date of human arrival to South America."
A later debut for humans (Perspective, open access) "Stratigraphic analysis resets the time of human arrival in Monte Verde, Chile"
A mid-Holocene age for Monte Verde challenges the timeline of human colonization of South America (open access)
Fig. 1. Map of the study area.
Fig. 2. Ages of geologic deposits and the Monte Verde site.
Wednesday, March 18, 2026
Children and adults shaped clay 15,000 years ago, long before pottery or farming, archaeologists find
Amazing stuff!
"Long before pottery, before agriculture, when the first villages took shape, people in the Levant were already molding clay with their hands, carefully, deliberately, and sometimes playfully. Some of those hands belonged to children. ...
An international team of archaeologists ... has uncovered the earliest known clay ornaments in Southwest Asia, revealing a forgotten chapter in the story of how humans began to express identity, belonging, and meaning through material culture. The findings ... push back the symbolic use of clay in the region by thousands of years.
The ornaments, 142 beads and pendants, were made some 15,000 years ago by Natufian hunter-gatherers living in what is now Israel. These communities were the first in the world to settle permanently in one place, millennia before the rise of agriculture. Until now, clay in this period was thought to play little or no ornamental role. In fact, only five clay beads from this era were previously known worldwide. ..."
From the abstract:
"Ornamental practices are essential for understanding socioeconomic structures and technosymbolic dynamics of prehistoric societies. However, our perception of these practices remains limited and biased, due to preservation issues, e.g., perishable materials, which are known only through indirect evidence or rare conservation contexts. Such is the use of unbaked clay for ornamentation, a practice that became widespread across Eurasia in the Neolithic, sporadically documented earlier in Upper Paleolithic Europe.
Focusing on the Levantine “revolution of symbols,” we report the earliest known clay ornamental tradition outside of Europe: 142 personal ornaments from five Natufian (Late Epipaleolithic, 15,000 to 11,650 calibrated years before the present) sites in Israel. Using a multidisciplinary approach, we show that both children and adults participated in crafting these items, which reflect newly emerging symbolic expressions, some inspired by plant forms. These findings offer original insights into the social organization of craft production and the rise of symbolic practices at the dawn of sedentism, which ultimately shaped the Neolithic transition in Southwest Asia."
Fig. 1. Typological variability of Natufian personal ornaments in the Southern Levant.
Fig. 2. Map of the distribution of Natufian sites.
Tuesday, March 17, 2026
Very old loom found on the Iberian peninsula about 3450 years old
Amazing stuff!
"When a fire ripped through a wealthy Iberian village 3450 years ago, it left behind heaps of rubble that trapped tools, pots, and jewelry—and, archaeologists argue in a new Antiquity study, one of the oldest looms ever found. The charred, meter-long pine beams, stone weights, and fiber cords open a window on an ancient economy, and perhaps on Bronze Age fashion.
Beginning around 2000 BCE, written sources from Mesopotamia, Mycenae, Egypt and elsewhere indicate that looms and weaving had become a part of daily life. But because they were made of perishable wood, finding an actual loom from prehistoric Europe is extremely rare. “What we find in archaeology is usually just the loom weights, because everything else decays ,” ... “To find a loom like this, just as it was standing there 3500 years ago, is really remarkable.”
Archaeologists found the loom’s wooden frame when they excavated a site near modern-day Alicante, Spain, in 2008. Close by lay nearly 50 clay loom weights, along with tough grass fibers probably used to lash the frame together—key clues the structure was used for weaving, rather than being simply debris from the collapsed house, the new paper argues. The weights were unusually light, potentially suggesting the weavers were working with delicate material such as sheep’s wool, which would have been a relatively new material in the region."
From the abstract:
"The deep history of weaving is attested by spindle whorls and loom weights, so the evolution of techniques may be tracked through changes in these durable artefacts; however, wooden looms rarely preserve.
Here, the authors document a series of loom weights and associated charred timbers and fibres that represent the remains of a Bronze Age warp-weighted loom, uncovered at the settlement of Cabezo Redondo in south-eastern Spain. Based on the number, weight and size of the weights, hypothetical reconstructions of loom setup and resultant textile products are proposed, revealing possible diversification of weaving processes in the mid-second millennium BC."
Evidence of a warp-weighted loom in the Bronze Age settlement of Cabezo Redondo (south-east Spain) (open access)
Figure 1. Location of Cabezo Redondo: a & b) aerial views; c) plan of the site. The red arrow and dot indicate the location of the raised platform on which the loom was documented
Figure 5. Different views of the loom timbers during excavation
Friday, February 20, 2026
New study maps where wheat, barley and rye grew before the first farmers found them
Recommendable!
"Using advanced machine learning and climate models, researchers have shown that the ancestors of crops like wheat, barley, and rye probably were much less widespread in the Middle East 12,000 years ago than previously believed. This challenges traditional assumptions about the geography of early plant domestication and agriculture. ..."
From the abstract:
"This paper presents the first continuous, spatially-explicit reconstructions of the palaeodistributions of 65 plant species found regularly in association with early agricultural archaeological sites in West Asia [Middle East], including the progenitors of the first crops. We used machine learning to train an ecological niche model of each species based on its present-day distribution in relation to climate and environmental variables. Predictions of the potential niches of these species at key stages of the Pleistocene–Holocene transition could then be derived from these models using downsampled data from palaeoclimate simulations. Our models performed well against independent contemporary test data, but their ability to predict the occurrence of specific species at archaeological sites was much more variable, probably reflecting a tendency of the method to underestimate the species’ fundamental niche. Nevertheless, the majority of species are predicted to have had more restricted geographic distributions under past climate conditions compared to today. Crop progenitors and several wild food species are modelled to have been concentrated in the Levant and, to a lesser extent, Cyprus and Western Anatolia, suggesting these regions may have served as glacial refugia. The average size of species’ niche shrunk by an average of c. 25% from the terminal Pleistocene to the Early Holocene, indicating that economically significant plants were adapted to cryo-arid conditions and did not, as often assumed, initially respond positively to the ‘ameliorated’ climate of the Holocene."
New study maps where wheat, barley and rye grew before the first farmers found them (original news release)
Figure 1 Map of the study region (West Asia, grey box) with locations of Late Epipalaeolithic and Pre-Pottery Neolithic archaeobotanical assemblages.
Monday, February 16, 2026
5,300-year-old 'bow drill' rewrites story of ancient Egyptian tools
Amazing stuff!
"Researchers ... have re-examined a small copper-alloy object excavated a century ago from a cemetery at Badari in Upper Egypt, and concluded it is the earliest identified rotary metal drill from ancient Egypt, dating to the Predynastic period (late 4th millennium BCE), before the first pharaohs ruled.
The artefact (catalogued as 1924.948 A in the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge) was found in Grave 3932, the burial of an adult man. When first published in the 1920s, the artefact - which is only 63 millimetres long and weighs about 1.5 grams - was described as “a little awl of copper, with some leather thong wound round it.” That brief note proved easy to overlook, and the object attracted little attention for decades.
However, under magnification, the researchers found that the tool shows distinctive wear consistent with drilling: fine striations, rounded edges, and a slight curvature at the working end, all features that point to rotary motion, not simple puncturing. ..."
From the abstract:
"This study presents a reassessment of the earliest known metal drill from Egypt, the copperalloy artefact 1924.948 A (Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, The University of Cambridge) from Badari, datable to Naqada IID. Originally published by Guy Brunton but long neglected due to insufficient documentation, the object has been re-examined through microscopic and compositional analysis.
The drill exhibits clear evidence of rotary motion and retains remnants of a leather thong, identifying it as part of a bow drill mechanism.
Portable X-ray fluorescence analysis revealed a highly unusual CuAsNi material with the addition of silver and lead, suggesting either long-distance exchange networks or underexplored Eastern Desert ore sources.
The article situates the Badari drill within the broader context of Egyptian craft technologies, tracing the development and depiction of bow drills from the Predynastic through the New Kingdom.
The technological continuity observed across nearly two millennia stresses the enduring utility of the bow drill and accentuates its significance in both woodworking and bead production. This re-evaluation not only enriches our understanding of early Egyptian tool use but also raises intriguing questions about early metallurgical knowledge and interregional interactions in the ancient Near East."
5,300-year-old ‘bow drill’ rewrites story of ancient Egyptian tools (original news release) "A new study reveals that Egyptians were using a mechanically sophisticated drilling tool far earlier than previously suggested."
Original photograph of the artefact published in 1927 by Guy Brunton (left) and the actual artefact
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