News

Examination of four of Tanzania’s most iconic heritage sites finds they are, in the interest of generating income from tourists, being destroyed by the same institutions tasked with preserving them.

Microscopic analysis uncovers traces of a highly toxic chemical used as anaesthetic on Ming Chinese medical instruments, indicating refined medical practices were understood and followed in ancient China as early as the 14^th century CE.

Zooarchaeological and isotopic analysis of pigeon bones from Bronze Age Cyprus suggests pigeons were domesticated centuries earlier than previously attested, encouraging us to see pigeons as an important part of human life for millennia.

Dr Nicholas Skopal writes on his research on the giant stone jars of northern Laos, exploring how he and the team may have finally solved one of Southeast Asia’s great archaeological mysteries.

Excavation of a large jar on the Plain of Jars, Laos found the remains of at least 37 individuals buried within, indicating deposition in jars was part of ancestral mortuary rites that spanned generations and showing connections as far away as Western Asia.

We will be at the Society for American Archaeology Annual Meeting in San Francisco, California from 29th April-3rd May 2026. Come along to meet our editor, grab some swag and find out how you can publish your research in Antiquity!

Examination of plague victims from a 17^th century AD hospital in Basel, Switzerland reveals the majority of those who died from the plague were working youths from lower social classes, showing how social status impacted disease mortality in the past just as much as it does today.

Ancient DNA analysis of individuals buried in chambered tombs from Early Neolithic northern Scotland finds some were closely related along the male line of descent, indicating paternal relatedness was an important social connection to the first Neolithic people in Britain and suggesting funerary landscapes were monumental signifiers of kinship and group identities.

Archaeologists have uncovered one of Scandinavia's earliest ship burials at the monumental burial mound of Herlaugshaugen, Norway, pre-dating the Viking Age and indicating pre-Viking cultural connections around the North Sea.

Excavation at the Maya centre of Ucanal, Guatemala finds evidence for the construction of open council houses, in which political leaders deliberated in public plazas, indicating the increasing importance of consensus-based politics during the Terminal Classic period.

Analysis of ash, preserved in Pompeian incense burners, finds evidence for the burning of frankincense sourced from as far away as India or sub-Saharan Africa, shedding light on daily religious life in the Roman Empire and the long-distance trade that facilitated it.

The first precise timeline of coral building construction in French Polynesia paints a clearer picture of everyday life in the Pacific following European contact and helps understand past ecological change.

Archaeological study of the traces of a war crime committed in 2022, during the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, helps preserve the collective memory of this traumatic experience and demonstrates the potential of archaeology in helping to understand and memorialise very recent historic events.

The first analysis of the largest deposit of Iron Age metalwork ever encountered in Britain leads us to rethink the British Iron Age, indicating a level of wealth and ceremonial connections to Europe not previously observed.

Charred timbers and plant fibres at 2nd millennium BC Cabezo Redondo, southern Spain, are likely the remains of a loom, providing a rare opportunity to reconstruct Bronze Age weaving techniques and the origins of the textile revolution.

Discovery of 30 prehistoric settlements in south-eastern Anatolia have big implications for our understanding of the origins of sedentary life in Western Asia.

Chemical analysis of skeletal remains from medieval Cambridge indicates people from different social groups ate different foods, showing how inequality in medieval England was not just cultural, but also physically embodied.

Use wear and AI-simulated play indicate a stone artefact from the Roman Netherlands was a game board used to play a blocking game, pushing evidence for blocking games back centuries and providing a ground-breaking new method to study past games.

Discovery of 4,500-year-old archaeological sites on the remote Kitsissut islands, north of Greenland, shows the first people in the High Arctic were skilled seafarers who actively shaped Arctic ecosystems from the start, redefining how we understand Indigenous influence on Arctic environments.

Excavations at St. Michael's Mount, Cornwall, England uncover evidence for prehistoric tin production, indicating that the island was Ictis, the tin trading island described by Pytheas the Greek in c. 320 BC in the earliest written account of Britain.

Mesolithic artefacts at the Early Neolithic site of Eilsleben indicate a never-before-seen level of contact and technology transfer between hunter-gatherers and farmers on Europe's Neolithic frontier.