News

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.

Archaeologists uncover the largest known corpus of late prehistoric administrative artefacts in the ancient world in western Iran, prompting us to reconsider our understanding of early bureaucratic institutions.

Analysis of mother and infant skeletons from Iron Age and Roman England shows how health was impacted across generations, finding that, whilst health did decline, this was only in urban centres. The new diseases, class divides, and infrastructure introduced to cities by the Roman administration had a long-term, negative impact on the health of ordinary people.

Analysing and, for the first time, playing conch shell trumpets from Neolithic Catalonia indicates they were useful for long-distance communication and could even have been musical instruments, making them powerful prehistoric forces of economic and social connection.

Following their discovery of a major Bronze Age settlement, possibly an early urban centre, in the heart of the Kazakh steppe, the authors write on their recent excavations at the site and next steps for the research in the latest Antiquity Blog.

Archaeologists have uncovered a vast 1600 BC settlement in the heart of Kazakhstan’s grasslands: an early Bronze Age city that shows that the settlements of Bronze Age polities in the steppe were just as sophisticated as those of contemporary, more traditionally ‘urban’ civilisations.