Project Gallery

Spanning 760km2 and identifying 603 sites covering thousands of years of (pre)history, the Mariwan Archaeological Survey provides a comprehensive examination of settlement history in north-western Iran. By employing advanced survey methods and targeting previously unexplored regions, evidence and understanding of Mariwan’s cultural dynamics and historical interactions is substantially enhanced.

The 2022–2023 Pleistocene and Early Holocene Archaeological Surface Survey in Mardin Province, south-eastern Türkiye, identified prehistoric settlements, including Şika Rika 5, that provide new insights into the early stages of settlement in the Northern Khabur Region.

The WEAR project is developing integrative methods to analyse and predict use-related shape transformation of Neolithic stone tools from Central Europe through experimental archaeology and computational modelling.

Adapting to a global urban future requires diverse, long-term perspectives on urbanism. URBank supports this by bringing together global deep-time urban datasets in a modern open-science computing platform. Its design eschews checklist definitions of cities, representing the variability of past urbanism and enabling systematic comparative spatiotemporal research.

This article examines a monumental structure in the North Pontic Steppe that was repurposed as a burial mound in the late fourth millennium BCE. The authors argue that this repurposing reflects a pattern of Yamna appropriation of ritual spaces, conceptualised as a ‘continuity of sacred spaces’.

This project investigates archaeological material collected from north-west China in the 1920s and housed at the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, Stockholm. Finds and archival materials are examined and catalogued to learn about prehistoric cultural interactions and to reconnect discoveries with the original excavation contexts and excavators.

Excavations at Kalat-e Yavar offer new insights into prehistoric connectivity between the Iranian Plateau and Central Asia. Stratified deposits yielded ceramics and burials from the third/second millennia BCE, alongside architectural remains, pits, faunal/botanical assemblages and a kiln, marking the Bojnord Plain as a cultural contact zone.

Newly discovered open-air sites along the Dorps River in the arid Karoo (South Africa), a region with uneven archaeological coverage, demonstrate multiple visits to this favoured habitat in the late Holocene Later Stone Age (c. 3000–2000 BP).

A geophysical survey at Cahal Pech, Belize, identified one of the earliest securely dated lithic caches from the Maya lowlands. Linked to Middle Preclassic (800–400 cal BC) monumental architecture and communal ceremonial events, this find demonstrates the effectiveness of gradiometry for detecting ritual deposits.

Rescue excavations at Mersin (Semnan, Iran) reveal a tightly patterned Achaemenid-period cemetery. Thirty-four graves, excavated between 2014 and 2024, combine local mortuary traditions with imperial-era objects, demonstrating how provincial communities selectively adopted imperial markers to negotiate identity and refining narratives for the empire’s north-eastern interior.

Ostrów Lednicki was a centre of the Piast dynasty (tenth–fourteenth centuries AD), laying the foundations for the development of the Polish state. A collapsed tenth-century wooden fortification associated with Bolesław the Brave (the first king of Poland) and its unique sculptural element provide insights into early-medieval construction techniques.

A community-based initiative in Ghana has mapped and partially excavated an earthwork site in the Oti region. Radiocarbon dating shows that the site was occupied between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries AD, while archaeo- and ethnobotanical research connects historical plant use with modern practices, contributing to our understanding of West African earthworks.