Ongoing excavations at Sedeinga, a 2,000-year-old necropolis in northern Sudan, have uncovered the remains of at least 35 densely-clustered pyramid burials – and an inscription asking the gods to ‘take care of Granny’. Identified by the French Archaeological Mission, the pyramids were built as part of a burial ground probably containing several hundred monuments, during [...]
A Colourful Colosseum?
Conservation work on the Colosseum’s only remaining covered passageway has revealed fragments of colourful frescoes and graffiti from the Roman period. Previously hidden beneath layers of calcified rock and dirt, the red, black, and blue scribbles suggest that the white and grey marble surfaces of the 1st-century AD amphitheatre might once have been much more [...]
Insight of the Valkyrie
A small silver figurine, found on the Danish island of Funen, is the first-known 3D representation of a valkyrie from the Viking Age, archaeologists say. Images of armed women interpreted as valkyries – literally ‘choosers of the slain’, companions of the god Odin, who in Norse mythology are sent to battlefields to fetch warriors fated [...]
Russia’s wealthy warrior
Archaeologists have identified a spectacular 2,200-year-old warrior burial in Russia, part of a previously unknown necropolis in the central Caucasus mountains. Located 800m (2,600ft) above sea level, near modern Mezmay, the site came to the attention of archaeologists after Krasnodar Regional Museum was alerted to large-scale looting in the area. Museum staff, directed by Nikolay [...]
CWA Photo of the Year Competition – results
March 22, 2013
Filed Under: News
CWA readers clearly are a talented bunch: we were overwhelmed by huge number and high quality of the entries for our first CWA photographic competition and giving our judge Adam Stanford, of Aerial-Cam, a truly difficult task in picking a winner. From Classical temples to remote Maya ruins, arty shots to scientific documentation, artefacts to [...]
Finding Richard III
March 21, 2013
Filed Under: News
At a Leicester press conference on 4 February, experts announced that the human remains found beneath a city centre carpark last August are ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ those of Richard III. Addressing over 100 journalists from all over the world, the panel reported that the skeleton was that of an adult male, aged in his late [...]
DNA detective work: identifying Richard III
March 21, 2013
Filed Under: News
Following questions about the validity of using a genetic sample from a modern day relative of Richard III to help identify his remains, Dr Turi King of the University of Leicester guides us through the process she used. I’m afraid I must start with a quick DNA primer! I promise to keep it short. Our DNA can [...]
Ancient arteries and ‘modern’ diseases
March 11, 2013
Filed Under: News
Hardening of the arteries is commonly associated with modern lifestyle choices, but newly-published research indicates that it affected people across the ancient world. Full-body CT scans of 137 adult mummies from ancient Egypt, Peru, southwest America (Ancestral Puebloans of the Archaic and Basketmaker II cultures), and the Aleutian Islands in Alaska (Unangan people), revealed that [...]
Worlds oldest artificial pigment put to modern use
March 5, 2013
Filed Under: News
Egyptian blue, the world’s oldest artificial pigment, could be put to a range of modern uses from medical imaging devices to remote controls for televisions, newly-published research says. First produced 5,000 years ago by the ancient Egyptians, who called it hsbd-iryt (‘artificial lapis lazuli’), the bright blue pigment was highly-prized in Antiquity, used to decorate tombs, sculptures, [...]
Ice Age Art: arrival of the modern mind
February 6, 2013
Filed Under: News, Blog, Exhibition
We may not know exactly how they looked, we certainly do not know how they sounded. But the art of our earliest ancestors speaks as eloquently to us today as it did to their contemporaries, transcending the tens of thousands of years between them and us. According to the new exhibition at the British Museum in London, [...]
Archaeologists find a 1,600-year-old tumour containing teeth
January 25, 2013
Filed Under: News
Archaeologists examining the 1,600-year-old remains of a woman from Roman Spain have made a unique – if grisly – discovery: a calcified ovarian tumour containing four teeth and a piece of bone. Known as a ‘teratoma’, the spherical mass measured 4.3cm (1.7in) in diameter and was found in the right-hand part of the woman’s pelvis by researchers [...]
Lucy in the trees with primates
Australopithecus afarensis such as ‘Lucy’ (CWA 32) may not represent the moment hominids finally came down from the trees after all, newly published research suggests. Ground-dwelling bipedalism is often held up by anthropologists as an essential marker of ‘human-ness’, setting us apart from all other great apes living today, who spend at least some of [...]
Meet the Hobbit
Modern humans can now look their recently discovered relative, Homo floresiensis, in the face thanks to a new reconstruction unveiled at an archaeological conference in Australia. This species of early human was first identified in 2003 when researchers led by Professor Mike Morwood and Thomas Sutikna found the remains of nine individuals in Liang Bua, [...]
Practical Peking Man
Also more sophisticated than previously thought is Peking Man, who may have made clothing and composite tools, archaeologists say. A subset of Homo erectus living in China c.200,000-750,000 years ago, the existence of Peking Man was revealed between 1929 and 1937 when a number of fossils, mostly from skulls, were excavated at Zhoukoudian, 55km (34 [...]
Birdmen of Koutroulou Magoula
Archaeologists have uncovered more than 300 clay figurines depicting male and female forms, as well as human-bird hybrids, at Koutroulou Magoula, a Neolithic settlement in central Greece. Ranging from 3-4cm to 10-12cm in length (about 1-4.5in), the models were scattered all over the 4ha site (nearly 10 acres), with some recovered from the foundations of [...]
Core of the matter
Archaeologists have identified a 30,000-year-old stone tool as China’s earliest-known engraved object – a key marker in the development of modern human behaviour. Found at Shuidonggou in the 1980s, the 68mm-long (2.7in) core’s significance was realised during recent analysis of the site’s stone assemblage by Professor Gao Xing and Dr Peng Fei from the Chinese [...]
A tall tale
A 16- to 20-year-old Roman from the 3rd century AD represents the first complete skeleton of a person with gigantism known from Antiquity, according to a paper in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism. At 2m (6ft 7in), he would have towered over contemporaries in imperial Rome, when men averaged around 1.7m (5ft 7in) [...]
Filing down dates
Polynesia was among the last places to be settled by humans, with the Lapita people arriving around 3,000 years ago (CWA 53). Now, according to a report published in PLOS ONE, the start of this occupation can be narrowed down to a 16-year window with high-precision dating. Uranium-thorium analysis is used on materials with high [...]
Extra mature cheese
Cheese-making developed in Northern Europe over 7,000 years ago, possibly because our ancestors were lactose intolerant. Pieces of sieve-like pottery, excavated in Poland 30 years ago and dated to the 6th millennium BC, were typologically interpreted as cheese-strainers. Now results, published in Nature, from the analysis of fatty acids trapped in their fabric has revealed [...]
Sealing Norse Greenlanders’ fate?
The mystery of what happened to Greenland’s Norse population is one step closer to being solved, as new evidence suggests that the colony did not die out because its inhabitants were unable to adapt to their new environment. The first Viking settlers arrived in c.AD 1000, and over time their population swelled to around 3,000 [...]
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