A retired policeman and a house painter have been arrested in northern Greece on suspicion of antiquities smuggling after an ancient gold wreath and armband were found in their car, police said Friday.
A team of maritime archaeologists will conduct extensive underwater surveys in the northwest coast of Qatar from October to look for signs of ancient trade and human inhabitation before the Gulf was flooded by sea level rise thousands of years ago.
Archaeologists believe a skeleton found with a musketball between his ribs is from one of the Duke of Wellington’s British regiments at Waterloo, and described the discovery of the skeleton as one of the best ever war finds.
It is the world’s biggest haul of human fossils and the most important palaeontology site in Europe: a subterranean chamber at the bottom of a 50ft shaft in the deepest recesses of the Atapuerca cavern in northern Spain. But Britain’s leading expert on human evolution, Professor Chris Stringer, has warned that the team in charge of La Sima has got the ages of its fossils wrong by 200,000 years and has incorrectly identified the species of ancient humans found there.
A warship submerged for two centuries in a river near Washington, D.C., could provide new insight into the relatively obscure War of 1812, say archaeologists who are preparing to excavate the wreck.
Colorful patterned clothes appear much earlier in the Iron Age than previously thought according to new analyses of 180 textile samples from 26 different bog finds, carried out by Ulla Mannering, a senior researcher and archaeologist at the Danish National Research Foundation’s Centre for Textile Research at the National Museum.
During their routine excavation of the southwestern burial shaft in the tomb of the nomarch Ahanakht I, Belgian excavators found they were looking at an important burial dating from the beginning of the Middle Kingdom era. It was filled with a large number of funerary objects which were still in situ, and these helped explain how the ancient Egyptians practised their funerary rituals.
Archaeologists in London have discovered the remains of an early playhouse used by William Shakespeare’s company where “Romeo and Juliet” and “Henry V” were first performed.
Campaigns to combat archaeological tomb raiders have notched up some big successes, but not enough to seriously dent the illegal antiquities trade. But plans are afoot to put thousands of previously unpublished photos and documents about stolen artefacts online to create WikiLoot, a new crowdsourcing, data mining experiment to help track down some of the world’s oldest treasures.
One result of the austerity measures imposed on Greece by the European economic establishment is deep cultural budget cuts, which have led to important sites being left unprotected and many galleries, like those at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, being closed to the public because of staffing shortages.
In the ruins of a Buddhist monastery in Afghanistan, archaeologists have uncovered a stone statue that seems to depict the prince Siddhartha before he founded Buddhism.
Click here to see a series of photographs of artifacts recovered before the construction of Olympic Park in London, from Neolithic axes to Victorian trash.
Security guards foiled an attempt to steal an antique panel depicting King Merenptah, the fourth ruler of the 19th Dynasty of Ancient Egypt, in the Selsela mountain quarries 20 kilometers north of Kom Ombo, Aswan.
The Oseberg finding is considered one of the most important testimonies of the Viking Age and is one of the most frequently visited sights in Norway. Yet, they are now in serious danger of collapse because the wood fibres in the artefacts are disintegrating due to early preservation techniques and conservators are rushing to find ways to preserve them.
An archaeological collaboration between William & Mary and the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation hopes to find conclusive evidence of the Bray School, an 18th-century institution dedicated to the education of free and enslaved black children.
