Archaeology · Geography · Ethnography
This is a gilded bronze earring from a tenth-century burial investigated by an expedition of the Academy of Sciences in the Sayan Mountains of southern Siberia. The grave, discovered as long ago as 2014 during preparations for the building of a railway, contained the remains of a woman, a
Archaeology · Science · Nature
It turns out the Etruscans cloned a single grape variety for centuries. And it was white. In Chianti, at the Etruscan-Roman site of Cetamura, researchers studied grape pips from the bottoms of wells cut into the rock. They found that most of the pips in the study date from
Archaeology · Science · Ethnography
A team of researchers at Yale University has established that the earliest populations of Near Oceania interbred with at least three distinct groups related to the Denisovans. The conclusion rests on an analysis of the genomes of 177 people from 12 populations in Papua New Guinea, the Bismarck Archipelago and
Museums · Heritage · Society
Szwarcwald ran the museum from 2020 to 2022 and left soon after his public statement. Insurance and other major expenditure are the responsibility of the museum's board, so this is in effect a story of a confrontation between a salaried director, who had embarked on modernisation, and his
Architecture · Faith · Heritage
The golden dove on the neo-Baroque façade of Amsterdam's De Duif church recalls the seventeenth century, when a clandestine Catholic congregation, Het Vrededuifje, the "Little Dove of Peace", stood on the site of this church. When all religions were formally put on an equal footing
Archive · London · Monarchies · Society
I cannot find a good-quality photograph of this act, but the document is very famous. And it begins with the following words: Le Roy le Veult soit baillé aux Seigneurs. A cette Bille avecque des amendemens les Seigneurs sont assentuz. A ces Amendemens les Communes sont assentuz. And no,
London · Observations · Society
I noticed that the website of Royal Mail, the state post of the United Kingdom, works in two languages, English and Cymraeg, that is, Welsh. One wonders why only two, and why precisely these two? The United Kingdom has, in fact, no constitutionally enshrined state language. The status of English
NB! · Art · Paris
Observations · Heritage · Society
Yet another absurd piece of news. The restoration of monuments is being removed from independent expert review. On 12 June a law was signed that, from 1 March 2027, changes the procedure for work on cultural heritage sites. Amendments to Federal Law No. 73-FZ and to the Town Planning
Archaeology · Observations · Science
University of Iowa researchers suggest that the regulatory "volume knobs" in DNA were already present in Neanderthals. According to the authors of the study, the capacity for language depends most strongly on tiny stretches of the genome, the regulatory regions known as HAQERs, which occupy less than a
NB! · Art · Moscow · Society Pages
Observations · Science · People · Humour
Vasily Belokurov, one of the 2026 Kavli Prize laureates in astrophysics, is a galactic archaeologist. I have read his article about intruders and learnt that the constancy of the starry sky, to which people have prayed from the Palaeolithic to our own day, is an optical illusion the length of