Archaeology · Museums · Heritage
In January 2025 three robbers blew open a door of the Drents Museum in Assen in the Netherlands and made off with the golden helmet of Coțofenești and three bracelets. All the objects had been lent to the museum by Romania for the exhibition “Dacia: Empire of Gold and Silver”
Archaeology · Observations · Science
This time the culprit is a high-profile study by an international team of scientists, which pushes back the timeline of the mastery of fire by hundreds of thousands of years! In the famous Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa, where traces of fires some 1 million years old had previously
Archaeology · Heritage · Science
In 1990, off the coast of Benicarló, at the underwater site of Piedras de la Barbada in eastern Spain, 43 iron helmets were raised from a depth of six metres. For over thirty years they were held to be Roman, if only because helmets are a commonplace Roman find in
Archaeology · Faith · Observations · Society · Ethnography
In Lima, ahead of the presidential run-off, shamans gathered on Herradura beach and blessed portraits of both candidates, Fujimori and López Aliaga. The rite is repeated there every year and before every vote, and it is no exotica staged for the amusement of tourists but a living example of
Archaeology · Geography · Heritage · Science
Usually a shipwreck leaves behind little but potsherds, yet here whole stacks of well-preserved tableware lie on the seabed, and alongside the plates and cups there is glass, chandeliers and sealed crates. The Chinese porcelain was raised by a robotic manipulator fitted with suction cups. The find tells us
Archaeology · Science · Humour
While some look for traces of extraterrestrials in ancient monuments, others are establishing what ordinary mortals were capable of. A new study deals with the Altar Stone of Stonehenge, a six-tonne sandstone slab at the centre of the circle. The stone hails from the north-east of Scotland, from
Archaeology · Art · Heritage · Science
In Bacon Hole Cave in South Wales, red horizontal bands have been recognised as a cave painting more than 17,000 years old. They were found as long ago as 1912, but in 1928 they were written off as a natural seepage of iron oxide, and for almost a century
Archaeology · Science · Humour
For a hundred years El Mirón Cave in the Cantabrian mountains was judged of no promise to science and used to keep goats. In 1996 Lawrence Straus and Manuel González Morales began to dig at a spot abandoned since 1903, and over thirty years they drew out of this one
Archaeology · Art · Books · Monarchies · Museums · Observations · Heritage · Science · Society
“What is our life? A tale we shall not recall twice, once it has been told,” runs the thought from Byron’s “Don Juan”, and so at the end of every month we reassemble the key publications that can be reread and kept in memory. Archaeology and the origins of
Archaeology · Geography · Palaeontology
In two elite burials on the Pacific coast of Panama, El Caño and Sitio Conte, dating to around AD 800–1000, five emeralds mined in Colombia more than 1,000 years ago were found alongside gold, pyrite mirrors and fossilised megalodon teeth. It turned out that the stones had travelled
Archaeology · Heritage · Science
Since 1974 the Ndalambiri rock shelter in Angola has been protected as a monument of national heritage, thanks to a painted frieze 60 metres long with almost 1,200 figures. A team led by Isis Mesfin of the National Museum of Natural History in Paris has excavated there. The first
Archaeology · Faith
In Black Lake Cave on the Croatian peninsula of Pelješac, a terracotta head in the guise of a Greek theatrical mask, dating from the 3rd-4th century BC, has been found. The object is hollow, with a small hole for a cord: it hung on a wall. Vessels for wine