The smell of Venus de Milo
NPR reports on new findings for classical works of art. It’s pretty well known now that the stark white of ancient Greek marble statues was […]
archaeology
Women’s history found under immigrant asylum floorboards
Australia’s ABC reports on clues to a hidden past being found under the floor of a former immigration depot and women’s asylum, shedding new light […]
Roman battlefield (probably) discovered in the U.K.
BBC has news of a discovery (yet to be confirmed, likely accurate) made using a combination of historical knowledge and ground-penetrating radar that shows how […]
Lost Mayan city found by accident… online.
BBC reports on the accidental discovery of an immense, forgotten Mayan city in the Mexican jungle by an archaeology PhD student browsing the internet: Archaeologists […]
They found the body of someone from the sagas.
iScience peers back through the mists of time to the Viking Age, when a saga describes a dead man being tossed down a castle’s well. […]
The real “paleo diet” was mostly vegetarian.
CNN has reported on prehistoric remains found in North Africa that reveal more evidence that our primordial ancestors didn’t really eat a meat-heavy diet, but […]
SONG: Migration Roads
SONG: “Migration Roads”. (available as .ogg here) ARTIST: grant. SOURCE: Based on LiveScience, 3 May 2024, “1st Americans came over in 4 different waves from […]
Science Art: Boars’s tusk helmet NAMA6568, Athens, Greece.
This is a photo taken in 2015 by Wikimedia Commons user Jebulon, of a helmet made for a Mycenaean warrior between 3.300 and 3,400 years […]
Marines combat-tested Bronze-Age armor. It worked.
Science Alert covers a (mock) battle that solved an ancient mystery – when Greek marines figured out if the 3,500-year-old Dendra armor was genuinely useful […]
Languages show four waves of migration into prehistoric North America.
LiveScience has a dramatic development in a field I don’t think I’d ever considered: Linguistic archaeology. A historical linguist from UC Berkeley has used a […]
Porcelain gallbladder exhumed from asylum cemetery.
Live Science reports on a first-of-its-kind archaeological discovery in the graveyard of the Mississippi State Lunatic Asylum, where a woman buried a century ago was […]
SONG: I Am Your Library
SONG: “I Am Your Library”. (available as .ogg here) ARTIST: grant. SOURCE: Based on Science Daily, 25 Mar 2024, “New archive of ancient human brains […]
Science Art: Pianta di Roma, by Giovanni Battista Piranesi, 1758.
It’s a map. An old map of an even older city. This is Piranesi’s map of ancient Rome (“and Forma Urbis”) from Le Antichità Romane, […]
“An archive of ancient human brains.”
Science Daily has research from University of Oxford archaeologists that is potentially upending a long-standing belief about digging up our long-ago ancestors. After looking through […]
Ancient stash of hallucinogenic medicine discovered.
Science magazine reports on the Dutch discovery of, basically, Roman-era drugs hidden inside a hollow bone. The black henbane seeds could have been used to […]