archaeology

The Guardian visits a huge, 5,000-year-old tomb complex on Scotland’s Orkney Isles that reveals a surprisingly sophisticated level of engineering know-how:

The tomb measures

The expat news magazine Wanted in Rome reports on an archaeological discovery in the shadow of the Vatican – a theater dedicated to the notorious Emperor Nero before 70 CE, but lost… Read the rest “Theater of Nero discovered in Rome.”

IFLScience reports on some stylish, retro bangles coming from a Brazilian designer that are taking the world by storm … because they were made from giant sloth bones about 25,000 … Read the rest “Bone jewelry means humans were in the Americas *before* the Bering Land Bridge.”

CNN reports on a Spanish discovery that a 5,000-year-old skeleton buried with an elephant tusk, an ostrich egg, an ivory comb and two daggers – one ivory and the other amber –… Read the rest “Ivory Lady was a prehistoric warrior queen (and maybe a warrior witch queen, too).”

Science News reports on a controversy over Homo naledi, a human-like ape from 160,000 years before the first Homo sapiens, who might have been burying its dead and decorating their gravesites… Read the rest “A human-like ape might have decorated the graves of its dead 330,000 years ago.”

They used to be above water, but the National Park Service reports that divers surveying a sunken island off Garden Key in the Dry Tortugas have found the ruins of a quarantine hospital and… Read the rest “Sunken cemetery, hospital found off the Dry Tortugas.”

Riddles are funny! BBC reports on the discovery at the Hathor Temple in southern Egypt of a small sphinx with an engaging grin that might have been modeled on the Emperor Claudius:

The limestone

Science News looks at a Viking burial site in England where animals were buried alongside humans, and finds that radioactive traces show these critters traveled to Great Britain aboard… Read the rest “Vikings brought animals to England, radioactive analysis shows.”

USA Today (among other outlets) celebrated the discovery of an inscription in the oldest known alphabet – a 3,700-year-old Canaanite ivory comb engraved with 17 letters spelling… Read the rest “Oldest full sentence ever found is a warning against beard lice.”

Phys.org decodes the messages left in the skin of mummies unearthed in the 1920s – ancient Egyptian women who had themselves permanently marked with signs meant to inspire a complication-free… Read the rest “Ancient Egyptian ladies’ tattoos were meant to protect them during childbirth.”

Science magazine recently covered the tale archaeologists uncovered about one of the earliest known settlers of Borneo, a young hunter-gatherer who had an injured foot amputated …… Read the rest “Amputation 31,000 years ago, among the prehistoric artists of Borneo.”