Conwy axe mould: why two halves count as treasure
A coroner in Wales ruled that the two halves of a 3,400-year-old axe mould are separate items, so both count as treasure under the Treasure Act.
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Archaeology.
Objects, evidence and the careful work of making sense of the past.
The Maya built a year into Mexico's El Castillo pyramid
El Castillo at Chichén Itzá in Mexico has 91 steps on each side plus a top platform, making 365, one for each day of the solar year.
Bulgaria's Varna gold undid the myth of an equal Copper Age
A cemetery near Varna in Bulgaria held 6,500-year-old gold in only a handful of graves, the earliest evidence that some people outranked others.
Göbekli Tepe may have put the temple before the farm
Klaus Schmidt argued hunter-gatherers built Göbekli Tepe before anyone farmed. Digs since his death in 2014 have found houses and signs of year-round living.
Two scholars needed a year to rebuild one Dead Sea scroll
Searches of 11 caves yielded around 900 Dead Sea Scrolls, mostly fragments. Rebuilding is slow, and a neural network has told two scribes apart.
The Antikythera mechanism's rebuilt front still needs proof
A 2021 model reconstructs the Antikythera mechanism's lost front gearing, but nobody has shown the ancient Greeks could have built it.
Carbon dating can age remains up to about 60,000 years old
Carbon dating measures decaying carbon-14 against stable carbon-12 to work out how long ago an organism died, a method Willard Libby built in Chicago.
Museums scan mummies to read them without unwrapping
CT scanners let researchers see inside a wrapped mummy in cross-section, revealing bones, teeth, amulets and embalming tools without cutting the wrappings.
One Bronze Age wreck off Turkey began underwater archaeology
In 1960 George Bass, a Penn graduate student, led the first archaeologist-run dig of an ancient wreck. He later founded the Institute of Nautical Archaeology.
Neolithic builders aligned monuments to the solstice sun
Two wooden posts near Stonehenge may be the earliest solar sightline there. Later Neolithic tombs and stones caught the solstice sun too.
At Grasshopper Pueblo, teeth showed who came from elsewhere
Strontium locked into tooth enamel records the rocks under a person's childhood home. Archaeologists compare it with bone to track ancient migrants.