Offa's Dyke still shadows the border between England and Wales
A Mercian king raised an 80-mile bank and ditch after Welsh raids. The border still crosses it, and a 2022 survey found only 8.7% in good condition.
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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.
Geneticists extract ancient DNA from a single tooth
Teeth outlast bone, and DNA survives in them long after death. Geneticists read it in sealed, filtered rooms, and Neanderthal plaque even shows past meals.
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.
A decree on the Rosetta Stone let Champollion read hieroglyphs
A priests' decree of 196 BC, carved in three scripts, let Jean-François Champollion read hieroglyphs in 1822. Thomas Young had laid the groundwork.
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.
Tree rings date a drought to the exact year
A tree lays down one ring a year, wide when the season is wet and narrow when it is dry. Matched across many trees, those rings date droughts to the year.
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.
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.