Archaeology

As temperatures climb, so does violence. At least that's the conclusion reached by researchers looking at how ancient cultures in the south central Andes responded to climate change about 1,000 years ago. It may be an important cautionary tale.

Archeologists are great at determining what life looked like in ancient days, but not necessarily how it smelled. Now, though, a 2,000-year-old crystal container has shed light on the scent you might have encountered on the streets of ancient Rome.

In one of the more stomach-churning studies, a team led by the University of Cambridge has probed poo from two ancient toilets in Jerusalem and discovered traces of a microorganism called Giardia duodenalis, which causes diarrhea in humans.

Mandrake and henbane are almost synonymous with secret rituals. In fact, after analyzing hair samples from a secret cache in a Menorcan cave, new evidence indicates that plants like these were ingested during burial ceremonies about 3,000 years ago.

A set of lengthy silver and gold tubes dug up from a famous grave in the the Caucuses has been found to represent the oldest surviving drinking straws, with the scientists behind the discovery believing they were used for communal beer consumption.

A new study is presenting archeological evidence of the oldest known bone tools used for making clothes. The tools, found in a cave in Morocco, suggest humans were skinning animals for fur to wear as clothes up to 120,000 years ago.

A new method of handwriting analysis is offering fresh clues as to who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls. Testing the machine learning tool on one of the most famous ancient scrolls has revealed not one but two scribes were responsible for the ancient text.

A team of scientists at the University College London has used 3D tomography to shed new light on the Antikythera Mechanism – the world's first computer, which was an accurate model of the Cosmos as it was known to the ancient Greeks.

A 3,500-year-old Egyptian medical text is shedding new light on the ancient practice of mummification. Recently discovered inside a much larger work, the papyrus document being studied by University of Copenhagen is the oldest known mummification manual.

Archeologists from University College London (UCL) have found the remains of a stone circle in west Wales, which indicate that part of Stonehenge was made from recycled stones. Excavations at Waun Mawn suggest that bluestones from the Welsh circle were moved 140 miles (225 km) away, about 5,000 years ago.

A novel analytical technique has revealed undiscovered compounds in an ancient Maya drug container previously thought to only be used for tobacco. The findings offer the first clear evidence that the Maya mixed tobacco with other plant materials.

A seven-year global effort has used almost 15,000 samples from a variety of sources to draw new, more accurate calibration curves to enable more precise radiocarbon dating of objects as old as 55,000 years.