#archaeology

#archaeology

The oldest known pieces of sewn clothing have been discovered in a cave in Oregon, potentially rewriting all of human history. Researchers from the US uncovered pieces of animal hide stitched together from the end of the last Ice Age, approximately 12,000 years ago. That would mean that humans in North America had advanced skills, specifically for working with plants, animals, and wood, thousands of years before the Great Pyramid of Egypt was constructed.

In a white and sterile office that could belong to any one of the warehouses that dot this industrial strip between Brisbane's airport and horse-racing precinct, a young woman is engrossed in a puzzle. Only this puzzle comprises, perhaps, three different sets, each almost (but not quite) identical to the other and none likely to be completed. Emily Totivan wears blue plastic gloves. She is an archaeology student helping to catalogue artefacts.

While the bone was worn and poorly preserved, archaeologists managed to identify its origin by comparing it with modern elephant and mammoth bones. Despite there not being enough DNA to confirm the exact species, the researchers were able to carbon date a tiny sample of the bone. This places the elephant's death between the late fourth and early third centuries BC - right in the middle of the Second Punic War.

Ceramic works by Nicole Cherubini emphasize motifs of collage at Friedman Benda in New York, while the Berlin show, Vital Architecture: Between Idealism and Reality, turns attention to the built environment, tracing how architectural thinking negotiates environmental conditions and history through research-driven practice. Questions of time, inheritance, and transformation run through the month.

Treasures unearthed by hundreds of archaeologists so far during work on the controversial planned HS2 train line have been shown exclusively to the BBC. The 450,000 objects, which are being held in a secret warehouse, include a possible Roman gladiator's tag, a hand axe that may be more than 40,000 years old and 19th Century gold dentures. It is an "unprecedented" amount and array of items, which will yield new insights into Britain's past, says the Centre for British Archaeology.

Archaeologists in Mexico have uncovered a 1,400-year-old tomb in the Central Valleys of Oaxaca that had been lost to history. The stone structure, built by the Zapotec culture, known as Be'ena'a, or 'The Cloud People', is adorned with sculptures, murals and carved symbols that suggest ritual significance. The Zapotec believed their ancestors descended from the clouds and that, in death, their souls returned to the heavens as spirits.

Pottery made by people of the Halafian culture, who inhabited northern Mesopotamia between around 6200 and 5500 BC, is painted with flowers that have 4, 8, 16 or 32 petals, and some show arrangements of 64 flowers. These patterns show a clear understanding of symmetry and spatial division long before written numbers came into use around 3400 BC, argue scientists in a new study. The skill might have helped the Halafian people with tasks such as sharing harvests or dividing communal fields, the authors say.

Taking its name from the word for "boiling waters," Ocmulgee Mounds National Historical Park in Georgia dates back more than 12,000 years and features Indigenous earthen mounds used for burials and ceremonies. Today, it's in talks to be designated a national park with expanded acreage. "This was a capital city for the Creek Confederacy," says Tracie Revis, a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation and director of advocacy for the Ocmulgee National Park and Preserve Initiative (ONPPI).

The use of poisoned hunting weapons is one of the most important innovations in the history of humans obtaining meat and has intrigued researchers for centuries. Until now, the oldest evidence came from bone arrowheads with traces of toxic glycosides found in Kruger Cave, South Africa, dating back to the mid-Holocene, about 6,700 years ago. However, a study published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances significantly extends that timeline.

Researchers have found traces of what appears to be plant-derived poison on tiny stone arrowheads from South Africa dated to 60,000 years ago. The finding pushes back the origin of this revolutionary hunting technology by tens of thousands of years. Scientists have long been fascinated by the development of poisoned hunting weapons. For one thing, they would have seriously leveled up our ancestors' foraging game.

The word vampire first appears in English in sensational accounts of a revenant panic in Serbia in the early 18th century. One case in 1725 concerned a recently deceased peasant farmer, Peter Blagojevic, who rose from the grave, visited his wife to demand his shoes, and then murdered nine people in the night. When his body was disinterred, his mouth was found full of fresh blood. The villagers staked the corpse and then burned it.

Research suggests that the introduction of monetary systems in Central Europe can be traced back to Celtic mercenaries. These men were paid for their services in Greece with coins and brought them back home with them. Around the middle of the 3rd century BC, the Celts began their own coinage, imitating gold coins of the Macedonian king Philip II (359336 BC).

A unique archaeological site at Pompeii, Italy, reveals the secrets of peculiarly durable Roman building materials.

Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis is a stunning reimagining of the 1996 genre-defining game.

Below, we examine how it carried the torch of the classic films to create the best new piece of Indy fiction in decades. Indiana Jones is one of the most revered blockbuster stories of the 1980s. Spielberg and Lucas' work on the original trilogy stands alongside Jaws and Star Wars as timeless classics that are worth revisiting regularly. The more recent entries--the Crystal Skull and the Dial of Destiny--do little to live up to the standard that the first three set.

The mystery of when, how and perhaps most importantly why a giant naked figure was carved into a dizzyingly steep hillside in the English West Country has been a source of wonder and intrigue for centuries. Future generations may come closer to solving the puzzle of the Cerne Giant after the National Trust stepped in to buy 340 acres of land around the 55-metre (180ft) figure. The planned purchase is expected to clear the way for more archaeological investigations around Britain's largest chalk hill figure, which looms over the rolling Dorset landscape.

An archaeological investigation before redevelopment of the railway station in Manduria, 20 miles east of Taranto, southeast Italy, has uncovered a large section of a defensive wall built by the pre-Italic Messapian people in the 4th century B.C. The structure is composed of limestone blocks that were precisely worked and laid dry in an alternating pattern. It was built inside a moat that encircled the inner wall of the older Archaic-era defensive walls.

Senon was an important city of the Mediomatrici tribe, documented in Roman sources after the conquest of Gaul (57 B.C.). While pre-Roman Gallic remains had been found before, the excavations were too small in scale to draw any conclusions about the extent and nature of the settlement. The excavation revealed the remains of timber-framed constructions that proved it was a fully developed settlement from the middle of the 2nd century B.C. to the beginning of the Roman period.

In that job, the 73-year-old Parkman used artifacts found in old ruins or the chemistry of rocks and layers of soil to piece together possible narratives about life in the Bay Area as far back as tens of thousands of years ago or as recently as the late 20th century. More than being a scientist or historian, Parkman has always seen himself as a storyteller with an innate curiosity about other worlds and a desire to imagine the people who lived in them.

This mission offers an unprecedented insight into the agricultural and socio-economic organization of the frontier regions of Roman Africa,

Laurent Davin, an archaeologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem who made the finding, called it 'extraordinary on multiple levels'. 'The depicted scene relates to the imaginary mating of a gander spirit with a woman,' he told the Daily Mail. 'Such imaginary mating between animal spirits and humans are very common in animistic societies across the world in specific situations such as erotic dreams, shamanistic visions and myths.' Although the detail is hard to make out, scientists have recreated the scene in a new illustration.

The face's features-"deep-set eye sockets, a flat nose, and lips marked by a cleft that also emphasizes the chin"-suggest that the face belongs to "an elderly man." The INAH statement describes that when the 18-inch-tall carving was uncovered, it was attached to the remains of the foundation of a building with an ovoid floor plan and an entrance facing west, to maximize sunlight.