Innehållsförteckning för September/October 2025 från ARCHAEOLOGY

Since ARCHAEOLOGY magazine’s first issue was published 77 years ago, the field has changed significantly. One marked shift over the decades has been archaeologists’ increasing cooperation with scientists who specialize in other areas to help them interpret the past. With the first published radiocarbon dates in 1949—just one year after the magazine’s launch—the need for such specialists on excavations and field surveys and in laboratories has grown exponentially. Of course, digs still need archaeologists trained to identify artifacts such as ceramics and building materials. You will read about this sort of work in the story of the ancient inhabitants of a remote village in what is now Tajikistan who built their sanctuary using both local and imported pottery and architectural styles. Other traditional experts featured in this issue include the…

Any good lawyer knows that the most important thing to do pretrial is to prepare and that it’s essential to take good notes during the proceedings. This was certainly true for the attorneys approaching a legal showdown nearly 2,000 years ago in the Roman province of Judea. They used a sheet of papyrus to jot down notes for their arguments and to record transcripts of the trial. In the case, two men, Gadalias and Saulos, were charged with a slew of crimes including forgery and fraud, which they had allegedly committed to evade taxes on the sale and manumission of enslaved people. Four other men who were allegedly part of the scheme are also mentioned, as is another group suspected of forgery. The prosecutors landed the case after an informant…

Archaeologists are unsure how a collection of weapons and other valuable objects found its way to a farm in southeastern Norway around A.D. 600. The first artifacts in the cache, which is known as the Åker assemblage, were unearthed in present-day Innlandet County between 1868 and 1912. These include shield mounts and a sword pommel, as well as a buckle decorated with a colorful cloisonné depiction of a man’s face. The objects were dated to the Merovingian period (ca. A.D. 550–800) and were once thought to have originated in Anglo-Saxon England or continental Europe. Another set of artifacts ascribed to the assemblage was discovered in the 1990s. According to archaeologist Ingunn Marit Røstad of the University of Oslo’s Museum of Cultural History, analysis of these items suggests they were produced…

A top the tallest pyramid at the site of San Isidro in western El Salvador, archaeologists have unearthed five ceramic figurines dating to around 400 B.C. Each figurine has an evocative facial expression that appears to shift depending on the angle from which it’s viewed. Four depict women, and the fifth portrays a man, whose face is incised with lines that may represent tattoos or scarification. “Given their meticulous craftsmanship, I’m pretty certain they were made for some ritual purpose,” says archaeologist Jan Szymański of the University of Warsaw, “though the nature of those rituals is more difficult to guess.” The figures’ mouths are open, suggesting that they may be singing or speaking. One of the smaller figurines measures four inches tall, the other, seven. The three larger figurines are…

From the mid-second century B.C. to the late first century A.D., the armies of China’s Han Dynasty (206 B.C.–A.D. 220) defended their territory against the marauding forces of the Xiongnu Empire, a multiethnic, nomadic people who controlled much of the eastern Eurasian steppe from the third century B.C. to the first century A.D. The Han built fortifications along and beyond their northern frontier during the protracted Han-Xiongnu Wars (133 B.C.–A.D. 89). More than three decades ago, archaeologists collected Han artifacts such as coins, ceramics, and arrowheads at the site of Bayanbulag in southern Mongolia. Subsequent investigations in 2009, led by archaeologist Alexey Kovalev of the Institute of Archaeology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, unearthed a walled fortress dating to the first century B.C. The team also uncovered a mass…

MICHIGAN: A lidar survey of the Sixty Islands archaeological site identified unexpected evidence of extensive farming by the ancestors of today’s Menominee people. The study revealed a huge network of raised ridges used to grow crops between A.D. 1000 and 1600. Researchers previously believed that the Upper Peninsula’s short, cold growing season hampered such large-scale agricultural efforts and that the area was inhabited only by small communities. The new findings indicate that the region may in fact have been home to much more substantial settlements. FRANCE: More than 3,000 ancient standing stones are strewn across the Carnac region of Brittany, making it home to one of Europe’s highest concentrations of megalithic monuments. This may also be where this mysterious pan-European Neolithic tradition began. It has been difficult for archaeologists to…

IT HAD BEEN GETTING COLDER and darker for the last few months, and the small community on the Danish island of Bornholm didn’t know what to think. Their ancestors had arrived more than a millennium before, in about 4000 B.C., and there had always been an abundant supply of domesticated grains and livestock, as well as wild plants, fish, and game. Recently, people had noticed that wild plants weren’t as robust as they once had been and that crops had begun to fail. During the next year, life grew ever more challenging—the sun was dim, even during daylight hours, resulting in colder days and nights and a decreasing supply of food. Who could explain what they had done wrong? Which god or gods could they beseech for help? “In an…

ALONG A ROCKY MOUNTAIN RIDGE in southern Tajikistan, two steep cliffs jut above the sloping Lyangurt Valley, where the rural village of Torbulok sits. Although the area is often dry, water occasionally flows down the valley, perhaps a hint of the more abundant water sources that gave Torbulok its name, which means “four springs.” It’s nearly as difficult to traverse the terrain now as it would have been in antiquity when people ventured to this remote location in the region of Bactria, which encompassed parts of present-day Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Afghanistan. Potsherds still visible on the ground, as well as purposely sunken ceramic food containers, are evidence of the small ancient community that once existed here. These artifacts date to the Hellenistic era (323–30 B.C.), a period when Greeks ruled…

The United States Minor Outlying Islands include several islands and atolls located south and west of Hawaii surrounded by shallow reefs, vast expanses of deep ocean, and underwater mountains that support a spectacular diversity of corals, fish, birds, mammals, and other marine life. The region’s human history is equally compelling. While the islands have had few permanent inhabitants, Indigenous wayfarers’ remarkable ability to read winds, waves, and currents brought them in their seagoing canoes to the farthest reaches of the Pacific ages ago. Exploring the ocean provides an unparalleled opportunity for research that honors traditional knowledge and considers it in tandem with material evidence of early navigation across this boundless seascape—the islands, atolls, and spaces in between. It can also reveal how people used the abundant resources available in these…

A marble sarcophagus dating to the second or third century A.D. has been discovered in the city of Caesarea on Israel’s Mediterranean coast. It depicts the wine god Dionysus and the hero Hercules engaged in a drinking contest. This scene is a familiar one in Roman art, but this is the first time it has been found on a sarcophagus in the area. The sarcophagus’ four panels include satyrs, the gods Hermes and Pan, a pair of lions, and Dionysus holding a cup in his hand, surrounded by female followers called maenads. Hercules, the contest’s loser, is shown overcome by drink, clutching a cup and collapsing on a lion skin. According to archaeologist Nohar Shahar of the Israel Antiquities Authority, the figures were meant to accompany the man in the…

At the oasis of Qurayyah in northwestern Saudi Arabia, archaeologists have discovered the earliest evidence that people burned a particular plant known for its medicinal and psychoactive properties. A team led by University of Vienna archaeologist Marta Luciani unearthed clay censers in two houses dating to some 2,700 years ago—one a humble dwelling and the other an elite residence with a cellar. Archaeochemist Barbara Huber of the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology analyzed minuscule amounts of residue preserved in the burners. Rather than finding incense, she was surprised to identify traces of burned harmala (Peganum harmala), also known as Syrian rue. The plant’s blackish seeds contain a high concentration of the compound that produces its salutary effects. “Harmala has antibacterial properties, but also a lot of different benefits, especially anti-inflammatory…

Beneath the ruins of a Roman villa in the German state of Bavaria, a grieving medieval family laid to rest a boy who was only a year and a half old, along with an unprecedented array of funerary goods. The toddler’s stone-lined grave, which dates to around A.D. 675, was outfitted with a floor of Roman tiles and completely sealed with lime mortar. The boy is known as the Ice Prince because archaeologists transported his burial to a laboratory in a block after freezing it with liquid nitrogen. He was interred wearing a belted garment that featured exceedingly rare braided silk. Among the other valuable objects archaeologists discovered were a scabbard with gold appliqué, silver spurs and bracelets, and a gold foil cross. Scholars suspect that the child belonged to…

THE LAHONTAN BASIN stretches along nearly the entire western edge of Nevada. High desert sagebrush grows in dry valleys, and barren mountain ranges reach into the sky. In the basin’s southernmost reaches, near the town of Fallon, a series of lakes and the state’s largest marshlands form an oasis in the desert landscape. Tall sedges called tule grass line the shores of these marshes, offering a temperate reprieve for vast populations of songbirds, waterfowl, and freshwater fish. Beginning at least 12,000 years ago, hunter-gatherers visited the basin to collect reeds used to make woven fabrics. They searched out nearby caves to bury their dead, and, eventually, established villages in the comfort and abundance of the marshy shoreline. For the Northern Paiute people, this oasis not only provided crucial resources, but…

SOMETIMES IT TAKES A village to raise a window. Between 2015 and 2017, skilled masons meticulously carved and beveled arches and four-lobed flourishes for a Gothic-style stone window frame in Guédelon Castle’s ornate Chapel Tower. All that remained was to install some glass. But there was a problem, and the carpenters, painters, blacksmiths, basket weavers, historians, and archaeologists who work on-site were all enlisted to figure it out. Eight years later, the matter of what to put in the window of a medieval castle has nearly been resolved…maybe. Luckily, the team of 40 professional builders and crafts-people at Guédelon Castle love a conundrum. The castle, located in an abandoned quarry in the Puisaye region of Burgundy, 100 miles southeast of Paris, is the site of one of the world’s most…

Greece’s unique shape makes it one of the most recognizable countries on a map of Europe. The mountainous peninsula juts into the Mediterranean Sea and is divided into two distinctive parts. The southern section, the Peloponnese, is attached to mainland Greece by a narrow strip of land, the Isthmus of Corinth. Measuring just four miles wide in places, the isthmus separates the Saronic Gulf to the east from the Gulf of Corinth to the west. Over the course of Greece’s history, this land bridge has been a vital artery for trade, travel, military transport, and communication. Throughout that time, it has also been a place where people have settled, with no location more renowned than Corinth itself, one of the most powerful and influential city-states of ancient Greece. Countless archaeological…

Thanks to the keen observational skills of a local farmer, a remarkably intact Roman mosaic has been unearthed in the village of Salkaya in eastern Turkey. While planting fruit tree saplings, Mehmet Emin Sualp saw portions of the mosaic less than two feet below the surface. Several months later, a team led by archaeologist Emre Çayır of the Elazığ Archaeology and Ethnography Museum and the museum’s director, Ziya Kılınç, uncovered the entire mosaic, which spans nearly 1,000 square feet. Çayır believes the artwork dates to between the last quarter of the third century and the middle of the fourth century A.D. Its central panel portrays a large array of local and nonlocal animals and birds including Anatolian leopards, lions, bears, deer, partridges, and ostriches, alongside hunting dogs. The mosaic’s scale…

Roughly 14 miles from the ancient city of Syracuse in southeastern Sicily, more than 4,000 tombs were carefully cut into the walls of a limestone gorge. The tombs make up the Necropolis of Pantalica, which was likely built by a local chiefdom in Sicily’s Late Bronze Age (ca. 1300–950 B.C.). The site continued to be used after the Greeks colonized southeastern Sicily in the eighth century B.C., through to the medieval period. However, according to archaeologist Robert Leighton of the University of Edinburgh, new tombs don’t seem to have been cut after 500 B.C. The dramatic cliffside necropolis was used predominantly between the thirteenth and seventh centuries B.C. The tombs are interspersed with the occasional rock-cut dwelling, which date to the seventh century B.C. and were modified in later centuries.…

The federal government recognizes some two dozen Native American tribes as having ties to New Mexico’s Chaco Canyon, where Ancestral Puebloan people constructed multistory masonry structures known as great houses from A.D. 850 to 1150. Among these tribes, 0 100 200 miles the 19 Pueblo communities of northern New Mexico have especially strong traditions linking them to the people who once lived at Chaco Canyon, which is now a national historical park. High in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, Picuris Pueblo is the smallest of these communities, counting some 300 members. Both the tribe’s oral history and an ancient path that leads from the pueblo to Chaco Canyon link the Picuris to the ancient site. But, as a small tribe, the Picuris have often felt their views were not taken…

THE THREE YAN DYNASTIES FORMER YAN DYNASTY (A.D. 337–370) LATER YAN DYNASTY (A.D. 384–407) NORTHERN YAN DYNASTY (A.D. 407–436) IN CHINESE DYNASTIC HISTORIES, tales are told of a general named Feng Sufu who lived some 1,600 years ago. Brother to the future emperor Feng Ba, Feng Sufu served one of a series of states known as the Three Yan. The Three Yan emperors ruled parts of northeastern China, mostly from their capital of Longcheng, or “Dragon City,” in what is now Liaoning Province, from A.D. 337 to 436, a brief and tumultuous period in China’s long history. As the stories go, a young Feng Sufu was swimming when he spied a golden dragon in the water that no one else could see. He cut off the dragon’s head, a convincing…

ADVOCATE Every day, irreplaceable cultural heritage sites face growing threats from conflict, neglect, and the passage of time. The Archaeological Institute of America (AIA) Site Preservation Program supports archaeologists working alongside local communities to protect and preserve these vital links to our past. The site of Khirbat al-Balu‘a in Jordan recently received an AIA Site Preservation Grant. This remarkable multiperiod settlement played a pivotal role in controlling trade routes and access to the Karak Plateau. From its origins as a Moabite city in the first millennium B.C. to its life as an Islamic village in the twentieth century, the extraordinary history of Khirbat al-Balu‘a deserves to be studied and protected. With support from the AIA, the Khirbat al-Balu‘a team will continue excavations, launch a long-term initiative in partnership with a…