In 160 years of digging at Troy, nobody had found anything you could play. Archaeologists have pulled walls, gates, jewelry, weapons and tableware out of the ground in huge quantities, but never an instrument. This season that changed. The team led by Rüstem Aslan of Onsekiz Mart University in Çanakkale, in northwestern Turkey, recovered a […]

Almost nothing survives of what people wore in the Iron Age. Linen, wool and dyes are all organic matter, and in most soils they simply rot away. Archaeologists therefore tend to reconstruct the history of textiles from the tools that do last, above all spindle whorls: small stone or ceramic discs that weigh down the […]

On the slope below the cemetery of Sant’Elpidio a Mare, in Italy’s Le Marche region, recent heavy rains loosened the hillside enough to expose something no one was looking for: a rounded ceramic vessel, decoration still visible, sitting almost intact in the displaced earth. It looked, at first, like debris. It turned out to be […]

More than two thousand years ago, in the middle of the Iron Age, the Celts built a large fortified settlement on two peninsulas that extended into the Rhine River, near what is now the Swiss city of Schaffhausen. This place, known as the oppidum of Altenburg-Rheinau, is considered by archaeologists to be a true commercial […]

A team of archaeologists from the Landschaftsverband Westfalen-Lippe (LWL), in collaboration with a specialized company, has confirmed the existence of what is considered the first evidence of prehistoric occupation in the German municipality of Bochum. The discovery took place on a plot previously used for agriculture, located in the Linden neighborhood, where a real estate […]