Sealed Etruscan Tomb Opened After 2,600 Years
Cold, damp earth. Heavy volcanic stone. The faint scent of ancient dust escaping through a narrow gap. High on a cliffside in central Italy, archaeologists carefully pried…
They Pulled a Lump of Bronze From the Sea. It Turned Out to Be a Computer.
In 1901, sponge divers working the seabed off a tiny Greek island called Antikythera hauled up a shapeless lump of corroded bronze, hardly worth a second glance…
The Lion That Killed Him Is the Reason We Could Still Eat Him
In 1984, in Fairbanks, Alaska, a small group of people sat down to dinner and ate an animal that had been dead for thirty-six thousand years. This…
The Ring of Silvianus: The Real Cursed Roman Ring Behind Tolkien’s One Ring?
A farmer’s plow bit into the soil of a Hampshire field in 1785 and struck something hard and yellow. Gold. Heavy for its size — nearly half…
Entire Carbonized Herculaneum Scroll Virtually Unwrapped
NAPLES, ITALY—Scientists have fully “unwrapped” an entire carbonized papyrus scroll preserved by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79, CNN reports. Known as PHerc. 1667, the scroll is one…
This Isn’t Egypt. It’s Louisiana — and It’s Older Than the Roman Empire
More than three thousand years ago, long before Rome existed, people in what is now northeastern Louisiana built a city of enormous earthen ridges and mounds —…
The $100 Million Lucky Charm Under the Bed
For ten years, a fisherman in the Philippines slept above a fortune and never knew it. Beneath his bed, wrapped and half-forgotten, sat a heavy, strange lump…
The Storm That Uncovered a 2,500-Year-Old Dagger Carved With the Night Sky
The Baltic does its best work in bad weather. Wind, surf, and a hard rain clawing at the soft clay cliffs along the Polish coast — and…
`The “Lamborghini of the Ancient World” Was Buried Under Pompeii for 2,000 Years. Looters Missed It by Inches.`
In February 2021, in a muddy suburban excavation site about 700 meters north of Pompeii’s ancient walls, archaeologists doing a routine sweep of a Roman villa complex…
A 2,600-Year-Old Tomb Was Just Opened in Italy — and Nothing Inside Had Moved
Roughly 70 kilometers northwest of Rome, in the rugged necropolis of San Giuliano, archaeologists did something almost no one gets to do anymore. They rolled back a…