A rare stash of 1,000-year-old ironwork, which sat for 40 years in a family’s basement in Norway, is now seeing the light of day after a woman discovered the hoard during some spring cleaning. The hoard consists of 32 iron ingots that look like small spatulas and date back to the Viking Age (A.D. 793 … Read more
Elite women, perhaps princesses, played a crucial role in holding the Xiongnu, one of the first nomadic empires of the eastern Eurasian Steppe, together, a new study suggests. The Xiongnu, who may have been among the ancient ancestors of the Mongols, formed a confederation of nomadic peoples who controlled much of Central Asia, from present-day … Read more
The Vikings are remembered as fierce fighters, but even these mighty warriors were no match for climate change. Scientists recently found that ice sheet growth and sea level rise led to massive coastal flooding that inundated Norse farms and ultimately drove the Vikings out of Greenland in the 15th century. The Vikings first established a … Read more
Stonehenge is a massive stone monument located on Salisbury Plain in southern England. It was built roughly 4,000 to 5,000 years ago and was part of a larger sacred landscape. The bigger stones at Stonehenge, known as sarsens, weigh 25 tons (22.6 metric tons) on average and are widely believed to have been brought from … Read more
New “unprecedented” animations of the Earth show how the planet’s surface has shifted and changed over the past 100 million years. These animations are the most detailed view of the history of Earth’s topography ever, depicting the rise of mountains, the development of basins, and the transport of large masses of sediments around the globe … Read more
The ancient Celts were fierce warriors who lived in mainland Europe. But during the Renaissance, an idea took hold that they lived in the British Isles. The term “Celts” is used today to describe the cultures, languages and peoples that are based in Scotland; Ireland; other parts of the British Isles; and Brittany, in France. … Read more
The Vikings explored, raided and traded across a vast area stretching from North America to the Middle East between roughly the late eighth and mid-11th centuries. In Old Norse, the language the Vikings spoke, “a Viking was a sea-borne raider, and to go-a-viking was to undertake sea-borne raiding,” Angus Somerville and Russell Andrew McDonald, both … Read more
The Egyptian pyramids erupting from the sands at Giza are a testament to human ingenuity and engineering. Raised to mark the tombs of ancient pharaohs, these great structures have stood for thousands of years. But over the millennia, the pyramids have changed, largely due to construction workers’ repurposing of in-demand materials and looting. So what … Read more
The Teutonic Knights were one of the great chivalric orders that emerged from the Crusades, alongside the Hospitallers and Templars, but while those other knights made their names in the Holy Land, the Teutonic Knights fought their greatest battles in Europe. In the latest issue of All About History (opens in new tab), on sale … Read more
A metal detectorist in Belgium has unearthed a fragment of a mysterious bronze artifact known as a Roman dodecahedron that is thought to be more than 1,600 years old. More than a hundred of the puzzling objects — hollow, 12-sided geometric shells of cast metal about the size of baseballs, with large holes in each … Read more
