Just as waterfront mansions are status symbols for today’s rich and famous, ancient artificial islands in the British Isles known as crannogs may have been used by elites to display their power and wealth through elaborate parties, a new study finds. A crannog is “an artificial island within a lake, wetland, or estuary,” Antony Brown … Read more
Stonehenge is one of the world’s most iconic, and mysterious, prehistoric monuments, and it has intrigued people for thousands of years. Scholars are still unsure exactly who built it and why, though many believe it was a religious site. Its circular layout aligns with the movements of the sun. But did the equally mysterious druids … Read more
Druids were religious leaders in what is now Britain and France. They were “philosophers, teachers, judges, the repository of communal wisdoms about the natural world and the traditions of the people, and the mediators between humans and the gods,” Barry Cunliffe, an emeritus professor of European archaeology at the University of Oxford, wrote in his … Read more
Countless civilizations have risen and fallen over the millennia. But which one is the oldest on record? About 30 years ago, this question seemed to have a straightforward answer. Around 4000 B.C., the earliest phase of the Sumerian culture arose as the oldest civilization in the Mesopotamia region, in what is now mostly Iraq. The … Read more
A faded medieval map of Britain may reveal evidence of “long lost” islands detailed in Welsh mythology, a new study finds. Researchers discovered the “missing” islands after analyzing the 650-year-old Gough map, which is now housed in the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford. In the area now known as Cardigan Bay, in Wales, … Read more
In A.D. 1054, a nearby star ran out of fuel and blew up in a dazzling supernova explosion. Though located 6,500 light-years away, the blast was clearly visible in the skies over Earth for 23 days and several hundred nights after. The explosion, now known as SN 1054, was so bright that Chinese astronomers dubbed … Read more
A mysterious ancient writing system called Linear Elamite, used between about 2300 B.C. and 1800 B.C. in what is now southern Iran, might have finally been deciphered, although some experts are skeptical about the findings. What’s more, it’s unclear whether all the artifacts used to decipher the writings were legally acquired. Only about 40 known … Read more
The Denisovans, together with the Neanderthals, are the closest extinct relatives of modern humans. It wasn’t until 2010 that scientists announced that the they existed, so much about them remains unknown. However, fossil and genetic evidence suggests the Denisovans lived across a wide range of areas and conditions, from the cold mountains of Siberia and … Read more
The “Book of the Dead” is a modern-day name given to a series of ancient Egyptian texts that the Egyptians believed would help the dead navigate the underworld, as well as serving other purposes. Copies of these texts were sometimes buried with the dead. The “‘Book of the Dead’ denotes the relatively large corpus of … Read more
The Goths were a people who flourished in Europe throughout ancient times and into the Middle Ages. Sometimes called “barbarians,” they are famous for sacking the city of Rome in A.D. 410. After the Western Roman Empire diminished, two Gothic kingdoms rose: the short-lived Visigoths and the longer-lasting Ostrogoths. The earliest surviving written records mentioning … Read more
