Archaeology News Online

In 1986, a long cist burial was dug up in Bridge of Tilt near Blair Atholl, where excavators discovered the skeleton of a man in his forties. Analysis at the time found the man was used to hard work, and lived around 340 to 615 AD, making this one of the earliest Pictish graves ever discovered. The digitally re-created Pictish man [Credit: GUARD Archaeology] Now, GUARD Archaeology in Glasgow and forensic artist Hayley Fisher have managed to digitally recreate the face of the Bridge of Tilt Pict which is now on display at Perth Museum and Art Gallery as part of their Picts and Pixels exhibition. Bob Will, the archaeologist leading this project, said: “The actual burial was found in the 1980s and a certain amount of work was done then. But various members of the local community and groups wanted to do more, so they got in touch to take the project forward and one thing they wanted was a facial reconstruction. That is what got the ball rolling on that one. “We then approached Historic Env

Ancient stone tombs, some dating back more than 4,000 years, have been uncovered by archaeologists working in Jordan's Black Desert. The burial sites were discovered in the Jebel Qurma region by a team of Dutch researchers. A giant cairn which dates back to the second or third century AD  [Credit: Jebel Qurma Archaeological Landscape Project] The region is so desolate that one early explorer described it as a land of 'Dead Fire'. The discovery of the burials could help to shed light on the history of human occupation of the area over the course of millennia, as well as the conditions they faced. Though many people once lived in Jebel Qurma, its climate is now inhospitable, and very few people live there. 'Except for a short period in the spring, the whole of this country looks like a dead fire — nothing but cold ashes,' wrote Group Capt. Lionel Rees, an officer in the British Royal Air Force, in an article he published in 1929 in the journal Antiquity . This enclos

Twentieth-century Spanish novelist Azorín once described Ávila as “the most 16th-century of all Spanish cities,” generously endowed as it is with churches and palaces. Declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO, it will now continue to live up to this boast in the 21st century by pioneering a European project called Smart Heritage City, aimed at monitoring this and other historical cities. Ávila is leading an EU project that uses technology to monitor potential damage to its famous walls  [Credit: Juan Luis Menendez Valderrey] As many as 226 sensors are being installed along the city wall, around the cathedral and on important buildings and streets. These devices, more than half of which are already in action, pick up a huge amount of data concerning humidity, temperature, light, cracks, insects and traffic vibration. “New technology has to be applied to the conservation of monuments because they are very delicate,” says Rosa Ruiz, archaeologist and head of Ávila’s Heritage Department. T

A Turkish-Italian team has completed the first part of their seven-season-long excavation works in an ancient site in the town of Karkamış, located in the Turkish province of Gaziantep on the Turkish-Syrian border, Turkish media have reported. The works at the site, which dates back to the Hittite Empire in 2,000 B.C., have been undertaken under the leadership of Nicolo Marchetti, a professor at Bologna University, and with the support of the Turkish and Italian governments, the Gaziantep Metropolitan University and SANKO Holding. Marchetti said the excavations, which started on May 2 this season, were executed by a team comprised of 25 experts with a special focus on the place site and the tumulus site, adding that the whole area was taken under protection until September, when the excavation works would be resumed. The Karkamış Ancient City Archaeological Park will open after a seven-year excavation period on May 12, 2018, Turkish Culture and Tourism Minister Nabi Avcı announced earl

Archaeologists have discovered the ruins of a luxurious 5th-century Roman palace in Auch in the Gers – and they face a race against time to excavate it. Excavation of Roman Imperial-era domus in Auch, France [Credit: © Jean-Louis Bellurget, Inrap] Abandoned some 16 centuries ago, this aristocratic ‘domus’ possessed private baths and splendid mosaics on the ground. It was close to the centre of the ancient Roman city of Augusta Auscorum, which was the capital of the province of Novempopulanie - and near the centre of the modern town of Auch. Aerial view of domus excavation [Credit: © Jean-Louis Bellurget, Inrap] Originally found by the landowner digging foundations to build a house, just 50cm below the surface the impressive 2-metre-deep ruins have been revealed. Since the end of April, l’Institut National de Recherches Archéologiques Préventives (Inrap) has been bringing to light a part of what was once a vast aristocratic home. The Inrap team works on the 5th century domus in Auch [Cr

More than 2,500 years ago, an Athenian nobleman named Cylon -- the first recorded Olympic champion -- tried to take over the city of Athens and install himself as its sole ruler. A conservator of archaeological works on a human skull in a lab at the American School  of Archaeology in Athens on July 7, 2017 [Credit: Aris Messinis/AFP] According to Thucydides and Herodotus, Athenian and Greek historians who wrote about the coup, Cylon enticed an army of followers to enter the city and lay siege to the Acropolis. They were defeated, but Cylon managed to escape. Now archaeologists in Athens believe they may have found some of the remains of Cylon's army in a mass grave in Phaleron, four miles (6 kilometres) south of downtown Athens. Bio-archaeologist Eleanna Prevedorou poses in a lab at the American School  of Archaeology in Athens on July 7, 2017 [Credit: Aris Messinis/AFP] The discovery of the 80 skeletons of men is "unequalled" in Greece, said site project director Stella

Using a combination of fossils and chemical markers, scientists have tracked how a period of globally low ocean-oxygen turned an Early Jurassic marine ecosystem into a stressed community inhabited by only a few species. Before the low oxygen period, bivalves were larger and more numerous [Credit: The University of Texas at Austin/ Rowan Martindale] The research was led by Rowan Martindale, an assistant professor at The University of Texas at Austin Jackson School of Geosciences, and published in print in Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoeconology . The study was co-authored by Martin Aberhan, a curator at the Institute for Evolution and Biodiversity Science at the Natural History Museum in Berlin, Germany. The study zeroes in on a recently discovered fossil site in Canada located at Ya Ha Tinda Ranch near Banff National Park in southwest Alberta. The site records fossils of organisms that lived about 183 million years ago during the Early Jurassic in a shallow sea that once co