Pompeii has always been a magical place for me with its vast avenues and huge government buildings, small familiar houses and gardens and, of course, the mummified bodies of town citizens, immortalised…
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Articles on Archaeology
Displaying 461 - 480 of 486 articles
During the warm periods between ice ages stretching from 500,000 to 200,000 years ago, the southern parts of Britain were occupied by a species of ancient human, Homo heidelbergensis. These hunter-gatherers…
Quantum mechanics has been hailed as the next big thing in technology. And quantum computers are a media favourite. But there is a little-known quantum technology that can peer beneath the earth, which…
It should not be a surprise that East Africa was a hotbed of evolution, because over the last five million years everything about the landscape has changed. The extraordinary forces of plate tectonics…
A spectacular new “missing link” fossil has been unearthed in China. The 419 million year old armoured fish, called Entelognathus, meaning “complete jaw” solves an age-old debate in science. For palaeontologists…
Frontiers like Hadrian’s Wall are central to the study of the Roman Empire. By now we might expect to have discovered most such major landmarks. However, by scrutinising archives of aerial photography…
What makes us human? Whatever it is, it can be found in Syria. When the earliest hominids first came from Africa they passed through Syria, and their remains, together with the tools they made, can still…
Researchers have discovered the earliest evidence yet of humans living in the Bolivian Amazon, putting the first known human habitation of the region at about 8000 years earlier than was previously thought…
The Faroe Islands could have been inhabited 500 years earlier than was previously thought, according to a startling archaeological discovery. The islands had been thought to be originally colonised by…
The archaeologist who helped discover the extinct Homo species Flores Hobbit, Professor Mike Morwood, has died after a struggle with cancer. New Zealand-born Professor Morwood, who was based at the School…
Responding to a crisis often brings out the best in people. Certainly it has in the past, when sudden changes in climate during the Middle Stone Age sparked off surges of cultural evolution and innovation…
Like many people, I grew up believing Australia was colonised by a small band of people, who had most likely landed on its shores by accident; but research I published this week suggests a far larger founding…
Sites in Western Australia’s Weld Range will be investigated and documented in a new partnership involving Wajarri Traditional…
A new study of DNA has found that Indian people may have come to Australia around 4000 years ago, an event possibly linked to the first appearance of the dingo. Australia was first populated around 40,000…
In Australia today, the biggest tree-dwelling mammals are our iconic and much loved koala and the enigmatic Bennett’s tree-kangaroo. The largest males of both species weigh a mere 14 kg. But a study of…
What is the oldest debate in Australian science? Probably, the argument over what caused extinction of our Pleistocene megafauna – the diprotodons, giant kangaroos, marsupial tapirs, über-echidnas and…
A few weeks ago astronauts on the International Space Station hid in escape capsules following concerns a piece of space junk was going to collide with the station. The collision didn’t eventuate but the…
A report published today in Nature by Yohannes Hailie-Selassie and co-workers outlines the importance to our evolutionary story of some very ancient foot bones discovered recently in the Rift Valley of…
The origin of the human species remains one of the most fascinating and difficult topics of modern science. One of the main reasons for this is a continuing lack of agreement about how we should define…
Archaeology is the study of the remains of the past but has long been predatory on the sciences and their ever-growing technologies. I was brought up as a student in 1970s Britain, when we learned of the…
Top contributors
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Associate Professor of Archaeology, Griffith University
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Honorary Associate Professor, UNSW Sydney
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Australian Research Council Future Fellow, Archaeology, School of Social Science, The University of Queensland
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Assistant Curator of Human Evolution., University of Alberta
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Head, Public Engagement, Chau Chak Wing Museum, University of Sydney
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Professor of Environmental and Geographical Sciences, Bournemouth University
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Director, Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution, Griffith University
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Associate Professor and Director, Flinders Microarchaeology Laboratory, Flinders University
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Associate Professor of Anthropology, Rice University
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Professor, Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology
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Director, ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage (CABAH), University of Wollongong
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Professor, Southern Cross University
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Claire Smith is a Friend of The Conversation.
Professor of Archaeology, College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, Flinders University
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Associate Professor in Archaeology and Space Studies, Flinders University
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Postdoctoral researcher, Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana (CENIEH)
