Today the phrase ‘all roads leads to Rome’ means that there’s more than one way to reach the same goal. But in Ancient Rome, all roads really did lead to the eternal city, which was at the centre of a vast road network.
We tend to think of archaeological sites as dead silent – empty ruins left by past cultures. But this isn’t how the people who lived in and used these sites would have experienced them.
A team of archaeologists strived to improve the reproducibility of their results, influencing their choices in the field, in the lab and during data analysis.
What we buy has defined who we are since the Gold Rush. In the 1850s and 1860s, people communicated their social status by buying stuff - dinner sets, junk jewellery - and throwing their old things away.
Currency first hit the scene thousands of years ago. An anthropologist explains the early origins and uses of money – and how archaeological finds fill in our picture of the past.
Archaeologists this week found that more than half of of HMAS Perth, a WWII wreck in Indonesia, has disappeared. It’s now a race to protect the millions of other wrecks and sunken cities lying under the oceans.
Islamic State has destroyed globally-significant sites in Iraq and Syria, but not as wanton acts of destruction. Instead, they are calculated political and religious attacks.
Since the epics of the Homeric poets, there have been tales of the mysterious, war-like Amazon women. The myth is likely based on the ‘strong, free’ women of the nomadic Scythian tribe.
The Mummy, starring Tom Cruise and Russell Crowe, is the latest manifestation of our centuries old fascination with Egypt. But beneath this obsession is a darker story of looting and destruction.
Africa has one of the world’s richest fossil records, and evidence suggests that amateurs collected really important fossils long before professionals arrived on the scene.
We can’t observe the brain activity of extinct human species. But we can observe modern brains doing the things that our distant ancestors did, looking for clues about how ancient brains worked.