Items ranging from those left over at a modern-day campsite to the remains of an ancient tomb are at the heart of archaeology. This branch of science seeks to study humanity through material evidence, including artifacts and human remains. These resources will help you to better understand this ever-growing field and its implications for future generations.
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What did the people of yesterday make of beer, and how exactly did they make it? Explore the timeless beverage in this guide to ancient beers from around the world. Archaeological evidence suggests the rise of beer brewing may have coincided with humanity's shift from hunters to farmers. According to this article, beer was first enjoyed in ancient Mesopotamia, where paintings, poems, and myths glorified the porridge-like brew.
Picture a Neanderthal in all their knuckle-dragging, loin cloth-wearing glory. Now, throw that picture away. This article dives into the rising tide of academic advocates for Neanderthals, a human ancestor that went extinct about 40,000 years ago.
This five-minute video details the accidental discovery and subsequent decoding of the first known sentence in what's believed to be the oldest written alphabet. The Canaanite sentence was found on a Bronze Age hair comb unearthed in Tel Lachish, a city of the ancient Biblical Kingdom of Judah, during a dig focused on excavating the kingdom's first Iron Age city. The Canaanite language developed sometime between 3,000 and 1,000 BCE.
Museums around the world are filled with human remains once taken by scientists, looters, or both. This story tells the tale of two Harvard anthropologists conducting dubious eugenics research in Iceland who removed 86 skulls from an Icelandic island beach and brought them to Harvard's Peabody Museum in 1905. In recent years, efforts to return the heads to their bodies have been hampered by a lack of legal framework and funding. Ponder the ethical conundrums of repatriating human remains in this fascinating podcast episode.
Modern humans are not the only creatures classified as part of the Homo genus. This article examines the eight other humans that fall under the Homo umbrella.
Melting glaciers continue to reveal archaeological and anthropological evidence previously hidden by solid ice. This article details the newer archaeological field, which was popularized after the 1991 discovery of Ötzi the Iceman. A German couple came across Ötzi as they hiked the Ötzal Alps near the Italy-Austria border. Ötzi was initially believed to be the corpse of an unlucky mountaineer, but further study revealed he had been dead for about 5,300 years.
Many museums hold items in their collection that may belong elsewhere, and there's no shortage of private collectors looking to place items of yore on their bookshelves. That's where tomb robbers come in. In 1999, a reporter for The Art Newspaper spent a day with a man who controlled much of the illicit excavation on the site of ancient Veii, one of the largest Etruscan cities. Read about the day in the life of a "tombarolo" here.
Long ignored by white archaeologists as a mere footnote, modern scientists are now racing to document what’s left of the African civilization. Evidence of ancient Nubia is at risk of vanishing under environmental, societal, and political pressures. This Undark Magazine article walks you through archaeologists' fight to record ancient Nubia.
How many of us have played a video game with an archaeologist protagonist whose main idea of fieldwork involves spying, back flips, and destroying the historic sites they're meant to be preserving? Exactly.
When Ötzi the Iceman's well-preserved body was pulled from a glacier in 1991, researchers essentially gained anthropological evidence into a 5,300-year-old cold case. This five-minute animated video provides an overview of Ötzi's discovery and...
Weave together the many narratives of world history with our highly curated and expanding selection of diverse, fascinating resources designed to showcase the breadth and richness of Earth's story, from the earliest traces of human civilization to the dramatic developments of contemporary cultures.