News Round Up

ROSSETT, WALES—The Shropshire Star reports that a metal detectorist alerted a local finds officer for the Portable Antiquities Scheme in Wales after uncovering the corner of a metal object that appeared to have markings on it. Archaeologists from…

The discovery of the exquisite and iconic gold cup of Early Bronze Age date at Ringlemere, Kent, in 2001 prompted a small-scale excavation by the Canterbury Archaeological Trust the following year to establish the archaeological context of this…

YORK, ENGLAND—BBC News reports that human remains have been unearthed in York’s city center. The construction site where the bones were found may have been a cemetery placed up against a friary wall that operated in the fourteenth and fifteenth…

LEIPZIG, GERMANY—According to a statement released by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, a third Neanderthal genome has been sequenced by a team of researchers led by Fabrizio Mafessoni. The first sequenced genome belonged to a…

TAMIL NADU, INDIA—According to a report in The Hindu, J. Ranjith of the Tamil Nadu Department of Archaeology and his colleagues have discovered a total of 250 cairn circles in southern India’s trade and industrial center of Kodumanal, which was…

BIRMINGHAM, ENGLAND—Birmingham Live reports that investigations conducted ahead of the construction of a high-speed train line in England’s West Midlands have uncovered more than 40 cremation burials estimated to be 2,000 years old. The cemetery is…

This volume, the 17th published by Oxbow on behalf of the Neolithic Studies Group, returns to two interrelated questions that have long been debated by archaeologists interested in Britain’s earliest monuments. The first is: do the wooden structures…

ISFAHAN, IRAN—The Tehran Times reports that researchers led by archaeologist Alireza Jafari-Zand are investigating the site of Tepe Ashraf, which is located in central Iran, in the city of Isfahan. The northern side of the burial mound there has…

ANDHRA PRADESH, INDIA—The Hindu reports that a brick temple was revealed during sand mining in southeastern India’s Penna River. Estimated to be about 200 years old, the temple may have been submerged and buried as the river changed its course after…

YORK, ENGLAND—According to a statement released by the University of York, migrants moving from Africa to Arabia some 5,000 years ago may have traveled along a now-submerged Red Sea coastline and survived by eating marine mollusks. It had been…

As many of you will have seen on social media last month, it is with great pleasure that the ADS can announce that it has been awarded CoreTrustSeal (CSA) certification. This is a massive achievement for a small digital repository, based out of four…

This report is about one of the most important Viking sites in England – one that remains shrouded in some confusion and secrecy. Mark Ainsley and Geoff Bambrook had been metal-detecting at the site (known here as ARSNY) since 1996, but it first…

TAMIL NADU, INDIA—The Times of India reports that a seventeenth-century gold coin measuring less than one-half inch in diameter was unearthed in the Agaram neighborhood of southern India’s city of Chennai. R. Sivanandam of the Archaeological Survey…

EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND—Excavation along a planned tram route in Edinburgh’s port area of Leith has uncovered two bones from the fin of a large, male sperm whale, according to a report in The Scotsman. The bones will be radiocarbon dated, but…

SILLAMÄE, ESTONIA—ERR reports that skeletons dating from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries were unearthed in eastern Estonia during a construction project. Martin Malve of the University of Tartu thinks the site may have been a cemetery. “I…

DUBLIN, IRELAND—Science News reports that geneticists Lara Cassidy and Daniel Bradley of Trinity College Dublin and their colleagues analyzed the genomes of 44 individuals who were buried in tombs and graves in Ireland between about 6,600 and 4,500…

Food has been central to social life throughout human history. In the classical world it was part of occasions from religious rites to ostentatious parties. There is plenty of information available on what the ancient Greeks and Romans ate and drank…

Museums across the UK are gathering objects and accounts that reflect people’s experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic. The post Collecting COVID-19 appeared first on Current Archaeology.

WOLLONGONG, AUSTRALIA—Jacques Jaubert of the University of Bordeaux, Eline Schotsmans of the University of Wollongong and the University of Bordeaux, and their colleagues donned protective gear and entered Grotte de Cussac, a cave in Dordogne,…

MOSCOW, RUSSIA—The Siberian Times reports that Kharis Mustafin, Irina Alborova, and Alina Matsvai of the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology mapped the genome of a 2,600-year-old Scythian mummy discovered in a wooden sarcophagus in 1988. It…