Archaeology December 2011 Archive

While I was updating my article on solstice photos of Stonehenge, I ran across a handful of articles about an interesting subset of megalithic monuments called recumbent stone circles (or ... Read More

Mapungubwe was an important Iron Age capital in Africa during the 13th century AD, where enormous quantities of beads and gold objects were recovered. Mapungubwe was about a century older ... Read More

The shortest day of the year in the northern hemisphere was yesterday, and photographer Matt Cardy was at Stonehenge and took this photo of the unseasonably warm day, December 22, ... Read More

The sad truth is, archaeologists don't always have an opportunity to excavate a site properly. Rarely are sites perfectly preserved like Pompeii or Ozette or Cerén. Fortunately, archaeologists are well-experienced ... Read More

I've been reading recently about the Angkor Civilization, a.k.a. the Khmer Empire, which included most of what is today Cambodia and Thailand during the Middle Ages (ca 800-1300 AD). The ... Read More

The ancient Egyptians were pioneers in the field of medicine, as I discovered when I was poking around in among the papyrus swamp. A page from the Edwin Smith Surgical ... Read More

I have a long-standing fascination with the written word (duh), so when I recently stumbled across a handful of papers about papyrus, how you make it and how old it ... Read More

Saffron is a crazy expensive spice and pigment, that was domesticated around four thousand years ago by the Minoans. Probably. Detail of the Saffron Gatherers, a fresco on the walls ... Read More

Xaltocan is an archaeological site that, like the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, was once located on a man made island floating within the Basin of Mexico: the lakes of the ... Read More

A recent study at the Maya site of Cerén, in El Salvador, has identified well-preserved evidence of a ridged agricultural field where about 600 AD, the inhabitants grew manioc, an ... Read More

There's a mountain in the Catalonia region of Spain called Montanissell where in 2004, amateur spelunkers discovered a karst cave hidden deep within its interior. Montanissell Mountain in Catalonia Gustau ... Read More