news

Architecture - History / Archeology - 07.01.2022

Magnificent complexity of the Alhambra
Scientists have studied the unique features of the decorative vaulting known as muqarnas in Spain's Alhambra palace and fortress complex. Muqarnas are commonly found in Islamic architecture, yet they are poorly understood by the architectural community and the little data that exist on them have been simplified over time.

Social Sciences - History / Archeology - 07.01.2022

Tracing the origins of human remains from colonial contexts
University of Jena working group on colonialism with new personal and further publication on legacy of colonialism Proforma invoice from the Umlauff company dated 14.1.1908 to Ernst Haeckel. His selection can be traced via the two blue coats of paint on the right-hand edge of the invoice. Image: Archiv/Ernst-Haeckel-Haus A scalp from Namibia and skulls from Tanzania and Papua New Guinea: these are examples of human remains from University of Jena collections that found their way to Germany during the colonial period.

History / Archeology - 06.01.2022

Fossil research affected by significant colonial bias
Share this page Share on Twitter Share on facebook Share on linkedin Share on email The fossil record, which documents the history of life on Earth, is heavily biased by influences such as colonialism, history and global economics, argues a new study involving palaeontologists at the University of Birmingham and the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg.

History / Archeology - Social Sciences - 14.12.2021

Equal at birth and in death
When baby 'Neve' died 10,000 years ago, she was accorded a proper burial recognizing her as a full person, archeologists on a dig in Italy find. The baby girl was born roughly 10,000 years ago, after the end of the last Ice Age in what is now Liguria, northwestern Italy, but didn't survive more than two months.

History / Archeology - 08.12.2021

2,700-Year-Old Leather Armor Proves Technology Transfer Happened in Antiquity
Researchers at the University of Zurich have investigated a unique leather scale armor found in the tomb of a horse rider in Northwest China. Design and construction details of the armor indicate that it originated in the Neo-Assyrian Empire between the 6th and 8th century BCE before being brought to China.

Social Sciences - History / Archeology - 23.11.2021

Prehistoric mums cared for kids better than we thought
A new study from The Australian National University (ANU) has revealed the death rate of babies in ancient societies is not a reflection of poor healthcare, disease and other factors, but instead is an indication of the number of babies born in that era.   The findings shed new light on the history of our ancestors and debunk old assumptions that infant mortality rates were consistently high in ancient populations.

History / Archeology - Life Sciences - 22.11.2021

Justinianic Plague was nothing like flu and may have hit England before Constantinople | University of Cambridge
'Plague sceptics' are wrong to underestimate the devastating impact that bubonic plague had in the 6th- 8th centuries CE, argues a new study based on ancient texts and recent genetic discoveries. The same study suggests that bubonic plague may have reached England before its first recorded case in the Mediterranean via a currently unknown route, possibly involving the Baltic and Scandinavia.

History / Archeology - Life Sciences - 22.11.2021

Justinianic Plague was nothing like flu and may have struck England before it reached Constantinople, new study suggests | University of Cambridge
'Plague sceptics' are wrong to underestimate the devastating impact that bubonic plague had in the 6th- 8th centuries CE, argues a new study based on ancient texts and recent genetic discoveries. The same study suggests that bubonic plague may have reached England before its first recorded case in the Mediterranean via a currently unknown route, possibly involving the Baltic and Scandinavia.

Life Sciences - History / Archeology - 20.10.2021

Origin of domestic horses finally established
The modern horse was domesticated around 2200 years BCE in the northern Caucasus. In the centuries that followed it spread throughout Asia and Europe. To achieve this result, an international team of 162 scientists collected, sequenced and compared 273 genomes from ancient horses scattered across Eurasia.

Environment - History / Archeology - 07.10.2021

Antarctic ice reveals 700 years of environmental impact
A new study from an international team of scientists including researchers from The Australian National University (ANU) has linked an increase in black carbon levels found in Antarctic ice to 700-year-old Maori land burning practices in New Zealand. The findings, which are published in  Nature , challenge past assumptions by demonstrating humans were responsible for environmental changes earlier, and on a much larger scale, than previously thought.

Criminology / Forensics - History / Archeology - 06.10.2021

New approach to skeletal age-estimation can help identify juvenile remains
New research by SFU archaeologists could help forensic teams in their work to estimate the age of the remains of children discovered during archaeological work or in criminal investigative cases. Their study is published in the journal Forensic Science International . While age is typically determined by dental records or other methods, such as measuring the long bones in the upper or lower limbs, those methods may not always be possible, especially in the case of young children.

History / Archeology - 27.09.2021

Dairying enabled Bronze Age steppe expansion
As archeologists work to understand factors that enabled prehistoric people to expand across the Eurasian steppe during the Bronze Age, they've recently identified one piece of the puzzle: milk. Researchers, including University of Michigan professor Alicia Ventresca Miller , examined human dental plaque from 55 individuals, ranging from the Eneolithic Age, around 4600 to 4000 BC, to the Late Bronze Age, or about 1700 BC.

History / Archeology - 17.09.2021

A comprehensive dating research expands the Neanderthal occupation period in Cova del Gegant
The most comprehensive and exact dating to date of the Cova del Gegant (Sitges, Garraf) has been published. This is the site with most Neanderthal remains in Catalonia and a unique place to study the Middle-to-Upper Palaeolithic transition, when the first populations of anatomically modern humans appeared and the Neanderthals disappeared.

History / Archeology - 23.08.2021

Farm field find rewrites archaeological history in Michigan
Thirteen thousand years ago, most of Michigan was covered in a wall of ice up to a mile high. Archaeologists believed this kept some of the continent's earliest people, a group called Clovis after their distinctive spear points, from settling in the region. But an independent researcher along with University of Michigan researchers have identified a 13,000-year-old Clovis camp site, now thought to be the earliest archaeological site in Michigan.

History / Archeology - 02.08.2021

The analysis of one of the oldest paintings in the world confirms its human origins
One of the main challenges in archaeology is to discover the time when the symbols appeared and the implications of their use in human behaviour. The oldest paintings found to date are those from the three Spanish caves in Caceres, Cantabria and Malaga, which would be about 65,000 years old. Their dating brought an intense debate in the scientific community, because it suggests that the paintings would have been made by Neandertals.

History / Archeology - 22.07.2021

Stone tool tells the story of Neanderthal hunting
65,000 years ago Neanderthal from the Swabian Jura hunted horses and reindeer with hafted leaf-shaped stone points. A newly discovered leaf point from the UNESCO World Heritage site of Hohle Fels Cave documents the evolution of hunting. A team under the direction of Professor Nicholas Conard for the University of Tübingen and the Senckenberg Centre for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment in southern Germany recovered the artifact underlying a layer dating to 65,000 years ago, which represents a minimum age for the find.

History / Archeology - 07.07.2021

Findings of a cave painting with the best scene of honey harvesting in the Levantine art
The findings of a new site of cave paintings in Castellote (Teruel) have brought to light the scene of a person climbing a ladder to get honey from a beehive about 7,500 years ago. This is the most elaborate and well-preserved painting on this gatherer activity documented to date within the Levantine art, developed on the Mediterranean coast of the Iberian Peninsula.

History / Archeology - 29.06.2021

Bronze Age: how the market began
researchers investigate the spread of weighing systems across Western Eurasia 4,000 years ago Knowing the weight of a commodity provides an objective way to value goods in the marketplace. But did a self-regulating market even exist in the Bronze Age? And what can weight systems tell us about this? A team of researchers from the University of Göttingen researched this by investigating the dissemination of weight systems throughout Western Eurasia.

Life Sciences - History / Archeology - 24.06.2021

Being Anglo-Saxon a matter of language and culture, not genetics
A new study from archaeologists at University of Sydney and Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, has provided important new evidence to answer the question: Who exactly were the Anglo-Saxons? New findings based on studying skeletal remains clearly indicates the Anglo-Saxons were a melting pot of people from both migrant and local cultural groups and not one homogenous group from Western Europe.

History / Archeology - Earth Sciences - 02.06.2021

Early Medieval Egyptian blue in laser light
Research team elucidates complex spectrum of trace compounds in the first artificial pigment of mankind Art technologist Dr. Petra Dariz and analytical chemist Dr. Thomas Schmid (School of Analytical Sciences Adlershof SALSA at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and Bundesanstalt für Materialforschung und -prüfung BAM) identified Egyptian blue on a monochrome blue mural fragment, which was excavated in the church of St. Peter above Gratsch (South Tyrol, Northern Italy) in the 1970s.