Archaeology: quotes, facts and reflections - Page 2

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WonderArchaeology

The Schöningen spears, found in a German coal mine in the 1990s, are among the oldest known hunting weapons: wooden spears shaped and balanced for throwing. Their exact age, once put at about 400,000 years, is still debated.

A team led by the archaeologist Hartmut Thieme uncovered ten wooden weapons between 1994 and 1999 in an open-cast lignite (brown coal) mine at Schöningen in Lower Saxony, where waterlogged lakeside mud kept the wood from rotting. Most were carved from spruce trunks, one from pine, and in some the thickest point lies in the front third of the shaft, as on a modern javelin. When athletes threw replicas, they reached targets 15 to 20 metres away. The spears lay among the bones of an extinct wild horse, many with butchery marks. Their age has changed with each dating method: first 380,000 to 400,000 years, then about 300,000 to 337,000; a 2025 study argued for about 200,000 years, which would make Neanderthals their likely makers.

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WonderArchaeology

Dental calculus, the hard tartar that builds up on teeth, can trap DNA, proteins, microbes and tiny food remains for thousands of years, giving archaeologists evidence of ancient diets and health.

Plaque hardens into calculus while a person is alive, sealing in traces of whatever passes through the mouth, and it survives in the ground far better than most soft remains. In 2017 a team studying DNA in the calculus of Neanderthals from El Sidrón cave in Spain found, in a young individual with a painful dental abscess, traces of poplar, a natural source of salicylic acid, the painkiller related to aspirin, and of Penicillium mould. The researchers suggested he may have been treating himself, though that remains a hypothesis. In 2014 a team led by Christina Warinner identified a milk protein preserved in calculus from ancient teeth, direct evidence of who drank milk as dairying spread through prehistoric populations.

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WonderArchaeology

The Vindolanda tablets are thin sheets of wood written on in ink around AD 100 at a Roman fort in northern England. Their letters, lists and army records show everyday life on the empire's frontier.

The first tablets turned up in March 1973, when the archaeologist Robin Birley, alerted by a student excavator, Keith Liddell, noticed that what looked like wood shavings had writing inside: two stuck-together pieces peeled apart to reveal ink. More than 1,700 have now been found, preserved in damp, oxygen-poor ground. Most are slightly older than Hadrian's Wall, which was begun nearby in AD 122. They include a cavalry officer's polite request for more beer for his men, a note about underpants sent to a soldier, and a birthday invitation from Claudia Severa to her friend Sulpicia Lepidina. A scribe wrote most of it, but Severa added the closing greeting herself, one of the earliest known examples of writing in Latin by a woman. Most of the tablets are held at the British Museum.

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WonderArchaeology

The Pazyryk carpet, made some 2,300 to 2,500 years ago and preserved in a frozen tomb in Siberia's Altai Mountains, is the oldest known carpet with a knotted pile, the soft surface of a rug.

The Soviet archaeologist Sergei Rudenko found it in 1949 in barrow 5 at Pazyryk, a burial mound of the horse-riding nomads of the Altai. Robbers had broken into the tomb in ancient times; water seeped in through their tunnel and froze, and the ice kept felt, wood, textiles and the carpet intact. Rudenko dated the burials to the fifth century BC; later work places this group of barrows in the fourth to third centuries BC. The carpet is about two metres square and holds around 1.25 million knots, with borders of horsemen and deer around a central field. Scholars still argue over where it was woven, with Persia, Armenia and Central Asia all proposed. It is kept at the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg.

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WonderArchaeology

Roman dodecahedra are small, hollow bronze objects with twelve five-sided faces, a round hole in each face and a knob at every corner. About 130 are known, yet no ancient text says what they were for.

The first was recorded in England in 1739. Since then about 130 have turned up in Britain, France, Germany, the Low Countries, Switzerland, Austria and Hungary, but none in Italy, the heart of the empire. They measure 4 to 11 centimetres across, were cast mostly in Gaul between the second and fourth centuries AD, and the holes in one object usually differ in size. Few show signs of wear, and none carries letters or numbers. More than fifty explanations have been published: a surveying instrument, a tool for knitting gloves, a gauge for checking coins, a fortune-telling device, a metalworker's showpiece. In 2023 amateur archaeologists at Norton Disney in Lincolnshire found an unusually well-preserved example, but it did not settle the question.

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WonderArchaeology

The Hoxne Hoard, found in Suffolk in 1992, is the largest hoard of late Roman gold and silver ever found in Britain: nearly 15,000 coins, with jewellery, spoons and pepper pots, buried early in the fifth century.

Eric Lawes, a retired gardener with a metal detector, found it on 16 November 1992 while helping a farmer, Peter Whatling, look for a lost hammer. When silver spoons and gold coins appeared, he stopped and reported the find, so archaeologists could excavate it the next day with the objects largely in place, packed inside the remains of an oak chest. The latest coins show it was buried after AD 407, as Roman rule in Britain was ending. Among its treasures are four silver pepper pots, one shaped as the bust of an elegant lady and known as the Empress; pepper, most likely what they held, came from India. Lawes and Whatling shared the £1.75 million reward. The hoard is now at the British Museum in London.

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WonderArchaeology

The Lewis chessmen, carved mostly from walrus ivory in the twelfth century and found on a Scottish island in 1831, turn chess into a cast of kings, worried-looking queens, bishops, knights and warriors biting their shields.

The pieces were found in 1831 in the parish of Uig on the Isle of Lewis, in Scotland's Outer Hebrides, together with plain discs for another board game and a belt buckle. They were probably carved between about 1150 and 1200, most often thought to be in Trondheim, Norway, when the Hebrides were under Norwegian rule, and they seem to come from several incomplete sets, perhaps a merchant's stock. The warriors biting their shields are berserkers, fighters of Norse legend who worked themselves into a battle frenzy. The queens resting a hand on their cheek probably meant calm and wisdom, not worry. The British Museum holds 82 objects and the National Museum of Scotland 11. In 2019 a warder (the equivalent of a rook), unrecognised for decades in an Edinburgh family's home, sold at auction for £735,000.

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WonderArchaeology

The Oxyrhynchus Papyri are some half a million scraps of ancient writing dug out of an Egyptian town's rubbish dumps. Lost plays and poems lie among contracts, tax returns, private letters and school exercises.

Two young Oxford scholars, Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt, began digging the ancient rubbish mounds of Oxyrhynchus, a town about 160 kilometres south of Cairo, in 1896. Egypt's dry climate had kept papyrus, the paper-like writing material made from a reed, from rotting. Among tax returns, receipts and letters they found fragments of Sappho's poems, comedies by Menander that had been lost for centuries, and early Christian texts. The haul was so large that only a small share has been published so far, because each scrap has to be cleaned, pieced together, read and translated. The Egypt Exploration Society, which keeps most of the collection in Oxford, is still publishing new volumes.

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WonderReligion & Belief

The Trundholm Sun Chariot, made in Denmark about 3,400 years ago, is a bronze horse on wheels pulling a bronze disc that is gilded on one side. It seems to show the sun being drawn across the sky.

A farmer ploughing a peat bog on the Trundholm moor, in north-west Zealand, turned up the chariot in 1902. In 1998 archaeologists and metal detectorists went back to the spot and recovered 21 more pieces, including parts of the wheels. Bronze Age Scandinavians left no writing, so the object itself is the main clue to their beliefs. Many archaeologists read the two faces of the disc as day and night: the bright side is shown as the sun travels from east to west by day, the dark side as it returns unseen by night. The chariot is dated to about 1400 BCE and is kept at the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen.

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WonderArchaeology

The Lion-man of Hohlenstein-Stadel, a figure with a human body and a cave lion's head carved from mammoth ivory, is one of the oldest known sculptures. It was made in what is now Germany some 35,000 to 41,000 years ago.

The geologist Otto Völzing found the first fragments on 25 August 1939 in the Hohlenstein-Stadel cave in southern Germany. The Second World War broke out a week later, and the pieces lay forgotten in the Museum Ulm for about thirty years, until the archaeologist Joachim Hahn sorted more than 200 fragments and saw a figure with human and animal features emerge. New pieces found in the cave in later decades, including tiny fragments sifted from its soil in 2008, were added in later restorations. The last, finished in 2013, brought the figure to 31.1 centimetres. Carbon dating of the layer where it lay gives an age of 35,000 to 41,000 years. It was carved with flint tools and is on show in the Museum Ulm.

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WonderArchaeology

The Dover Bronze Age Boat, found under a road in Dover in 1992, was built about 3,500 years ago from oak planks sewn together with yew and made watertight with moss and animal fat.

Workers building the A20 road between Folkestone and Dover uncovered the boat on 28 September 1992, six metres below the surface. Waterlogged, airless ground had kept the oak from rotting. Archaeologists worked for nearly a month to lift a 9.5-metre section; the rest ran under nearby buildings and had to be left in place. The planks are held together by twisted yew stems and by wooden wedges driven through cleats, raised blocks carved out of the planks themselves. It is dated to about 1575 to 1520 BCE, which makes it one of the oldest seagoing boats known. Whether it ever crossed the Channel is still debated. It is on display in Dover Museum.

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WonderArchitecture

Great Zimbabwe, the stone city built by ancestors of the Shona people between the 11th and 15th centuries, has huge granite walls laid without mortar. It was the capital of a kingdom that traded gold towards the Indian Ocean coast.

The ruins spread over several square kilometres in the south-east of today's Zimbabwe, and at its height the city was probably home to up to 10,000 people. Its best-known structure, the Great Enclosure, has walls up to 11 metres high, some topped with chevrons, a zigzag pattern of set stones. Excavations found Chinese pottery, glass beads, coins from Arabia and a coin minted at Kilwa on the Swahili coast, signs of the city's place in Indian Ocean trade. Colonial writers claimed Africans could not have built it. David Randall-MacIver in 1905 and Gertrude Caton-Thompson in 1929 showed it was the work of the Shona's ancestors, yet Rhodesia's government kept promoting other theories until independence in 1980. Dzimbabwe means houses of stone in Shona, and the country took its name from the city.

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WonderArchaeology

Nan Madol, off the island of Pohnpei in Micronesia, is a ruined city of basalt walls, tombs and ceremonial buildings on roughly a hundred artificial islets divided by tidal channels.

Islet-building began by the 8th or 9th century, and the great basalt walls went up from about 1180–1200. The site became the ceremonial and political seat of the Saudeleur dynasty, which ruled a united Pohnpei until about 1628; rival chiefs were made to live there, where they could be watched. The builders used long, naturally many-sided columns of basalt, quarried elsewhere on Pohnpei and brought to the site, stacking them in alternating crosswise and lengthwise courses around platforms filled with coral rubble. How they moved and raised such heavy stone is not recorded. The mortuary sector, Madol Powe, includes the walled royal tomb islet of Nandauwas. UNESCO listed Nan Madol in 2016 and placed it at once on its List of World Heritage in Danger, as silt and mangroves were choking the channels.

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WonderTrade

Kilwa Kisiwani, an island off the coast of Tanzania, was one of the richest Swahili trading cities from the 13th to the 15th century. It controlled the gold trade of the southern coast and built its mosques and palaces of coral stone.

The Swahili were Muslim African trading communities of the East African coast. Kilwa grew rich when its sultans took control of the gold trade at Sofala, in today's Mozambique, where gold from the Zimbabwe plateau reached the sea. Merchants brought cloth, glass beads and porcelain from Arabia, Persia, India and China. The Great Mosque, one of the oldest standing on the coast, and the vast Husuni Kubwa palace were built of coral stone. For some 500 years Kilwa minted its own coins, mostly copper, which have been found as far inland as Great Zimbabwe. A Portuguese fleet sacked the city in 1505 and its trade declined. UNESCO listed the ruins in 1981; they were on its danger list from 2004 until conservation work allowed their removal in 2014.

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WonderEngineering

Wootz was a steel made in southern India and Sri Lanka by melting iron with carbon in small sealed clay pots. Traded west as ingots, it was prized because careful forging brought out flowing, watery bands in the blade, the pattern of famed Damascus swords.

Crucible steel of this kind was made in southern India from around the middle of the first millennium BCE. Because the metal melted fully in a sealed pot, it took up carbon evenly, giving a hard, high-carbon steel. In Sri Lanka, the archaeologist Gill Juleff found ancient furnaces built on hillsides to catch the monsoon winds, which blew air through them instead of bellows. Ingots travelled to Persia and Syria, where smiths forged them into the blades Europeans called Damascus steel. The wavy bands are sheets of tiny carbides, hard compounds of iron and carbon. In the 1990s J. D. Verhoeven and Alfred Pendray showed that traces of vanadium in the ore, together with repeated heating during forging, are needed for the pattern to form.

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WonderTrade

Baltic amber is tree resin that hardened over tens of millions of years. It was carried from the shores of the Baltic Sea to southern Europe along a web of trade routes known as the Amber Road, reaching Mycenaean Greece and, later, Roman workshops at Aquileia.

Amber began as resin in ancient forests and hardened underground; it is light, feels warm to the touch, and sometimes holds insects trapped millions of years ago. Storms still wash pieces up on Baltic beaches. There was never one paved road: amber moved along rivers and overland tracks, passing from hand to hand. Archaeologists can tell Baltic amber from other kinds by its chemistry, notably its succinic acid, and so trace beads found far to the south back to the Baltic. The Roman writer Pliny the Elder tells of a knight sent north under Emperor Nero who came back with so much amber that it decorated an entire gladiator show in Rome.

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WonderLanguage

Rongorongo is a script of glyphs carved into wood on Rapa Nui (Easter Island). More than twenty inscribed objects survive, but no proposed decipherment has won scholarly acceptance, and the texts remain unread.

The glyphs show human, animal, plant and geometric shapes. They are written in reverse boustrophedon: the reader follows one line from left to right, then turns the tablet upside down to read the next. Outsiders first reported the tablets in 1864, soon after Peruvian slave raids and a smallpox epidemic had killed much of the island's population, apparently including those who could read them. No bilingual text has been found to serve as a key. The surviving pieces are kept in museums and collections off the island, from the Santiago Staff in Chile's capital to tablets in Rome and Washington, and claims of a solution have so far failed to convince specialists.

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WonderTechnology

Lidar works like radar but with laser light: it measures distance by timing how long each pulse takes to bounce back. Flown over a forest, it can map the ground through gaps in the leaves and reveal ancient roads, walls and buildings hidden by trees.

The name stands for light detection and ranging. An instrument on an aircraft, drone or satellite fires rapid pulses and turns each round-trip time into a distance, building a “point cloud” of millions of measurements of roofs, branches and ground. Light cannot pass through solid leaves, but some pulses slip through small gaps, and software separates these ground returns from the canopy. Remove the digital forest and the bare terrain appears. In 2018 a lidar survey of the Maya Biosphere Reserve in northern Guatemala revealed more than 60,000 structures, from houses to raised roads and defences, many of them previously unknown, without a spade entering the soil. The same method maps flood plains, measures forests and helps self-driving cars see.

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WonderHistory

The Sweet Track, a raised wooden walkway across the Somerset marshes in England, was built with timber felled in the winter of 3807–3806 BC. Tree rings date it to that single year, making it one of the oldest precisely dated built roads in the world.

The track is named after Ray Sweet, the peat cutter who found its timbers in 1970. It ran for about 1.8 kilometres between an island of higher ground and a ridge, with oak planks laid end to end on crossed pegs driven into the peat. The parts were prepared in advance, and ten people could have assembled it in a day. It follows almost the same line as an even older walkway, the Post Track, built around 3838 BC. The Sweet Track was used for only about ten years before rising water covered it. Waterlogged peat kept out oxygen and preserved the wood, and dendrochronology, dating by counting and matching tree rings, pinned down the year the trees were cut. Finds along it include a polished jade axe head.

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WonderHistory

A hoard buried in Norfolk, England, about 2,000 years ago contained a near-complete carnyx, a tall bronze war trumpet topped with an animal's head. Found in 2025 and announced in January 2026, it also held parts of a second carnyx, a boar-headed standard and five shield bosses.

The carnyx was played across Iron Age Europe, roughly between 200 BC and AD 200. Held upright, its bell, shaped like an animal's open mouth, rose high above a crowd. This is only the third found in Britain: one dredged from the River Witham in Lincolnshire in 1768 was later destroyed while its metal was being analysed, and of the Deskford carnyx, found in Scotland in 1816, only the boar's-head bell survives. A standard is an emblem carried on a pole to mark a group of fighters, and this is the first boar's-head standard found in Britain. A shield boss is the metal dome at a shield's centre that covers the hand grip. The hoard was probably buried in the first century AD, in the lands of the Iceni, the people of Boudica, who rose against Rome in AD 60 or 61.

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WonderHistory

Alexandria on the Tigris, a port founded by Alexander the Great in 324 BC in what is now southern Iraq, is being mapped street by street. Drone photographs, surface survey and geophysics have revealed its walls, canals, temples and some of the largest city blocks known from the ancient world.

After floods ruined Alexander's city, it was rebuilt around 166 BC under the Seleucid king Antiochus IV. His governor Hyspaosines later made it the capital of his own kingdom, Characene, and it took his name as Charax Spasinou. For about 550 years it was a hub of long-distance trade linking Mesopotamia, the Gulf and India. The ruins, a site called Jabal Khuyabir, were identified in the 1960s by the British researcher John Hansman. Fieldwork resumed in 2016 with a British-German team, first reported by the University of Manchester and joined by Stefan Hauser of the University of Konstanz, whose results drew wide attention in early 2026. Magnetometer survey, which finds buried walls through small changes in the soil's magnetism, showed a grid of blocks about 185 by 85 metres.

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WonderArt

Font-de-Gaume, a cave in France's Dordogne famous for its Ice Age paintings, has had some of them dated directly for the first time. Charcoal found in the black paint showed that a bison was drawn about 13,300 years ago; the results were published in 2026.

Radiocarbon dating measures how much of a slowly decaying form of carbon is left in material that was once alive, such as charcoal. The cave's black figures were long thought to be painted with manganese minerals, which contain no carbon and cannot be dated this way. A team led by France's national research centre, the CNRS, used Raman spectroscopy and hyperspectral imaging, methods that identify materials by the way they react to light, and found charcoal in two drawings: a bison and a face-like 'mask'. Their study, published in March 2026 in PNAS, the journal of the US National Academy of Sciences, dated the bison to about 13,300 years ago and two samples from the mask to between about 14,200 and 16,000 years. A third mask sample came out at about 8,800 years, which suggests part of the figure was added or retouched thousands of years later.

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