Peer-reviewed journal publishing archaeological research, including bioarchaeology, isotope analysis, and material science studies.
Lead-isotope analysis ties a copper ingot hoard found in Malawi in 1967 to Congo's Kipushi mine, nearly 800 km away. The river route the researchers propose, by canoe down the Kafue and Zambezi, is their reading of the terrain, built on top of that match.
Reality
A woman buried face down in a Henan cemetery had her nasal bones cut back to half the bridge and lived, and the team that found her among 300 burials argues the grave itself points to punishment.
Reality
Chinese law codes prescribed cutting off a livestock thief's nose, and the texts record thousands of cases. A skull from a Henan cemetery, healed and remodelled around a wide nasal opening, suggests one of those sentences was carried out.
Reality
A team at Nicolaus Copernicus University ran isotopes, DNA and textile analysis on a 17th century Polish burial, and the sequence they report puts the padlock on the toe at interment and the sickle at the throat only after someone dug the grave open again.
Reality
University of Waterloo anthropologists matched skeletal DNA to living relatives and named Harry Peglar, William Orren, David Young and John Bridgens. Six of the 105 men who walked away from Erebus and Terror now have names.
Reality
A first count of the pigment behind the world's oldest artificial mummies turns a burial rite into a procurement problem, and dents the idea that states come before technique.
Reality