Topic
The study of past human life through excavation and analysis of material remains such as artifacts, structures, and sites.
Jesse Tune and Shane Miller's study of some 500 Tennessee Valley spear points finds Clovis hunters resharpened them more than their Cumberland successors. The pair read that thrift as caution by newcomers who did not yet know where to find good stone.
Reality
A Sheffield Hallam and Curtin team paired mineral grain dating with simulations of last-glaciation ice sheets. The models let ice carry the six-tonne sandstone to the North Sea and leave the rest of the 700 km to people.
Reality
A reanalysis of 18 mammoth ivory figurines dug up in northern Ukraine between 1908 and 1913 finds their engraved lines following structures inside the tusk. Mizyn is so far the only site where the pattern has been reported.
Reality
Greece's culture ministry reports a fourth-century B.C. complex at Mieza with two banquet halls, a stadium and a lecture hall of stone desks, while the name of the teacher who worked there still comes from Plutarch.
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Florida Museum researchers compared 58 plain and decorated sherds from Tampa Bay and report in American Antiquity that migrant artisans made the decorated vessels on the coast, one of three explanations archaeologists had weighed for a century.
Reality
Maamoun Abdulkarim ran Syria's antiquities directorate when the Deir ez-Zor Museum was emptied in the summers of 2014 and 2015, and he has now published his own account of the operation in a curatorship journal.
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The 2023 excavation of a ridge in northwestern Morocco dated a multiphase ditch, rampart and wall to about 4,000 to 3,500 years ago, the earliest confirmed defensive construction in North Africa outside Egypt.
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Nothing grows in the dark at Cloggs Cave, so the half-burnt silica plant microfossils in its ash layers came in with people. The dated layers show the same act being repeated for at least 2,800 years.
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An international team sequenced Yersinia pestis from teeth at four Siberian cemeteries and found it in 18 of 46 people, among them siblings and parents who appear to have died in the same outbreak. The work is published in Nature.
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The age of a richly furnished burial in southwest Poland rests on the style of a greenish serpentinite axe, and the bone work that would confirm it, along with the claim of decapitation, is still to come.
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
A 10th-century timber chamber at Gnezdilovo held a man, a horse, a dog and riding gear. With only 80 others known in western Russia, one find carries unusual inferential weight.
Reality