Free Republic

...Located in Marliens, a commune in eastern France, the site has a large bowtie-shaped structure, whose middle sports a circular construction measuring 36 feet (11 meters) in diameter. This center circlet is interconnected by a 26-foot-long (8 m) horseshoe-shaped structure on one side and a jug-handle-shaped feature on the other, according to a translated statement from the French National Institute of Preventive Archaeological Research (INRAP), which carried out the excavations...Based on the plethora of artifacts found there — including a bundle containing seven flint arrowheads, two protective armbands worn by archers, a flint lighter and a copper-alloy dagger — archaeologists...

A copper dagger more than 4,000 years old was found in a forest near the town of Jarosław on the San River in south-eastern Poland. This discovery is the oldest dagger made of metal found in the Podkarpackie Voivodeship.In the 3rd millennium BC, objects made of copper were extremely rare in the area, Dr Elżbieta Sieradzka-Burghardt, an archaeologist from the Jarosław museum, told PAP.This valuable object, dating back over 4,000 years, was discovered last November by Piotr Gorlach of the Jarosław Historical and Exploration Association, who – with the permission of the Podkarpacie Regional Historical Monument Conservator in Przemyśl –...

Identifying an archaeological site with biblical stories is often circumstantial. In this case, archaeologists found the biblical archaeology equivalent of the Holy Grail: inscriptions discovered within a few hundred meters from the site, albeit from the 1st century B.C.E., reading "boundary of Gezer" in Hebrew, among other things. But the city's story begins thousands of years earlier...Later excavations in the 1960s and '70s on behalf of Hebrew Union College discerned 26 strata, often with one built upon the last. They range in date from the Chalcolithic period (4th millennium B.C.E.) to the Early Roman period (late 1st century B.C.E).The most...

LWL archaeologists have been excavating an Iron Age cemetery containing cremation burials near Fröndenberg-Frömern in Germany’s Unna district.Dr. Eva Cichy from the Olpe branch of LWL Archeology, said: “When a few remains of corpses were uncovered, it quickly became clear that we had found a small burial ground. In some graves, the remains of vessels used as urns were still preserved, while most of the burials had already been destroyed by agriculture.”Two large burials have been noted by the archaeologists. One slightly oval pit at a depth of 15 centimetres contained large ceramic shards deposited as funerary offerings, some of...

Serbian archaeologists say a 7,500-year-old copper axe found at a Balkan site shows the metal was used in the Balkans hundreds of years earlier than previously thought. The find near the Serbian town of Prokuplje shifts the timeline of the Copper Age and the Stone Age's neolithic period, archaeologist Julka Kuzmanovic-Cvetkovic told the independent Beta news agency. 'Until now, experts said that only stone was used in the Stone Age and that the Copper Age came a bit later. Our finds, however, confirm that metal was used some 500 to 800 years earlier,' she said. The Copper Age marks the...

Lake Constance is a 63km-long central European lake... formed by the Rhine Glacier during the ice age and is a Zungenbecken or tongue basin lake.No evidence of Palaeolithic finds have been found in the vicinity, but archaeologists have previously discovered stone tools (microliths) and hunting camps, suggesting that Mesolithic hunter gatherers frequented the area without settling.Neolithic activity dates from the middle and late Neolithic, when the so-called pile dwelling and wetland settlements were established on Lake Überlingen (Lower Lake Constance), the Constance Hopper (a bay in Lake Constance) and on the Obersee (Upper Lake Constance).In 2015, a 20 km line...

One of the oldest copper fishhooks in the world was discovered during excavations in Ashkelon, southern Israel, the Israel Antiquity Authority (IAA) announced on Wednesday.The 6,000-year-old discovery was made in 2018 when the IAA carried out excavations prior to the construction of the Agamim neighborhood in Ashkelon. However, the find is only being presented to the public now; it will be exhibited for the first time at the 48th Archeological Congress on April 3, the IAA press release said."This unique find is 6.5 cm (2.5 inches) long and 4 cm (1.5 inches) wide, its large dimensions making it suitable for...

Early occupation of Ategua dates from the Chalcolithic period, with the emergence of a major settlement around the 8th and 7th centuries BC, consisting of orthogonal-plan dwellings defended by an outer wall.According to the De Bello Hispaniensi, a Latin work continuing Julius Caesar's commentaries, the city inhabitants sided with Pompey during Caesar's civil war in the late Republic Era, resulting in the city being besieged by the Caesarian army in 45 BC.Most of the current morphology of Ategua is from the Roman period, including several domus abandoned during the 2nd century AD, a civil building, bathhouses, and burials on the...

...A couple of years ago while hunched over her microscope at the University of Haifa, graduate student Rikva Chasan began to notice on the inside rims of countless stone bowls a plethora of previously undocumented, methodically incised small triangles.Chasan is working as part of a multi-year international interdisciplinary project conducted by the university’s laboratory for ground stone tools research that is tracking the provenance of these basalt vessels across the ancient Levant in order to show socioeconomic changes in the Chalcolithic period, circa 4,500 BCE – 3,900 BCE...Chasan postulates that the clearly coordinated decorations depict the start of a crafts...

A mind-blowing 3D reconstruction has revealed what a Stone Age woman looked like 4,000 years ago. It’s now on display at Västernorrlands Museum in Sweden and is based on skeletal remains that were found in 1923. The remains of the Stone Age woman were found next to the body of a seven-year-old boy who may have been her son. Scientists have reconstructed her after all this time and designed her expression as if she was watching over her child....

The origins of a family of languages including modern Japanese, Korean, Turkish and Mongolian date back some 9,000 years to millet farmers that inhabited northeastern China, a study found after evaluating linguistic, genetic and archaeological evidence... Millet was an important early crop as hunter-gatherers transitioned to an agricultural lifestyle.There are 98 Transeurasian languages. Among these are Korean and Japanese as well as various Turkic languages including Turkish in parts of Europe, Anatolia, Central Asia and Siberia; various Mongolic languages including Mongolian in Central and Northeast Asia; and various Tungusic languages in Manchuria and Siberia.This language family's beginnings were traced to...

...the new study encompasses data from nearly 300 ancient individuals and focuses specifically on the Copper to Bronze Age transition...The genomic data reveals some of the processes underlying this genetic shift. While the bulk of the genome shows that Bronze Age individuals are a mix of local Iberian Chalcolithic ancestry and a smaller part of incoming ancestry from the European mainland, the paternally inherited Y chromosome lineages show a complete turnover, linked to the movement of steppe-related ancestry that is also visible in other parts of Europe..."We also found signals of ancestry that we traced to the central and eastern...

The discovery of a dismantled stone circle—close to Stonehenge's bluestone quarries in west Wales—raises the possibility that a 900-year-old legend about Stonehenge being built from an earlier stone circle contains a grain of truth. Radiocarbon and OSL dating of Waun Mawn indicate construction c. 3000 BC, shortly before the initial construction of Stonehenge. The identical diameters of Waun Mawn and the enclosing ditch of Stonehenge, and their orientations on the midsummer solstice sunrise, suggest that at least part of the Waun Mawn circle was brought from west Wales to Salisbury Plain. This interpretation complements recent isotope work that supports a...

The latest finds were made during preliminary studies of the area, before 18 months of full archaeological excavations are expected to begin later this year, Leivers said. Foremost among the latest finds are several graves, unearthed just to the southwest of the Stonehenge circle, that are thought to be from the Beaker culture, which is named after their practice of burying the dead with bell-shaped pottery drinking vessels. The Beaker people lived in Western Europe between 4,800 and 3,800 years ago, beginning in the Chalcolithic period when the first copper tools came into use. In one of the graves., the...

One of the world’s oldest workshops for smelting copper – going back some 6,500 years – has been uncovered in Beersheba by archaeologists at Tel Aviv University and the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA). The remnants go back to the Chalcolithic period – the word “chalcolithic” is made up of the Greek words for “copper” and “stone” – is so named because although metalworking was already in evidence, the tools used were still made of stone. An analysis of the isotopes of ore remnants in the furnace shards show that the raw ore was brought to Neveh Noy neighborhood from Wadi...

Archaeologists in Israel announced Sunday that they had uncovered a 5,000-year-old city north of Tel Aviv. It is the largest Bronze Age urban area found in the region to date and could fundamentally change ideas of when sophisticated urbanization began taking place in the area, they said. Israel's Antiquities Authority said in a Facebook post that the city was discovered at the En Esur excavation site during road works near Harish, a town some 50 kilometers (30 miles) north of Tel Aviv. The archaeologists described the city as "cosmopolitan and planned." It covered 65 hectares (160 acres) and was home...

The site demonstrates a long Bronze Age sequence, and earlier Chalcolithic occupation, starting before 2,500 BC and connected with the neighbouring Neolithic–Philia phase settlement of Kissonerga-Mosphilia. The site was abandoned around 1600 BC, during the transition to the Late Cypriot Bronze Age. During the final occupation phase a complex including some roofed areas and large open spaces was built. The complex has no evidence for domestic occupation and activities seem to be industrial, including large fire-related installations and the previously published malting kiln likely used in beer production... The majority of features and emplacements are associated with the primary construction...

An international team of researchers from Tel Aviv University, the Israel Antiquities Authority and Harvard University has discovered that waves of migration from Anatolia and the Zagros mountains (today's Turkey and Iran) to the Levant helped develop the Chalcolithic culture that existed in Israel's Upper Galilee region some 6,500 years ago. The study is one of the largest ancient DNA studies ever conducted in Israel and for the first time sheds light on the origins of the Chalcolithic culture in the Levant, approximately 6,000-7,000 years ago... The team unearthed dozens of burials in the natural stalactite cave that is 17...

A 6,500-year-old grave of a man holding in his hands a stone ax scepter has been discovered by archaeologists excavating a recently found necropolis from from the Chalcolithic (Aeneolithic, Copper Age) in the town of Kamenovo, Kubrat Municipality, Razgrad District, in Northeast Bulgaria. A total of seven graves were found in the Chalcolithic necropolis in Kamenovo when it was first discovered back in September 2015. However, these were all graves of women and children (of the Mediterranean anthropological type), with the newly discovered grave being the first male grave to be found there to date, reports local news site Darik...

It draws on fossil evidence showing Homo sapiens was present in East Africa around 195,000 years ago and that our species had dispersed to the far corners of Eurasia, Australia, and the Americas by 12,000 years ago. This increase in global human populations is linked with a variety of species extinctions, one of the most significant being the reduction by around two-thirds of 150 species of 'megafauna' or big beasts between 50,000 and 10,000 years ago, says the paper, with their disappearance having 'dramatic effects' on the structure of the ecosystem and seed dispersal. ...second... the advent of agriculture worldwide,...