Archaeologists and astronomers to study Wiltshire site’s lesser understood connection to the moon The rising and setting of the sun at Stonehenge, especially during the summer and winter solstices, continues to evoke joy, fascination and religious devotion. Now a project has been launched to delve into the lesser understood links that may exist between the monument and the moon during a rare lunar event ..read more

Archaeologists and guides among critics who say scheme goes against what symbol of democracy should represent Jackie and Malcolm Love stood amid a bevy of tourists in the heart of Athens taking in the Acropolis with a mixture of awe and admiration. The Greek capital’s greatest classical site was truly magnificent, they said, but the crowds had been such, even in April, that they preferred to experience it from a distance. “We didn’t go, not with all those people,” said Jackie, looking up at the fifth-century monument from the cobbled boulevard below. “We didn’t think it’d be the best thing to ..read more

‘Black room’ with frescoes inspired by Trojan war described as one of most striking discoveries ever made at site in southern Italy A banquet room replete with well preserved frescoes depicting characters inspired by the Trojan war has been unearthed among the ruins of Pompeii in what has been described as one of the most striking discoveries ever made at the southern Italy archaeological site. The 15-metre-long, six-metre-wide room was found in a former private residence in Via di Nola, which was ancient Pompeii’s longest road, during excavations in the Regio IX area of the site ..read more

Paper dates 82 pottery pieces found in single dig site at between 3,000 and 2,000 years old Follow our Australia news live blog for latest updates Get our morning and afternoon news emails, free app or daily news podcast Groundbreaking archaeological research may have upended the longstanding belief that Aboriginal Australians did not make pottery. A paper published in the Quaternary Science Reviews on Wednesday details the finding of 82 pottery pieces from a single dig site on a Great Barrier Reef island, dates them at between 3,000 and 2,000 years old and determines that the pots were most ..read more

Exclusive: four vases in New York auction traced to Gianfranco Becchina, convicted in 2011 of illegally dealing in antiquities Christie’s has withdrawn four ancient Greek vases from Tuesday’s auction after a leading archaeologist discovered that each of them was linked to a convicted antiquities dealer. Dr Christos Tsirogiannis, an affiliated archaeology lecturer at the University of Cambridge and a specialist in looted antiquities and trafficking networks, told the Guardian that there was damning evidence within the auction house’s own correspondence with the dealer, which was seized by the p ..read more

Chemical analysis reveals origin of coinage that stimulated trade and helped fuel development of new towns from seventh century Several decades after the Sutton Hoo burial, starting in about AD660, there was a sudden rise in the number of silver coins in circulation in England, for reasons that have long puzzled archaeologists and historians. The new rush of silver coinage stimulated trade and helped fuel the development of the new towns springing up at the time – but where did it come from? Were the Anglo-Saxon kings recycling old Roman scrap metal? Or had they found lucrative sources from mi ..read more

My brother Stephen Mitchell, who has died aged 75, was a historian, archaeological surveyor and interpreter of inscriptions of the Hellenistic, Roman and early Byzantine periods, particularly in what is now Turkey. Equally at home on a hillside as in a lecture theatre, he once discovered three lost cities of the Pisidian people, high in Anatolia’s Taurus mountains, in a single fortnight. Stephen joined the department of classics at Swansea University in 1976, gaining a professorship in 1993; he held visiting fellowships at the University of Göttingen in Germany and the Institute for Advanced S ..read more

Letter reveals disappearance of 17th century British pirate was tied to William III’s spy ring, Daniel Defoe and an archbishop In 1695, Henry Avery led his 160-strong crew to pull off the most lucrative heist in pirate history on the high seas, amassing gold, silver, sapphires, emeralds and diamonds worth more than £85m in today’s money. He became the most wanted criminal of his day but vanished without trace and was the stuff of legend for 300 years. Now shipwreck explorers Dr Sean Kingsley and Rex Cowan claim to have solved what they call the longest cold case in pirate history: the “pirate ..read more

Excavations of bronze age graves have found battle-scarred female archers, says the historian Bettany Hughes In Greek legends, the Amazons were feared and formidable women warriors who lived on the edge of the known world. Hercules had to obtain the magic girdle of the Amazonian queen Hippolyte in one of his 12 labours, and Achilles killed another queen, Penthesilea, only to fall in love with her as her beautiful face emerged from her helmet. These horseback-riding, bow-wielding nomads, who fought and hunted just like men, have long been shrouded in myth, but archaeologists are discoverin ..read more

Settlement on stilts dropped into River Nene after a fire nearly 3,000 years ago and was preserved in silt A bronze age settlement built on stilts that dropped “like a coffee plunger” into a river after a catastrophic fire has provided a window on our past lives, according to the archaeologist that led the investigation of the Cambridgeshire site. Must Farm, nicknamed the Pompeii of the Fens, offers “exceptional clarity” because of a combination of charring and waterlogging, said Mark Knight, of Cambridge University’s archaeological unit ..read more