Hannibal Crossing the Alps, drawing by Clarkson Stanfield. Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum.

Which mountain pass he actually used has been argued over for centuries. A new study takes an unusual angle on the question, treating the crossing not as a philological puzzle but as an energy budget, and its numbers point squarely to one route, the Col de la Traversette.

The research, by Emilio Berti of the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research, known as iDiv, and Friedrich Schiller University Jena, together with Fritz Vollrath of the University of Oxford and Save the Elephants in Kenya, was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Turning elephants into data

The team’s method borrows directly from movement ecology, the study of how animals allocate energy as they travel across real terrain. Vollrath, who has spent years studying the bioenergetics of African elephants in Kenya, noted that applying what has been learned from living elephant populations brings an entirely new dimension to the old debate over Hannibal’s route. The researchers built models estimating energy expenditure as a function of body mass and terrain slope, a critical variable in mountainous country where every additional meter of elevation carries an outsized metabolic cost, then calibrated those models against empirical data gathered from elephants in Kenya’s Samburu reserve.

Applying that framework to four historically proposed Alpine passes, the team calculated the total energy the entire Carthaginian force, men, horses, and elephants together, would have needed to cross each one. The Col de la Traversette came out lowest, requiring an estimated 5.42 terajoules for the whole army. The route over the Col de Montgenèvre and down into the Po Valley via Susa came second, at 6.02 terajoules. The Col du Clapier, long the leading academic favorite, ranked third at 6.28 terajoules. The Col du Mont Cenis proved least efficient of all, at 6.45 terajoules.

A quiet reversal of the leading theory

That ranking matters because it upends the conventional wisdom. As the study’s authors note, the Col du Clapier had been considered the most likely candidate among historians for years, while more recent philological and geomorphological analyses had already begun to point toward the Traversette instead. Emilio Berti was careful about how far the new analysis can go, stressing that it does not dispel all uncertainty about the exact path taken. What it does, he said, is significantly strengthen the case for the Traversette route, by showing it would have better accommodated the demands of moving a large army, elephants included, through extremely difficult terrain.

The Col de la Traversette sits at an altitude of 2,914 meters on the modern border between France and Italy, a formidable barrier by any measure, and the researchers’ models suggest it nonetheless offered the most efficient path available to a force burdened with thousands of men, horses, and multi-ton animals unaccustomed to alpine cold.

Figure X. (A) Proposed routes for Hannibal’s crossing of the Alps. Background colors indicate elevation, and white lines show all candidate routes. Colored lines highlight the three highest-ranked routes. Elevation data courtesy of NASA. (B) Cumulative direct energy costs for the three highest-ranked routes, calculated for a single soldier, horse, and elephant. Route colors correspond to those shown in panel A. Values include only direct locomotion costs and exclude additional expenditures, such as transporting supplies or supporting noncombatant personnel. (C) Elevation profiles of the three highest-ranked routes. Colors indicate the cumulative energy cost incurred by Hannibal’s army along each route. Credit: E. Berti and F. Vollrath (2026).

The elephants fared better than the men

Perhaps the study’s most striking result concerns not the route itself but what the crossing did to the different parts of Hannibal’s army. Modeling the metabolic toll of the Traversette crossing, the researchers found that human soldiers would have lost roughly 19 percent of their body fat reserves over the journey, a figure the authors consider consistent with the high mortality that classical sources describe among Hannibal’s troops during the passage. Horses fared somewhat better, losing an estimated 11 percent. The war elephants, remarkably, came through comparatively unscathed, losing only about 4 percent of their reserves, a result that runs against the long-held assumption that the elephants suffered the worst of any part of the army in the mountains.

The explanation lies in basic elephant physiology. In the wild, African savannah elephants forage for roughly fourteen hours a day simply to maintain their body weight, and their sheer size, close to three tons for both the African elephants that made up most of Hannibal’s force and his own mount Surus, an Asian elephant, comes with correspondingly large energy reserves to draw on. Those reserves, the study suggests, gave the elephants a buffer that the leaner, harder-marching soldiers simply did not have, and may help explain why so many of Hannibal’s elephants are recorded as having survived the crossing at all.

An old mystery, an unusual toolkit

The deeper puzzle behind Hannibal’s decision to bring elephants at all remains open. Historians still debate why he insisted on hauling war elephants over some of Europe’s most punishing terrain rather than relying solely on infantry and cavalry. One possibility is that he wanted the tactical shock value of unfamiliar giants in his first engagements with Roman forces. Another is that the animals were meant to awe and help win over the Celtic tribes of northern Italy whose support Hannibal needed against Rome. The new study cannot settle that question, but by reconstructing the actual physical toll the mountains took on each part of his army, it offers historians a genuinely new kind of evidence, drawn not from ancient texts but from the metabolism of the animals Hannibal brought with him.

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Source. Berti, E., and Vollrath, F. (2026). “Energy costs of Hannibal’s alpine crossing.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 123(28), e2612764123. doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2612764123

Every autumn in the Zagros foothills, families still climb into oak groves to scrape a sticky exudate off the leaves and boil it down into molasses. In the Sinai, Bedouin still gather sweet globules that bleed from tamarisk branches in the cool hours before dawn, a seasonal harvest their grandparents called by the same name used three thousand years earlier for a food that fell from the sky. Manna, it turns out, never stopped being real. What changed was how people explained it.

Few ancient food traditions sit at the intersection of environment, memory, and identity as tightly as manna does. In the classical wilderness narratives, it is not a normal staple grown, stored, and taxed like grain. It appears as an episodic provision, gathered early, rationed daily, and framed as a lesson in dependence and communal discipline. Read with historical method rather than doctrinal expectation, the descriptions also look like something else entirely, a composite memory of real desert phenomena, edible exudates, insect honeydew, windblown lichens, filtered through the literary conventions of sacred history.

A historically grounded account does not require choosing between miracle and nothing at all. It asks a narrower, more answerable question. What do the ancient authors actually say the substance did, what can desert ecologies plausibly produce, and how do communities transform short-lived environmental events into enduring narratives of survival.

Ercole de' Roberti - The Israelites gathering Manna (National Gallery, London)

What the texts actually describe

Across the relevant traditions, manna is defined less by culinary detail than by behavior. It arrives with night moisture and morning collection, it is small and pale, and it resists hoarding. Exodus 16 places it after the morning dew has lifted, describing thin flakes like frost on the ground, fine enough to prompt the question “what is it,” a line that doubles as wordplay embedded directly into the naming tradition. The same chapter turns spoilage into a narrative mechanism, using the substance’s short shelf life to enforce daily rationing and to punish those who tried to stockpile it. Numbers 11 adds sensory detail the earlier account lacks, comparing the grains to coriander seed and describing preparation by grinding, beating, and baking into cakes with a taste likened to oil-rich fare.

A parallel memory survives in the Qur’an, where manna appears paired with quail as a providential food supply. Historically, that pairing matters more than it might first appear, since it ties an otherwise vague sweet or bread-like substance to a concrete, recognizable ecological event, the seasonal movement of migrating birds, anchoring the story in a real landscape rhythm rather than pure abstraction.

Treated as cultural artifacts that preserve observation inside stylized storytelling, five details across these texts carry the most diagnostic weight. The substance is tied to dew, it is collected early in the day, it takes the form of small pale granules or flakes, it carries sweetness in some traditions, and it spoils quickly once stored. Together, they read less like poetic invention than like a set of field notes on a real, if unfamiliar, seasonal food.

Three candidates from the desert itself

Tamarisk honeydew and the manna scale. The most thoroughly studied natural correlate is the honeydew produced by scale insects living on tamarisk trees. The tamarisk manna scale, Trabutina mannipara, feeds on sap-rich tamarisk branches and excretes the surplus sugar as tiny globules that harden in the cool morning air into a sugar-like crust, still gathered locally today as a seasonal delicacy. The pattern maps cleanly onto the textual dew motif. Honeydew is easiest to collect before the day’s heat softens or scatters it, and insect-derived sugars sour or spoil quickly if not processed soon after gathering. The classic scholarly case for this identification is F. S. Bodenheimer’s 1947 paper “The Manna of Sinai,” which treats the substance as an entomological product tied to specific local tamarisk ecologies. Its strength is not that it proves any particular wilderness narrative happened as told, but that it demonstrates how an unusual, intermittent desert food could plausibly be experienced as gift-like and then narrated in a theological register. It also has a real limitation worth stating plainly, since tamarisk manna is only available for a few months each year and in quantities of a few kilograms per hectare, a modest yield that natural historians have long flagged as far short of what would be needed to sustain a large population for any length of time.

Trabutina mannipara

Manna lichens and the optics of food from the sky. A second candidate is the so-called manna lichen, a vagrant, unrooted organism that wind can dislodge and carry, sometimes depositing it suddenly across open ground after a storm. The Australian National Botanic Gardens documents the phenomenon under the name Diyarbakir’s heavenly bread, linking reports of edible material falling after windstorms to lichens identified as Lecanora esculenta and related species discussed in the specialist literature. The interpretive value here lies less in the food itself than in the optics of its arrival, since a ground-level ecological event, when it follows a storm and appears scattered in irregular patches, is easy for observers to perceive as something descending from above. This pathway also helps explain why manna became a floating category word across Eurasia and the Middle East, applied again and again to rare sweet or edible deposits that were not cultivated in any conventional sense, a pattern traced in detail in Donkin’s historical-geographical survey of manna traditions. The theory carries a genuine weakness, however, and a rigorous account should not paper over it. Lecanora esculenta itself is not documented growing in the Sinai region, which undercuts its direct application to the biblical wilderness narrative specifically, even as it remains a well-attested phenomenon elsewhere in the wider manna tradition.

Oak exudates as a living regional tradition. A third family of candidates comes from oak-derived exudates, produced through insect activity on Quercus species and often crystallizing on leaves or acorns before being collected as a sweetener. Recent biochemical work on Gazo, or oak manna, gathered from Quercus infectoria in Iraqi Kurdistan, confirms it as a genuine natural exudate shaped by insect activity, and its chemistry sets it apart in an informative way. Unlike the manna of Cotoneaster or Fraxinus trees, Gazo contains no mannitol, the sugar alcohol that typically dominates those other regional mannas, pointing to a distinct biochemical pathway even among substances that share a single folk name. Parallel ethnobotanical work from southeastern Anatolia documents Gezo molasses, produced from Quercus brantii acorns, with local communities across seven provinces still practicing the seasonal collection, sorting, and processing methods their ancestors used.

Taken together, these three traditions suggest that manna functions historically as an umbrella term rather than a single substance. A remembered desert food may correspond not to one species or mechanism but to a repertoire of opportunistic foods, tamarisk honeydew in one micro-region and season, oak exudates in another, and occasional wind-borne lichen falls layered on top, all gathered under one enduring name.

Quail, rationing, and the logistics of survival

The quail motif accompanying manna in several traditions is often read as purely symbolic, but it fits a realistic environmental frame as well. Ornithological research documents genuine autumn quail migration across the north Sinai coast, a seasonal pulse of birds moving through a landscape otherwise defined by scarcity. The point is not that any ancient text should be read as a field survey, but that migratory pulses of this kind can produce brief windows of real abundance, the sort of episode a community would remember vividly precisely because it stood out against long stretches of want.

That pairing of sudden abundance with underlying scarcity also explains why manna narratives are so preoccupied with rules of collection, daily portions, limits on hoarding, and strict timing. In subsistence settings, rationing is not an abstract ethical stance. It is survival technology. A food that appears in small quantities, is easiest to gather early, and spoils quickly will generate social tension around accumulation almost automatically. When later narrators encode that tension into story form, spoilage becomes a moralized mechanism, a way of explaining why the substance goes bad specifically when people disobey communal norms. That is a literary strategy, but one built on a genuinely plausible material substrate rather than invented from nothing.

In this light, manna can be read as an interface between ecology and governance. Whatever one concludes about the historicity of any single wilderness episode, scholarship on these traditions increasingly emphasizes that the texts preserve real geographic and environmental knowledge, often indirectly, because the shape of a landscape constrains what kind of provisioning a storyteller can plausibly imagine. Hoffmeier’s work on the wilderness traditions argues along these lines, showing an underlying awareness of Sinai and northeastern Egyptian geography even as the historicity of any specific narrative event remains debated across the field.

Modern re-enchantment and the limits of evidence

In contemporary popular retellings, manna is sometimes rebranded as something far stranger than an ancient desert food, a technologically exotic or alchemical substance marketed under names like ORMEs, or orbitally rearranged monoatomic elements, associated with David Hudson. It is worth being precise here about what actually exists. Patent filings connected to Hudson’s claims are real documents in patent databases, but a patent records an application and a description. It does not constitute validated scientific evidence, and it is not the same thing as a replicated, peer-reviewed consensus. Engineering literature that has examined ORME-style claims places them squarely on the borderland between unconventional hypothesis and pseudoscience, noting a persistent lack of the kind of robust, independently reproduced evidence that would be needed to support the more extraordinary popular assertions.

The pattern is a familiar one across history. Ancient wonder foods are periodically reinterpreted using whatever prestige vocabulary a given era finds most compelling, alchemy in one century, electricity and ether in another, quantum or nano language in the present. Manna’s journey from desert exudate to monoatomic gold is simply the latest iteration of a much older habit of re-dressing mystery in the era’s most fashionable technical costume.

TEM image of gold nanoparticles and nanorods

That habit becomes genuinely dangerous when it slides from metaphor into practice. Some contemporary narratives imply that ingesting or injecting metal-based preparations produces spiritual or cognitive upgrades, a claim with no defensible basis in the ancient manna texts themselves. Separately, and on entirely independent grounds, modern biomedical literature on gold nanoparticles documents real biodistribution, accumulation, and toxicity pathways in the body, shaped by dose, surface chemistry, and route of exposure. Gold in nanoparticle form is not automatically benign simply because the metal itself is inert in jewelry, a distinction worth stating clearly given how casually it gets erased in popular retellings.

What the layered memory actually preserves

The most methodologically disciplined conclusion is also, in the end, the most satisfying one. Ancient manna traditions read best as a layered cultural memory of rare desert foods and episodic abundance events, reshaped through storytelling into lessons about communal order and endurance. There is no single hidden chemical waiting to be decoded, no secret ingredient that unlocks the whole tradition at once. The real secret, if there is one, is simpler and more human. It is the way that groups under pressure convert a precarious, unpredictable ecology into meaning that can survive being told and retold for thousands of years.

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References

1. Bodenheimer, F. S. (1947). The Manna of Sinai. The Biblical Archaeologist, 10(1), 2 to 6.
2. Ben-Dov, Y. (1988). Manna scale, Trabutina mannipara (Hemprich and Ehrenberg). Systematic Entomology, 13(4), 387 to 392.
3. Britannica. “Manna (biblical food)” and “Tamarisk manna scale (Trabutina mannipara).”
4. Hoffmeier, J. K. (2005). Ancient Israel in Sinai. The Evidence for the Authenticity of the Wilderness Traditions. Oxford University Press.
5. Niżnik, Ł., et al. (2024). Gold Nanoparticles (AuNPs). Toxicity, Safety and Green Synthesis. A Critical Review. International Journal of Molecular Sciences, 25(7), 4057.
6. Australian National Botanic Gardens. “Diyarbakir’s heavenly bread” and related manna lichen case studies. See also Donkin, R. A. (1980) on the historical geography of manna traditions.
7. Soleimani, A., Shorsh Hamad, D., Khalil Ismael, S., and Muhamad Said, K. (2025). Identification and Quantification of Carbohydrates, Amino Acids, and Protein in Gazo (Oak Manna). Jundishapur Journal of Natural Pharmaceutical Products, 20(4), e164649.
8. Ethnobotanical and chemical studies on Gezo molasses from Quercus brantii Lindl. acorns in Turkey (2021 to 2026 survey period).
9. Zuckerbrot, Y. D., Safriel, U. N., and Paz, U. (1980). Autumn migration of Quail (Coturnix coturnix) at the north coast of the Sinai Peninsula. Ibis.
10. Hudson, D. R. (Patent). Non-metallic, monoatomic forms of transition and noble metal elements (ORMEs).
11. van Deventer, J. S. J. (2013). The precious metals we prefer to ignore. Minerals Engineering.
12. Primary texts. Exodus 16; Numbers 11:7 to 9; Qur’an 2:57 and 7:160.

The reason is brilliant. The tumulus is made of loose gravel. Any excavation would quickly fill back in, the stones collapse inward the moment you dig. This is why the site has resisted archaeologists for over a century.

American archaeologist Theresa Goell devoted decades of her life to this mountain, tunneling through its slopes in the 1950s in search of the chamber. She never found it. Every attempt to cut into the loose rock triggered the same result: the mound simply swallowed the opening back up. No excavation attempt has even been permitted since 1987.

This is Mount Nemrut, the tomb sanctuary of King Antiochus I of Commagene, a small kingdom that flourished between the Greek west and the Persian east in the 1st century BC. Antiochus believed he was descended from both Alexander the Great and the Persian king Darius, and he built this sanctuary to place himself among the gods, as an equal.

Colossal seated statues of Zeus, Apollo, Heracles, and the king himself once lined the terraces around the mound. Today their giant heads lie toppled at their feet, staring out across the mountains, while the tomb they were built to guard remains sealed inside.

A self-sealing mountain. Engineered to protect a secret forever. And so far, it has.

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The Proclamation of Emperor Claudius, by Lawrence Alma-Tadema. Credit: Public domain / Wikimedia Commons

The research, by Zhao Dong of the University of Oxford, was published in the journal Economics Letters. It offers the first systematic comparison of its kind, tracking 97 Roman emperors and 58 Chinese emperors across the five centuries in which both empires coexisted, from 27 BC to AD 476.

The numbers

Of the 97 Roman emperors in the dataset, 59 died violently, through assassination, execution, military revolt, defeat in civil war, or forced suicide. Among the 58 Chinese emperors, only 18 met the same fate. Roman rulers also held power for a much shorter time. The average Roman reign lasted 7.5 years against 11.7 years in China, and the gap widens further in the median figures, 3 years for Rome against 6.5 years for China, indicating that a typical Roman emperor’s rule could end abruptly at almost any point.

The pattern held up across every phase of both empires’ histories. During the Principate, the early centuries of Roman rule, the violent death rate reached 62.1 percent, while China’s contemporaneous Han Dynasty saw just 17.6 percent. Rome’s worst stretch was the Crisis of the Third Century, from AD 235 to 284, when 26 emperors held the throne in fifty years and more than 80 percent of them were murdered. China’s roughly contemporaneous Wei-Jin and Northern and Southern Dynasties period of fragmentation, which stretched across 257 years, produced a violent death rate of 36.6 percent, itself elevated by Chinese standards but still far below Rome’s peak. Even in the later Roman Empire, from AD 284 to 476, after Diocletian’s reforms had reorganized the imperial system, the rate remained high at 47.6 percent, while China’s violence declined sharply once its own period of crisis passed.

The Via Labicana Augustus depicts Augustus as Pontifex Maximus, with his head veiled during a sacrifice. Augustus was the first emperor of the unified Roman Empire and one of the few to die a peaceful death. | Werner Forman Archive, N. J. Saunders, Palazzo Massimo alle Terme, Getty Images

The military trap

Dong’s explanation centers on what he calls the military trap. In Rome, the legions developed a corporate identity of their own and a settled belief that they held the right to choose and depose emperors. An acclaimed general was expected to reward his troops with donatives, land, or better conditions of service, and an emperor who failed to deliver risked being replaced, usually violently, by whichever rival his own soldiers preferred next.

The data bear this out sharply. Among Roman emperors who took power through military acclamation or usurpation, 75.7 percent died violently, compared with 51.7 percent of those who came to the throne through inheritance, appointment, or co-rule, a statistically significant gap. More strikingly, 62.7 percent of all violent deaths among Roman emperors trace directly to military conflict, whether revolt, civil war, or battle abroad. As the study puts it, Roman emperors died violently at roughly twice the Chinese rate, and the difference survives after controlling for historical period and mode of succession.

Emperor Commodus ruled for 12 years before being assassinated on 31 December 192 CE. He was strangled in his bath by the wrestler Narcissus as part of a conspiracy that also involved his mistress, Marcia. Credit: Joseph Saleh/Georgia Institute of Technology.

China’s palace conspiracies

Imperial China operated on an entirely different logic. Across the full 500 years studied, only seven Chinese emperors reached the throne through what Dong terms military-style elevation, and every one of them was a dynasty founder. Within any already-established dynasty, no emperor came to power through military acclamation or troop mutiny.

Violent removals in China instead took the shape of palace conspiracies, orchestrated by regents, the families of imperial consorts, or court eunuchs, factions that commanded troops but never as autonomous forces with a corporate identity of their own, using them instead as instruments of court intrigue. Dong cites the murder of Emperor Taiwu in AD 452 by the eunuch Zong Ai, and the poisoning of Tuoba Hong, known as Emperor Xiaowen, in AD 476 by the Empress Dowager Feng, as cases where the killers were court insiders acting with their own followers rather than commanders answering to a mutinous legion. Among the seven Chinese founder-emperors who did rise through military means, only one, Tuoba Gui, died violently, murdered by his own son in a palace incident, and none died from directly military causes. In Rome, by comparison, 18 of the 37 emperors elevated by the army died in battle or during military revolt.

Data and method

Dong built the Roman side of his dataset from the catalog compiled by Kienast, Eck, and Heil, supplemented by the work of Campbell and Southern, and drew the Chinese side from the Basic Annals of the Twenty-Four Histories, China’s official dynastic chronicle. He applied identical coding rules to both empires, counting violent death as assassination, execution, death in military revolt, defeat in civil or foreign war, lynching, or suicide under political pressure, with poisonings counted only where political intent could be established.

The statistical analysis relied on chi-square tests, Fisher’s exact tests, comparisons of means, and linear probability models, controlling for mode of succession and historical period. Dong is careful about the limits of the design. Because there is no exogenous variation in military policy to exploit as a natural experiment, the models are associative rather than causal, and he acknowledges that unmeasured factors, such as the age of a dynasty, simultaneous economic crises, or rivalries among non-military elites, could also have shaped the results. He calls for future work to refine the categories of violent death and to examine risk on a year-by-year basis within individual reigns.

Why Rome’s army broke free

Dong traces the precedent to AD 69, the Year of the Four Emperors, when the legions first grasped that they could impose their preferred candidate on the throne. Once established, the practice proved impossible to reverse. Each new emperor raised by military force then had to meet his troops’ expectations, locking the system into a cycle of rewards and rising fiscal demand that ended, again and again, in overthrow whenever the treasury could not keep pace.

China avoided that trap through a different structure entirely. Its bureaucracy and civilian oversight of the armed forces kept soldiers from consolidating into an independent political force, even during its most fragmented periods, leaving palace conspirators, not mutinous legions, as the main threat to an emperor’s life, a form of violence that, however deadly for individual rulers, did not destabilize the machinery of government to the degree Rome’s civil wars repeatedly did.

Bust of Emperor Didius Julianus (reigned 193 CE), a ruler who died a violent death. His reign lasted just 66 days, the shortest in the unified Roman Empire. He was executed a little over two months after purchasing the throne in what became known as the “Auction of the Empire.” Credit: DON EMMERT/AFP/Getty

A wider lesson

Dong situates the study within a growing body of scholarship comparing Rome and China, one that has so far focused mainly on fiscal capacity, trade, and institutions rather than on the survival odds of the rulers themselves. He argues the pattern is not merely a historical curiosity. Political systems in which the military functions as an autonomous power capable of deciding who governs tend toward greater coup risk and instability more broadly, suggesting the military trap may be less a peculiarity of Rome than a general feature of any regime that shares its monopoly on violence with the very soldiers meant to protect the ruler.

Several questions remain open. Why the Roman army developed this corporate identity while China’s did not, whether the emphasis on hereditary legitimacy in Chinese succession played a causal role, and whether army size or geographic deployment mattered, are all left for future research to untangle. What the data make clear is the scale of the difference itself. Across five centuries, the military trap functioned as the death sentence of some fifty Roman rulers, a fate their Chinese counterparts faced far less often, and rarely at the hands of their own soldiers.

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Source. Dong, Z. (2026). “The military trap. Why Roman emperors died more violently than Chinese emperors.” Economics Letters.

Odysseus and Polyphemus, painted by Arnold Böcklin (1896). Credit: Public domain / Wikimedia Commons

Two studies released within weeks of each other in 2026, one geological, one philological, now converge on a striking resolution. Ithaca, they argue, was never an island at all, and Homer himself knew it.

An old hypothesis meets new rock

The idea traces back to Robert Bittlestone’s 2005 book Odysseus Unbound, written with Cambridge classicist James Diggle and University of Aberdeen geoscientist John Underhill. Bittlestone proposed that Ithaca was not the island called Ithaki today, but Paliki, the low-lying western peninsula of neighboring Kefalonia. The idea fit Homer’s description of a homeland positioned furthest west among three neighboring islands, low-lying rather than mountainous, unlike Ithaki, which faces east and rises steeply.

There was an obvious snag. If Homer’s Ithaca was an island, then Paliki had to have been a genuine island in Odysseus’s Late Bronze Age, roughly 1200 BC, separated from the rest of Kefalonia by open water. Bittlestone found support for this in the Greek geographer Strabo, who wrote in the first century AD that at its narrowest point Kefalonia formed a low isthmus, often submerged from sea to sea. Bittlestone read this as describing a marine channel later filled by earthquake-triggered landslides, in one of Europe’s most tectonically active zones.

Testing that claim became Underhill’s life’s work. Over two decades, he led an extensive geoscientific campaign across the Thinia Valley, the narrow six by two kilometer land bridge connecting Paliki to the rest of Kefalonia, using seismic imaging, airborne geophysics, borehole sampling, subsurface rock cores, and geomorphological analysis. Presenting the results at the EAGE conference in Aberdeen in June 2026, Underhill reported that the marine channel hypothesis does not hold up. The team found marine sediments dating to the Late Pleistocene, but no evidence of a continuous seaway running through the valley during the Bronze Age. Instead, Thinia appears to have been shaped by an overland drainage system, an upland lake and meadow feeding rivers that flowed north and south to the coasts, a pattern that still shows itself occasionally today after heavy storms, and one Underhill argues matches Strabo’s actual description more closely than a vanished channel ever did.

Telemachus’ journey, based on the reconstruction by Robert Bittlestone. Credit: James Diggle and John Underhill

A blow that became a breakthrough

On the face of it, this result undercut Bittlestone’s founding mechanism. If Paliki was never separated from Kefalonia by water, it could not have been an island in Odysseus’s time, seemingly disqualifying it from matching Homer’s island Ithaca.

Instead, the finding sent Diggle back to the Greek text itself, and what he found overturned an assumption scholars had carried since antiquity. In a paper titled “Was Homer’s Ithaca an Island?,” published in the online journal Antigone on July 5, 2026, Diggle and Underhill argue that Homer never actually calls Ithaca an island in the first place. Despite having abundant opportunity to use the Greek word for island, nisos, a word that would have fit the poems’ meter just as easily, Homer instead consistently describes Ithaca using words meaning land, native land, or domain, gaia, patris, and dimos.

One passage, long read as clinching proof of an island Ithaca, turns out to hinge on a subtle mistranslation. When Odysseus finally makes landfall at the end of his ten-year voyage, standard translations describe his ship approaching “the island,” where “on Ithaca there is a bay of Phorcys.” Diggle points out that Homer’s actual phrase is “in the dimos of Ithaca,” meaning “in the domain of Ithaca,” language that implies Ithaca is a district within a larger island the ship is approaching, not the island itself. A further clue comes from the Iliad’s Catalogue of Ships, where Odysseus leads not “Ithacans” but “the gallant Cephallenians,” the very name later used for the inhabitants of Kefalonia as a whole.

Map of the islands of Cephalonia and Ithaca. Credit: Gobbler / Wikimedia Commons

Reassembling the map

Freed from the requirement that Ithaca be a freestanding island, the case for Paliki grows stronger rather than weaker. Homer’s description of Ithaca as low-lying and facing west toward the setting sun, with the neighboring islands of Zacynthos, Same, and Doulichion turned instead toward dawn, matches Paliki and not Ithaki, which sits mountainous and east-facing. Zacynthos and Same can be identified confidently as modern Zakynthos and Kefalonia. Doulichion has long puzzled scholars, but if Paliki is Ithaca, modern Ithaki itself becomes the obvious candidate for Doulichion, an identification that appeared on some early maps.

Underhill and Diggle describe the result as an elegant explanation that unifies the geoscience, the Homeric text, and Strabo’s ancient account into a single coherent picture, one they say remains entirely consistent with Bittlestone’s founding insight even though its supporting mechanism has changed. Recent excavations by the Ephorate of Antiquities for Kefalonia and Ithaca have added a further encouraging thread, uncovering newly identified Early Bronze Age sites on Paliki, including Livadi Marsh, the location Bittlestone proposed as the site of Odysseus’s harbor.

A myth measured against real ground

The renewed attention arrives at a fitting moment, with global interest in Homer’s epics heightened by the approaching release of Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation of the Odyssey. Underhill frames the convergence of geoscience and classical philology as proof that the line between myth and physical reality can be narrower than long assumed. The debate over Odysseus’s true homeland has never fully closed. Other scholars have argued over the past century for Lefkada to the north, or continued to defend the traditional island of Ithaki itself, and the new studies will not be the last word. But by tying precise textual analysis to two decades of hard geological fieldwork, the Diggle and Underhill research offers what may be the most tightly argued case yet for where Odysseus was actually trying to go.

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Sources. University of Aberdeen (June 11 and July 1, 2026). James Diggle and John Underhill, “Was Homer’s Ithaca an Island?,” Antigone (2026).

New Tombs Discovered at Egypt's Ancient Leukaspis. Credit: Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities

The mission also revealed remains of the ancient city’s extensions and architectural components beyond the burial ground itself, pushing the total number of tombs recorded at Marina El Alamein since the site’s discovery in 1986 up to 44 and reinforcing its standing as one of the most prominent ancient coastal cities on the Mediterranean.

Minister of Tourism and Antiquities Sherif Fathy described the find as an important scientific and archaeological addition, one that contributes to understanding the cultural identity of ancient Marina El Alamein’s inhabitants and to re-evaluating the city’s historical role as a civilizational and cultural center linking Egypt with the wider Mediterranean world. He noted that the ministry is giving considerable attention to the scientific excavation work at the site in preparation for opening it to visitors, adding a new cultural tourism product alongside the beach tourism for which the North Coast is already known.

Hisham El-Leithy, secretary general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, outlined the site’s development plan, which includes a visitor center, routes for electric vehicles and pedestrians, a museum storage facility, an administrative headquarters, and an open-air theater. Completion is expected within the first half of next year, after which Marina El Alamein is meant to stand as a fully integrated archaeological and tourism destination.

Skeletal remains uncovered during excavation at Marina El Alamein, found alongside pottery vessels and wooden elements from the burial. Photo Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities.

A city of rock-cut tombs and altars

Mohamed Abdel Badie, head of the Egyptian Antiquities Sector at the Supreme Council of Antiquities, said the newly discovered tombs include eleven cut entirely into the rock, known as hypogea, with an average depth of about eight meters, in addition to seven surface tombs built of limestone. Some of the tombs stand out for their exceptional state of preservation, with burial openings still sealed by their original stone slabs, untouched since antiquity.

The excavation also revealed numerous surface burials around the tombs, reflecting the social diversity of the city’s inhabitants, along with a water well that had later been reused for burial purposes, a clear example of how ancient Egyptian influence persisted in funerary architecture through the Ptolemaic and Roman periods. The work yielded a distinguished group of artifacts as well, including complete and near-complete pottery vessels, amphorae, oil lamps, plates, limestone altars and basins, and architectural elements associated with the tombs.

The interior of one of the rock-cut tombs uncovered at Marina El Alamein, showing a sealed sarcophagus and skeletal remains within a burial niche. Credit: Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities.

Hisham Hussein, head of the Central Administration for Lower Egypt Antiquities, pointed to a limestone altar for offerings with a distinctive architectural facade imitating the false door known from ancient Egyptian funerary belief. Also among the finds were an unfinished marble statue believed to represent the goddess Aphrodite, a limestone funerary stele depicting a seated man holding a bird, and a number of glass tear bottles.

The plaster sphinx statue found at Marina El Alamein, discovered beside the sealed granite sarcophagus in one of the tombs. Credit: Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities.

A sealed sarcophagus and a sphinx in plaster

Iman Abdel Khalek, head of the mission and director of the area, reported the discovery of a granite sarcophagus 2.5 meters long, its original lid still in place, containing skeletal remains now under study. Beside it, the team found the remains of a plaster sphinx statue, further confirming the persistence of Egyptian religious and artistic influence within the city through the Hellenistic and Roman periods.

The limestone funerary stele found at Marina El Alamein, showing a seated man holding a bird. Credit: Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities.

Gold on the tongues of the dead

Among the most striking finds, Abdel Khalek noted, were 24 gold pieces placed inside the mouths of some of the deceased, representing what is known as the golden tongue, one of the elements tied to the funerary beliefs of that era. One of the pieces was shaped as the Eye of Horus, among the most important protective symbols in ancient Egyptian belief.

Gold tongue amulets from Marina El Alamein, laid out together after their recovery from the burials. Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities.

A city called Leukaspis

Marina El Alamein lies on Egypt’s northwestern coast, about 100 kilometers west of Alexandria, and is believed to represent the city of Leukaspis, mentioned by the Greek geographer Strabo. The city flourished from the Hellenistic era through the Byzantine era, reaching the height of its urban and economic activity during the first three centuries AD.

The site was discovered by chance in 1986 during construction work in the Marina area, and the extensive excavation and study that followed has revealed one of Egypt’s best-preserved ancient coastal cities, with a street network, houses, public facilities, a port, commercial districts, and extensive cemeteries reflecting the cultural and civilizational diversity that marked Egypt’s Mediterranean coastal cities during the Hellenistic and Roman periods.

The ministry describes this discovery as a new step toward completing our understanding of the city’s history, and toward reinforcing its position as one of the most important archaeological and cultural destinations on the North Coast, within the framework of the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities’ efforts to preserve Egyptian heritage and make it accessible to the public.

Source. Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, official statement.

According to a new study, the extinct human species Homo floresiensis, commonly known as the “hobbit,” may have been a scavenger. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

A new study of ancient animal bones from the species’ cave home on the Indonesian island of Flores now overturns that picture. Homo floresiensis, the research suggests, was not a hunter at all. It was a scavenger, picking over the leftovers that the island’s fearsome Komodo dragons left behind, and it shows no convincing evidence of ever having tamed fire.

The study, led by paleoanthropologist Elizabeth Grace Veatch of the Smithsonian Institution’s Human Origins Program and the Cluster of Excellence in Human Origins at the University of Tübingen, was published on July 3, 2026, in the journal Science Advances.

A hobbit with a giant reputation

Homo floresiensis was first uncovered in 2003 in the limestone cave of Liang Bua on Flores, a species whose ancestors are thought to have reached the island at least 700,000 years ago. Standing an average of about 106 centimeters tall, with a brain only slightly larger than a chimpanzee’s, prominent teeth, and notably large feet, the species quickly earned its hobbit nickname. Alongside its bones, archaeologists found stone tools, animal bones bearing cut marks, and bones that appeared charred, a combination that seemed to point toward the sophisticated behaviors associated with our own genus Homo. The hobbits vanished around 50,000 years ago, roughly when Homo sapiens began spreading across Southeast Asia.

Veatch wanted to test that inherited assumption directly. As she put it, she wanted to see whether the evidence could really show that Homo floresiensis was the hunter it had long been portrayed as.

Selected bone fragments showing marks left by Homo floresiensis and Komodo dragons. Credit: E. Grace Veatch et al. (2026)

Teaching a dragon to testify

The obstacle was that Flores’ Stegodon, a dwarf elephant relative, is extinct, and there was no way to run a hunting experiment on a living one. So the team turned to the island’s other apex predator, the Komodo dragon, the world’s largest living lizard, which still stalks the same landscape. Researchers fed a goat carcass to a captive Komodo dragon named Rinca at Zoo Atlanta, then recovered the goat’s skeleton and used 3D scanning to painstakingly document every pit, notch, furrow, and tooth score the dragon’s bite had left behind. The pattern was clear. The dragon’s teeth concentrated heavily on the meatiest cuts, the fore and hind quarters, exactly the parts a hungry predator would prioritize.

With that reference library of dragon bite marks in hand, the team turned to the real evidence, examining more than 3,000 Stegodon bone fragments from Liang Bua alongside a broader sample that totaled over 10,000 bones and stone artifacts from the site. They found 54 cut marks made by hobbit stone tools and almost twice as many Komodo dragon tooth marks on the same Stegodon remains. The locations told the real story. The dragon marks clustered on high-meat areas, just as in the goat experiment, while the human cut marks turned up mostly on low-utility parts, the skull, neck, and feet, places with comparatively little to eat.

Second in line at the carcass

Taken together, the researchers argue, the distribution of marks points to Komodo dragons having primary access to Stegodon carcasses, with Homo floresiensis arriving second to scavenge whatever scraps were left. The likely scenario echoes how Komodo dragons hunt large prey such as water buffalo today, delivering a venomous bite and then tracking the weakening animal, sometimes for kilometers, using their extraordinary sense of smell to find a carcass. Once the dragons had eaten their fill, the hobbits appear to have moved in with their stone tools to cut whatever meat remained from the bones the dragons had left behind.

No fire in the ashes

The second pillar of the hobbits’ supposed sophistication was fire, and it fared no better under scrutiny. The team searched for burn traces across the Stegodon bone assemblage and found essentially none, one single bone out of more than 3,000 showed any sign of heat exposure, and that specimen most likely came from a disturbed section of the deposit. The researchers also examined roughly 7,000 bones of giant rats from later, more recent layers of the cave associated with Homo sapiens, looking for the same fire signatures across a combined sample of about 10,000 bones. What earlier researchers had taken for evidence of burning on some remains, the team now concludes, was most likely natural manganese staining rather than the residue of a hearth.

Study co-author Briana Pobiner, a paleoanthropologist at the Smithsonian, noted that thousands of stone tools were found alongside Homo floresiensis remains, tools apparently crafted from local chert specifically to strip meat from bone. That toolmaking skill was real. What appears to be missing is the pairing of hunting and cooking that anchors so much thinking about advanced hominin behavior. The hobbits, the researchers suggest, most likely ate their scavenged meat raw, alongside plants and insects, and may have survived alongside the island’s dragons in part through group living and caution, since even modern Komodo dragons rarely attack people without provocation.

What it means for the hobbit’s ancestry

The absence of hunting and fire technology reopens the question of where Homo floresiensis actually came from. Veatch suggests it is entirely possible that the ancestor of the hobbits split off from the genus Homo before hunting and the control of fire had become established behaviors at all. As she frames it, the findings underline the importance of weighing behavior alongside anatomy in these debates, and point toward an ancestor that did not depend on hunting and cooking as subsistence strategies, perhaps an early form of Homo rather than a more advanced one.

Two competing hypotheses for the hobbits’ origin remain in play. One holds that they descended from a larger-bodied species, evolving smaller body size over many generations through island dwarfism driven by limited resources. The other proposes they descended from an already small-bodied, more primitive Homo species. The new study does not settle that argument outright, since so little is known about the behavior of early hominins elsewhere in Southeast Asia, including Homo erectus on Java, or across the wider region once known as Sundaland, the landmass between the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean that has been intermittently exposed and submerged over the last 2.6 million years. If Homo floresiensis really did descend from Homo erectus, it would imply a substantial reversal of established behaviors somewhere along the way.

Adam Brumm, an archaeologist at Griffith University in Australia who was not involved in the study, sees that possibility as entirely plausible for a hominin lineage cut off on an island. Such a transition, he suggests, may have involved not only the well-known anatomical shifts of shrinking body size and brain volume, but behavioral adaptations as well. Flores, in his view, was a genuinely unpredictable place in the story of early human evolution, the kind of setting where almost anything could happen, including the loss of hominin behaviors as deeply rooted as hunting and the use of fire.

Sources. Live Science (July 3, 2026); CNN; National Geographic. Article, E. Grace Veatch et al. (2026), "Taphonomic analysis at Liang Bua reveals the behavioral and technological capabilities of Homo floresiensis," Science Advances 12, doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aeb7219.

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Artifacts recovered from the elite burial site of Eleke Sazy in eastern Kazakhstan. Credit: Zainolla Samashev

Sequencing the genomes of 85 Iron Age individuals from across Central Eurasia, researchers have found that these nomadic societies were organized around powerful elite dynasties, ruling families whose authority was inherited and whose blood ties stretched across burial grounds hundreds of kilometers apart. Nearly half of those elites were women.

The work, published on July 3, 2026, in the journal Science Advances, was led by archaeogeneticist Ayshin Ghalichi of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig and the University of Texas at Austin, with an international team that included colleagues in Kazakhstan. Its central finding is that social inequality among the steppe nomads emerged during the Iron Age, around 900 BC, and hardened into something like dynastic rule.

Reading power in the genome

Almost everything known about the Scythians has come from the outside. Ancient Greek and Roman writers described these skilled equestrians, and their monumental burial mounds, called kurgans, dot the steppe from the Altai Mountains to the Black Sea. Their tattooed mummies, their exquisite animal-style goldwork, and their women warriors, who may have inspired the Greek legend of the Amazons, were famous across the ancient world. Yet the Scythians left no writing of their own, and after a run of military defeats around 200 BC they were largely absorbed into other groups.

To get at how these scattered communities were connected and how their societies were structured politically, the team sequenced DNA from 85 individuals dating between roughly 900 and 200 BC, comprising 38 people from elite kurgan burials and 47 from ordinary graves, including 45 or 46 newly sequenced genomes. What emerged was a clear genetic signature of a ruling class. Elite individuals were about eleven times more likely to be biologically related to one another than to non-elites, pointing to a powerful, extended family group presiding over the steppe nomads.

Map showing major Iron Age Eurasian steppe sites included in the study. Ancient DNA reveals evidence of elite dynastic rule among Iron Age Eurasian steppe nomads. Credit: Study authors.

Kin scattered across the grasslands

Within that elite the researchers identified close family bonds, including two pairs of full brothers, a brother and sister, and a parent and child. In one striking case, two brothers had been buried in different regions far apart from each other. In another, an elite grandfather and his grandchild were laid to rest in entirely separate cemeteries. That last pattern, elite kin linked across distant burial grounds, is the strongest evidence for dynastic rule, since it shows that a single ruling lineage held sway over a wide territory rather than a single local community.

At the same time, elite burials tended to cluster closer together than ordinary ones. As co-author and genetic anthropologist Ainash Childebayeva notes, this hints at a degree of geographic centralization, and she points to the famous “Valley of the Kings” in Siberia, an area dense with large elite kurgans likely from a period similar to the one in the study, as a possible expression of the same tendency.

Women at the top

One of the most consequential results concerns gender. Ancient authors such as Herodotus had claimed that Scythian women could hold positions of high status, and the genetics now supports them. Nearly half of the elite individuals in the dataset were women, which Ghalichi describes as a noticeable presence indicating that women held high social standing in Iron Age Scythian society. Rather than authority passing strictly through male or female lines, the team found that power seems to have run through extended elite family networks in which women were full participants, buried in the same richly furnished graves, with the same gold and honors, as elite men.

The mystery of the Golden Man

Reconstruction of the “Golden Man,” whose DNA was sequenced as part of the study. Credit: Gulmira Mukhtarova

The DNA also settled a decades-old question about one of the steppe’s most celebrated finds. The Golden Man, a young skeleton discovered in 1969 in a kurgan at Issyk in Kazakhstan, was buried with more than 4,000 gold ornaments and a silver bowl bearing an inscription that has never been deciphered. Because the bones alone could not reveal the individual’s sex, and because experts tended to assume a powerful warrior must be male, the Golden Man was long presumed to be a man, even though Scythian women clearly wielded comparable power. This study produced the first genome-wide data for the Golden Man, and although the coverage was low, the result indicates the individual was more likely male than female. The team could not establish any kinship links for this person.

More telling, according to Childebayeva, is that the Golden Man died young, around age 17 by the evidence of the bones, yet was given elite burial, a combination that argues for inherited rather than earned status. She calls an even more dramatic example the match between an elite grandfather and his one-year-old grandchild, both interred in elite kurgans. Graves of elite children like these reinforce the conclusion that among the Iron Age steppe nomads, social status was passed down by birth.

One of the kurgan burial mounds before excavation. Credit: Rinat Zhumatayev.

A new view of the steppe

The picture that emerges is of a nomadic world far more hierarchical and politically structured than the romantic image of free riders suggests. By weaving together archaeology, anthropology, and genetics, the study reconstructs patterns of marriage, kinship, and political organization that were invisible in the archaeological record alone, revealing dynasties whose reach crossed the grasslands and whose power descended through the generations. As the authors put it, the findings advance our understanding of how social inequality and differentiation arose among the ancient nomadic groups of Eurasia, and shed light on the earliest of them in the first millennium BC.

Sources. Live Science; Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Article, Ayshin Ghalichi et al. (2026), “Ancient DNA reveals elite dynastic rule among Iron Age Eurasian Steppe nomads,” Science Advances, doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aef0108.

Detail of the newly discovered Byzantine city. Credit: Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities

The settlement at the site of Ain al-Sabil, in New Valley Governorate, comes with streets, squares, houses, a church, watchtowers, a fortress, coins, and roughly 200 written documents, making it one of the most complete urban sites of its period ever found in the Egyptian desert.

The discovery was announced on July 3, 2026, by Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, following excavations by an Egyptian mission of the Supreme Council of Antiquities. Minister of Tourism and Antiquities Sherif Fathy called the find an important addition to Egypt’s archaeological record, one that highlights the cultural diversity that flourished in the country’s oases across different historical periods and promises to boost cultural tourism in the region.

View of the excavation site. Credit: Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities

A city built to a plan

What sets Ain al-Sabil apart is not a single spectacular object but the coherence of the whole. According to Diaa Zahran, head of the Islamic, Coptic and Jewish Antiquities Sector at the Supreme Council, the city followed a carefully organized layout. Broad main streets ran from north to south, intersected by smaller cross streets running east to west, and their crossings opened into squares and courtyards distributed through the settlement. Every building uncovered so far was raised in mudbrick, the material that has allowed desert sites in the oases to survive in a state of preservation almost unthinkable in the Nile Valley.

This was no loose scatter of farmhouses. The plan knits together domestic, religious, and defensive spaces into a functioning urban whole, which is precisely what makes the site so valuable for understanding how such desert communities actually worked.

Detail of the excavated structures. Credit: Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities

Church, fortress, and the house of a deacon

At the heart of the city, overlooking one of its main streets, stood a basilica-style church that the mission dates to the middle of the fourth century AD, an early moment in the Christianization of Egypt’s countryside. Mahmoud Masoud, director general of Dakhla Antiquities and head of the archaeological mission, said the settlement contained all the key elements of a thriving, self-sufficient community. Along its perimeter the team found the remains of two watchtowers, together with a heavily fortified structure girded by thick defensive walls, a reminder that life on the desert margin required protection as well as prosperity.

The residential quarters tell the domestic side of the story. Houses featured spacious halls and vaulted ceilings, and around them the excavators documented bread ovens, kitchens, and stone tools used to grind grain, the humble machinery of everyday survival. Among the best-preserved buildings is a house dated to the second half of the fourth century AD that belonged to a man named Tisus, a deacon of the church, a rare case in which archaeology can attach a name and an office to a specific desert home.

Two hundred voices on broken pottery

Perhaps the most valuable haul is textual. Zahran Mahdi, director of the Excavations Department at the Islamic and Coptic Antiquities Sector, highlighted a collection of about 200 ostraca, fragments of pottery bearing writing in both Coptic and Greek. The texts record commercial transactions, personal correspondence, and other threads of daily life, offering researchers a direct line into the administration, economy, and social relationships of the community, written by its own inhabitants.

Alongside the documents came the material fabric of daily life. The excavation produced household pottery, bottles for storing oils and perfumes, oil lamps, and grinding equipment, together with numerous well-preserved bronze coins bearing the portraits of Byzantine emperors, Latin inscriptions, and Christian symbols, which will help anchor the site’s chronology.

Coins uncovered during the excavation. Credit: Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities

The oasis that was never a backwater

Hisham El-Leithy, secretary general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, said the excavation delivers valuable new information about life in the Dakhla Oasis during the Byzantine period, sharpening our picture of the settlement’s urban design, social organization, and economic activity. That picture fits a broader scholarly reassessment of Egypt’s western oases. Far from being isolated outposts, Dakhla and its neighbor Kharga formed a connected world of settlements, wells, fields, roads, and administration, and they preserve some of the clearest evidence anywhere for daily life in Late Antique Egypt beyond the Nile. Long-running excavations at Dakhla sites such as ancient Kellis and Amheida have already yielded houses, temples, churches, and archives, and Ain al-Sabil now adds a full planned town to that record.

One point of precision is worth keeping in view. The mid-fourth century falls at the transition between the Late Roman and early Byzantine worlds, so the ministry’s description of a “complete Byzantine residential city” is best read as a well-preserved Late Roman and early Byzantine settlement whose life extended into the Byzantine centuries. However the label is drawn, the substance is the same. In the sands of Dakhla, an entire town has come back into view, streets, squares, ovens, church, and the letters of its people included.

Sources. Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities (July 3, 2026); Supreme Council of Antiquities.

The Grave of an Ancient God Found Near Sikachi-Alyan in Russia’s Far East. Image credit: Khabarovsk Krai Today

The meaning of that mysterious rite is still to be deciphered, but the find is already being described as unique, the first time a petroglyph has ever been discovered underground.

The discovery was presented publicly at the conference “Russia and China, History and Prospects of Cooperation,” held in Blagoveshchensk and continued across the border at universities in the Chinese cities of Heihe and Mudanjiang. The gathering drew specialists well beyond archaeology, including physicians, physicists, chemists, and economists from leading institutes in Moscow, Saint Petersburg, and other cities, along with Chinese colleagues. A report titled “A Ritual Complex of the Early Iron Age in the Sacred Landscape of Sikachi-Alyan” drew keen interest from the scientific community of both countries, according to Evgeny Chernikov, head of the archaeology department of the Khabarovsk Regional Center for the Protection of Historical and Cultural Monuments.

The cluster of stones uncovered in the test pit near Sikachi-Alyan, part of a mound-like ritual structure raised in the early Iron Age. Photo Khabarovsk Regional Center for the Protection of Historical and Cultural Monuments.

They stumbled over a stone

The story began in the autumn of 2025, during the routine work of defining the boundaries of archaeological heritage sites. As often happens in science, the breakthrough came entirely by accident. The archaeologists literally tripped over a boulder protruding from the ground. Looking closer, they saw parallel cut marks on its surface, an unmistakable sign of human modification, since no animal is capable of making such traces.

Where it all began. The stone in the forest, the carved boulder on the shore, and the site that connects them, near Sikachi-Alyan on the Amur. Credit: Khabarovsk Regional Center for the Protection of Historical and Cultural Monuments.

The strange boulder proved to be only the first piece of the puzzle. The team opened a test pit and, within a small area, uncovered a whole heap of stones piled together. The stones had probably been carried up from the riverbank, where the famous basalt boulders of Sikachi-Alyan lie, including one on which previously unknown images were identified not long ago. As the excavation continued, it became clear that the heap had once been part of a surface structure resembling a burial mound. At its base lay a dark, humus-stained patch, the trace of a hearth. And at the bottom of the hearth pit, among a cluster of small stones, the archaeologists found a fragment of an anthropomorphic image pecked into stone.

A Neolithic face in an Iron Age fire

Here the history takes its strange turn. The fragment belongs to a mask-face, or lichina, of the type famous at Sikachi-Alyan, and dates to the Neolithic, making it at least 4,500 to 5,000 years old. The hearth, however, turned out to be far younger. Radiocarbon analysis of charcoal from its fill showed that the fire went out about two thousand years ago, in the early Iron Age. The carved image, in other words, ended up in the fire at least two millennia after it was made.

The sequence the archaeologists reconstruct is remarkable. The image was moved from the riverbank into the forest, painted with red pigment, burned in a fire, and a mound of boulders was heaped up nearby. As Chernikov stressed, there is no practical reason to burn a stone. What the evidence points to is symbolic action.

The ritual complex at Malyshevo Settlement-1 under excavation. Field photographs of the trench beside an annotated 3D plan showing the collapsed stone structure, the raised stonework with its hearth pit, the fragment of a carved figurative image in yellow, and scattered sherds of hand-molded pottery across the 2.5-meter excavation. Image Khabarovsk Regional Center for the Protection of Historical and Cultural Monuments.

A rite wrapped in mystery

The deeper context makes the scene even more evocative. The Neolithic on the Lower Amur came to an unexpected end around three and a half thousand years ago, in the first half of the second millennium BC, for reasons still unknown, with climate change among the suspected causes. The river country stood largely empty for a long stretch, until new people settled the territory centuries later at the dawn of the early Iron Age. The burned mask thus belonged to one cultural tradition, and the fire to a completely different one.

Chernikov suggests the fragment was deliberately taken, or perhaps stumbled upon, by these later inhabitants, and that the burning may have been a way of resolving some problem connected with the image. It could, for instance, have been a source of anxiety, a powerful relic of vanished people that demanded ritual treatment. He is careful to note that a full reconstruction of the rite is impossible, since the data are too scarce. What is clear is that the complex served no utilitarian purpose and took shape through ceremonial, ritual actions.

Not everyone is convinced. Among the experts at the conference, opinions on the interpretation split. Some congratulated the team on a discovery, while skeptics proposed a plainer scenario, in which people two thousand years ago simply picked up the stone from the bank along with others, never recognized the face carved on it, and put it to ordinary practical use.

An open ending

One question may remain open forever. Will the rest of the mask ever be found? The team has already looked. In the spring of 2026, during monitoring of the ice drift at the especially valuable heritage site “Sikachi-Alyan. Petroglyphs,” they re-examined the shoreline near the spot where the complex was found, and came up empty.

Chernikov is not discouraged. More than 400 images are already recorded near the villages of Sikachi-Alyan and Malyshevo, and new ones are constantly coming to light. The boulder bearing the rest of the face may simply be buried in sand, and a major flood could one day wash it clean and leave it on the surface. Perhaaps other archaeologists will find it many years from now, he reflects, or perhaps it will be his own team, simply on the next visit. Time will tell.

Source: Khabarovsk Krai Today (todaykhv.ru), interview with Evgeny Chernikov, Khabarovsk Regional Center for the Protection of Historical and Cultural Monuments.

A Carved Stela Found in Mexico Shows Two Figures Receiving a Sacred Liquid. Credit: INAH

The find was announced by Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) and reported by Smithsonian Magazine on July 1, 2026. It emerged during a salvage excavation in Coatepec, on a plot of about 12 hectares slated for residential development, in the San Lucas subdivision near the long-studied archaeological site of Campo Viejo. For Lino Espinoza García, one of the INAH archaeologists coordinating the work, the discovery is unique and unprecedented, unlike anything previously recorded in this part of Veracruz.

A monolith buried face down

The stela is a substantial monument. It stands 1.88 meters tall, reaches 1.47 meters at its widest point, and varies between 22 and 25 centimeters in thickness. Strikingly, it was not found standing. According to INAH archaeologist Mireya Moreno Aguirre, the stone had been placed face down in antiquity, and later structures were built directly on top of it, a deliberate act of burial that preserved the carving in remarkably good condition.

A monolith buried face down. Credit: INAH

The engraved scene shows two seated elite individuals, richly attired with headdresses and ear ornaments, gathered in what the researchers read as a ritual. Above them, an entity appears to emanate a substance flowing down toward the vessel the figures hold. Espinoza García says the team believes the liquid is water, and that in this context it is clearly a sacred fluid. He suggests the scene may commemorate a period of great drought in the region, a moment when the gift of water from a divine source would have carried enormous weight.

The team is careful about what the liquid actually represents. In Mesoamerican art, flowing substances can stand for water, blood, pulque, maize drinks, or rain, and without laboratory analysis or an inscription the safest reading is a sacred transfer of liquid rather than any single substance.

A composition never seen in the region

What makes the carving so unusual is not just its subject but its arrangement. Annick Daneels, an archaeologist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, notes that a composition of two seated figures facing one another had never before been documented in central Veracruz. Adding to the intrigue, one of the two figures displays what researchers describe as possible Maya-like traits.

That detail matters because of where the site sits. Coatepec lies well beyond the Maya heartland of the Yucatán Peninsula, whose Classic period ran from roughly 250 to 900 AD. A Maya-looking figure on a Gulf coast stela does not mean the Maya lived here. It more likely points to long-distance contacts, shared visual conventions, or a local community absorbing elements from the wider Mesoamerican world.

Illustrated rendering of the carvings on the stela. Credit: Lino Espinoza Garcia / INAH

A platform unlike its neighbors

The stela was associated with an equally puzzling structure, a civic-ceremonial platform some 30 meters long and 12 meters wide. It was built of stone slabs and white limestone with a plaster-like texture, which specialists attribute to an induced firing process applied intentionally to decorate the walls. Its ornamentation includes engraved lines and square-like shapes, along with circular stones set along two of its sides.

None of this matches the known building tradition of the area. INAH archaeologist Alberto Vázquez Domínguez, who co-directs the interdisciplinary team, says there is no record connecting the structure to other ancient sites. The site sits on the periphery of Campo Viejo, a major center of ceremonial plazas first identified in 1972 and systematically studied by the INAH Veracruz Center since 2000. Daneels describes Campo Viejo as the principal settlement of its era in the densely populated region around modern Xalapa, positioned near one of the routes that linked the Gulf coast to the central highlands and served as an axis of interaction from Preclassic times onward.

Offerings of maize and greenstone

Around the platform, excavators recovered traces of ritual activity. There were fragments of burnt maize, possibly deposited as offerings to higher powers, along with buried ceramic vessels and a greenstone bead broken into four pieces. Every recovered item is headed to the laboratory for analysis, which may sharpen both the dating and the interpretation of the site.

The chronology currently points to the Early Classic period, roughly 200 to 600 AD, with the settlement’s later phase matching the figure of about 1,400 years ago. As for who lived here, the honest answer is that no one yet knows. Totonac territory lies relatively nearby, but the excavation produced no evidence of Totonac presence at Coatepec. The researchers’ working hypothesis is a distinct local culture, separate from both the Totonac and the Maya, that shared traits with other ancient coastal groups.

Mexico’s Secretary of Culture, Claudia Curiel de Icaza, framed the discovery as a reminder that every structure and object recovered through archaeological research testifies to one of the deepest and most diverse cultural heritages in the world, and reaffirms the importance of protecting that heritage as a common good. For now, the two stone figures keep their secret, seated across from one another as they have been for fourteen centuries, sharing a drink poured from the hand of a god.

Source: National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), Mexico.

Picene Prince’s Chariot Tomb Unearthed on Italy’s Conero Coast. Credit: Soprintendenza Abap Ancona Pesaro Urbino

The find emerged during preventive archaeology work carried out by the firm ArcheoLab in collaboration with the Comune di Sirolo, and funded by Italy’s Ministry of Culture. What the team uncovered is not a single grave but an organized aristocratic burial ground, and with it a clearer picture of the ruling families who dominated this stretch of coast some 2,600 years ago.

The context of a warrior found in 2020

The new complex finally makes sense of an earlier discovery. In 2020, in the same area, archaeologists found the tomb of a warrior who lived in the second half of the sixth century BC, buried with a first-rate set of arms that included a helmet, a spear, a long sword, and a dagger. His grave goods also held a refined bronze oinochoe, a wine jug in the Greco-Etruscan tradition, and something rarer still, a diphros, the folding stool that ranked among the most exclusive emblems of authority in pre-Roman Italy.

At the time, that warrior stood alone. The new excavation shows he belonged to a much larger monumental cemetery organized around a central princely burial. For the first time, researchers can read the group rather than the individual, tracing the hierarchical and symbolic relationships that bound an entire aristocratic nucleus together.

Archaeologists excavating the Tomb of the Chariot. Credit: Soprintendenza ABAP Ancona–Pesaro Urbino.

A prince buried with his chariot

At the heart of the newly revealed monumental circle lay a large male burial containing the remains of a currus, a two-wheeled chariot that appears to have been placed intact in the grave pit. In the funerary world of the Picenes and pre-Roman Italy more broadly, a chariot was among the clearest markers of princely rank, and this one places its owner firmly among the elite.

The weapons buried with him, including a helmet, an axe, and other offensive arms, reinforce that status. So do several other objects, still being cleaned and studied, that seem to point to forms of power and authority not previously well documented in Picene territory. The excavators suggest these pieces may eventually reshape how we understand the roles played by the Conero’s ruling class in the sixth century BC.

A banquet sealed for the afterlife

Among the most striking finds are large vessels of beaten bronze sheet recovered from the chariot tomb. Sealed with ceramic lids and still full, they held organic material, ceramic fragments, and animal bones. The team reads them as the traces of a funeral banquet held at the burial, or as food offerings meant to sustain the dead man on his journey into the afterlife. That they remained closed for more than two and a half millennia gives researchers a rare chance to study the contents directly.

Excavation of the female burial. Credit: Soprintendenza ABAP Ancona–Pesaro Urbino.

A woman adorned in fibulae and amber

Beside the central tomb lay a female burial of considerable richness. Excavators documented textiles, decorative elements, and the remains of footwear with metal fittings still in their original positions. Numerous fibulae, the ornamental brooches used to fasten clothing, were arranged directly on the body at the chest, shoulders, pelvis, and feet, holding in place the garments and shroud that wrapped her. A large fibula with an amber core lay just beyond her head, possibly part of a headdress or hairstyle. These details promise new insight into ritual practice and into how prestige was expressed for aristocratic women in Picene society.

A monument built to be seen

The complex also rewrites part of what was known about how these burials were designed. The great funerary circles of the Conero and the wider Piceno had always been defined by a ring ditch, usually cut in a V-shaped profile, that separated the space of the living from that of the dead. The Sirolo complex does something new. Its boundary is marked not by a ditch but by a ring palisade, traceable through a regular series of post holes, each holding small deposits of carefully selected pottery fragments at its base.

Its placement looks equally deliberate. The circle sits on a low natural rise that commands the surrounding land, a choice that seems meant to make the monument immediately visible across the funerary landscape and to underline its symbolic weight. It lies not far from the celebrated Tomb of the Queen and the area long known as the necropolis of the Pini, and geophysical surveys suggest the burial ground extended well beyond its previously understood limits.

Why it changes the picture

For Stefano Finocchi, the excavation’s scientific director, the value of the find is that it lets researchers see a whole aristocratic community rather than a lone grave. He describes a nucleus with legible hierarchical and symbolic relationships, one that opens new perspectives on the elites who led the major Picene center that grew up in the Conero area. The scale of the monument, the quality of the grave goods, and the objects still under study together sketch a ruling group woven into a dense web of contacts, one that linked the middle Adriatic to the leading centers of central Italy.

Source: Soprintendenza Archeologia, Belle Arti e Paesaggio per le Province di Ancona e Pesaro e Urbino (July 1, 2026).

Detail of the Bearded Slave by Michelangelo. Credit: Dimitris Kamaras / Wikimedia Commons

Their subject is one of Michelangelo’s unfinished figures in Florence, and a small irregularity carved into its armpit that, they argue, may be the earliest known depiction of hidradenitis suppurativa.

The disease was not formally described until the nineteenth century. The sculpture dates to 1536. If the researchers are right, the carving would predate the medical description of the condition by roughly 327 years, a startling gap between what an artist may have observed and what medicine would eventually explain.

The figure in the marble

The work sits in the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence, among the group of unfinished figures Michelangelo carved for the ill-fated tomb of Pope Julius II. Known collectively as the Prisoners, or Slaves, they appear to strain and emerge from the raw stone, and they are celebrated precisely for being incomplete, a vivid record of the sculptor’s non-finito method and of his lifelong study of the human body. The authors, Sura Alkinani, Francesca Prignano, Kira Kofoed, and Gregor B.E. Jemec, titled their paper after the “Awakening Slave,” though coverage of the study has also referred to the closely related Bearded Slave. Both belong to the same group of powerfully modeled male nudes.

Whichever figure is meant, the point of interest is narrow and specific. In the left armpit of the marble body there is a surface irregularity, a cluster of raised, uneven detail that, the researchers contend, does not match how sculptors of the period rendered the human form.

The Bearded Slave by Michelangelo. Credit: Gabriela chavarro / Wikimedia Commons

Why the armpit is the clue

The starting point is a simple visual observation. Renaissance sculptors did not, as a rule, carve axillary hair. Smooth armpits were the convention, and depictions of underarm hair in stone are rare. So when a lump of irregular relief appears in exactly that spot, the question arises of what it is meant to represent. The rarity of carved body hair, the authors suggest, tilts the balance away from the simplest explanation and toward the possibility that Michelangelo was recording something he actually saw on a living body.

The team is careful not to overreach. Marble has its own veining, fractures, and centuries of surface aging, all of which can produce shapes that fool the eye. They caution explicitly against overinterpretation, acknowledging that what looks like a lesion could be an artifact of the stone itself. Their claim is offered as a hypothesis worth taking seriously, not as a settled diagnosis.

What the disease actually is

To see why the idea has appeal, it helps to know the condition. Hidradenitis suppurativa is a chronic inflammatory skin disease that centers on hair follicles and the apocrine sweat glands, striking the areas where those structures cluster, above all the armpits, the groin, the anogenital region, and the folds beneath the breasts. It produces painful, deep-seated nodules and abscesses that can rupture, drain, connect into tunnels beneath the skin, and heal into rope-like scars. It usually appears after puberty, tends to recur for years, and affects on the order of one percent of people, though it remains widely underdiagnosed and is often mistaken for other conditions.

The armpit is one of its most typical sites. A cluster of raised, inflamed nodules in the axilla is a textbook presentation. That is what makes the carved irregularity suggestive. If Michelangelo was working from a model whose underarm bore the swellings of active disease, a faithful sculptor attentive to anatomy might well have reproduced them, even without any idea of what he was looking at.

An artist who studied bodies

The proposal gains a little weight from what is known of Michelangelo himself. He dissected cadavers, studied musculature closely, and built his reputation partly on anatomical precision. The torsos of the Prisoners, with their carefully defined muscles, are often cited as evidence of that fascination. An artist of his exactness, working from a living model, is exactly the kind of observer who might have transcribed an unusual detail of the skin without editing it into idealized smoothness.

That said, the authors do not claim Michelangelo diagnosed anything. Nothing suggests he understood the swellings as a disease. The argument is only that he may have recorded, faithfully, what was in front of him, leaving behind an image that modern clinicians can now read with knowledge he did not possess.

A question worth asking

The disease would not enter the medical literature until the nineteenth century, when French surgeons described and eventually named it, long after the marble had been carved and set aside. The researchers are honest that their reading of the sculpture cannot be proven. The enigma, as they frame it, remains open. What they offer instead is a genuine dialogue between dermatology and art history, and the reminder that works we think we know can still surprise us.

For anyone who now stands before the figure in Florence, the marble may look a little different. It remains silent and unchanging. But in one shadowed armpit there may be the trace of a human ailment, quietly waiting three centuries for a name.

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Source: Alkinani, S., Prignano, F., Kofoed, K., & Jemec, G. B. E. (2026). "The enigma of hidradenitis suppurativa. Michelangelo's 'Awakening Slave'." Journal of Investigative Dermatology. doi.org/10.1016/j.jid.2026.03.042

Archaeologists decipher 4,000-year-old Linear Elamite script from ancient Iran

Desset, an archaeologist specializing in Iran from the Neolithic through the Bronze Age, worked alongside colleagues Kambiz Tabibzadeh, Matthieu Kervran, Gian Pietro Basello, and Gianni Marchesi. Their proposed decipherment, first announced in 2020 and detailed in a peer-reviewed study published in 2022, has drawn wide attention for cracking a script that had resisted scholars for over a century.

The breakthrough drew on a set of previously inaccessible inscriptions on silver beakers held mainly in the Mahboubian Collection in London. The vessels are thought to originate from the Kam-Firuz area near the ancient city of Anshan in southwestern Iran. The additional texts gave researchers enough material to identify recurring royal names, which served as the key to unlocking the script’s phonetic values.

Linear Elamite consists of geometric signs and was used during the Bronze Age, roughly between 2300 and 1900 BC, by the Elamite civilization that flourished in what is now southwestern Iran. Desset and his colleagues have argued it may be the oldest known purely phonetic writing system, a claim that remains debated among specialists, with some scholars maintaining the script is partly logographic.

The script was first uncovered in the early 1900s during French excavations at the ancient city of Susa, but it remained unreadable for more than a hundred years because so few inscriptions survived. Earlier scholars such as Ferdinand Bork, Carl Frank, Walther Hinz, and Piero Meriggi identified the values of a handful of signs but could not complete a decipherment, largely because the available corpus was too small.

Regularised Linear Elamite characters as interpreted by Desset et al. in 2022. Credit: François Desset

Desset has said his engagement with the script deepened after 2006, when he took part in excavations in southern Iran. The turning point came when he identified a repeated sequence of symbols matching the ending of the name of the Elamite ruler Shilhaha, who reigned around 1950 BC. Recognizing that pattern allowed the team to assign sound values to several signs and gradually read the rest.

The achievement has invited comparison with Jean-François Champollion, who deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphs in the early nineteenth century by recognizing royal names such as Ptolemy and Cleopatra. Desset has described Shilhaha as playing the role in his own work that those names played for Champollion.

Following the breakthrough, researchers have been able to read dozens of Linear Elamite inscriptions, from a known corpus of only around 40 to 50 texts. Desset has said he next intends to turn to the even older and largely undeciphered Proto-Elamite script, one of the earliest writing systems in the world, of which more than 1,600 inscriptions survive.

The Elamite civilization emerged during the early urbanization of the ancient Near East in the fourth millennium BC. Centered first at Anshan and later at Susa, Elam covered much of present-day Khuzestan and Ilam provinces in Iran and extended into parts of southern Iraq. Its language is considered unrelated to any known language family and remained in official use during the Achaemenid Persian Empire.

Desset has expressed hope that the work will support the preservation of Iran’s cultural heritage and contribute positively to Iranian culture and identity.

Ship carvings at Kelleby. Credit: Gerhard Milstreu.

For decades these carvings drew far less attention than the spectacular boat art of southern Scandinavia, where more than 20,000 ship images survive. Now a new study argues that the two traditions, separated by some 3,000 kilometers of Atlantic coastline, are unmistakably related, and that the resemblance points to a Bronze Age Europe knit together by long-distance seafaring far tighter than once assumed.

The research, led by Durham University’s Department of Archaeology and published on June 9, 2026, in the open-access journal PLOS ONE, compared boat petroglyphs at sites in Northwest Iberia with the well-documented corpus of Nordic ship carvings in Sweden and Denmark. Its central finding is that the vessels share a precise vocabulary of design, down to details that would be hard to explain by coincidence.

A shared design language

When the team set the Iberian carvings beside their Scandinavian counterparts, the same distinctive features kept appearing in both. The boats carry matching end-ship decorations, including bird shapes and s-shapes at prow and stern. They show rigging, oars, masts, and sail-like elements rendered in comparable ways. In several cases the parallels are nearly identical, such as a “mushroom” or “cult-axe” shape placed at the center of the vessel that recurs in the same position in both regions.

To the researchers, this is not a matter of two cultures independently drawing boats in roughly similar ways. The specificity of the overlap suggests that ideas, symbols, and shipbuilding knowledge were moving across Europe along maritime routes. As the team frames it, the carvings record technologies and beliefs being shared between distant coastal communities rather than invented separately in each place.

Examples of Atlantic and Figurative rock art traditions in northwestern Iberia: (A) Tapada do Ozão, Valença, and (B) Monte de Porreiras 6, Paredes de Coura, Portugal. Credit: Luís Coutinho / Marta Díaz-Guardamino.

How the carvings were dated

The Iberian boat art has long resisted firm dating, because rock carvings rarely sit in contexts that can be pinned to a calendar. The Scandinavian material, by contrast, is anchored by securely dated finds, including ship images on bronze objects and on stone slabs from closed grave contexts. The accepted Nordic chronology uses the shape of a boat’s two end-ships as its main dating criterion, tracing the tradition across the Bronze Age from roughly 1700 to 500 BCE.

By matching the Iberian vessels to these dated Scandinavian forms, the team proposed a Late Bronze Age range of about 1300 to 800 BCE for the Iberian carvings. That placement is significant, because it lines the Iberian images up chronologically with known Nordic maritime technology, and with a period when Atlantic exchange networks were intensifying. The dating holds, the authors note, whether the engravings were left by visiting foreign crews or by local sailors who had adopted foreign naval technology. Either way, the communities of Northwest Iberia were plainly enmeshed in expansive, long-distance maritime networks.

Boats placed in a watery landscape

Alongside the iconography, the team studied where the carvings sit. Using high-resolution 3D laser scanning and photogrammetry, they built detailed digital models of the Iberian panels, then used Geographic Information Systems to map each site and analyze its relationship to coastlines, rivers, and estuaries.

The pattern was consistent. Almost every Iberian boat-art site lay near the sea or a river, or was positioned so that water was visible from it. Even sites deep inland kept a clear visual or physical link to navigable water. At one upland location in southern Galicia, more than 100 kilometers from the coast, the carved panels still command views over the creeks and river below. The placement looks deliberate, the researchers argue, as though these were meant to be maritime places, set apart from ordinary domestic life and tied to the routes of seafarers.

Boat 3 from Panel 2 at Santo Adrião, showing details that closely parallel southern Scandinavian boat imagery: (A) boat carving from Bottna, western Sweden, (B) rubbing of a boat carving from Himmelstalund, eastern Sweden, and (C) part of a rock art panel from Tanum, western Sweden. Credit: Boel Bengtsson.

Sun crosses and a shared mythology

The connection may run deeper than trade and technology. On both the Iberian and the Scandinavian panels, the team identified cosmological motifs accompanying the ships, in particular sun crosses placed near or even inside boats. In Scandinavian rock art the pairing of vessels and solar symbols is common, and has been linked to the importance of the sun in navigation and belief. Finding the same association in Iberia hints at a shared focus on solar mythology, and suggests that boats in this art were not merely transport but carried symbolic weight bound up with ritual and cosmology.

A review cited in the study found that sun crosses, known in Portugal as segmented circles, are relatively common in Northwest Iberia, with more than 100 depictions across twenty-nine rock art sites. At Laje da Churra in northern Portugal, a sun cross overlays the hull of one carved boat, echoing Scandinavian examples where solar signs ride inside the vessels.

Metals, trade, and a connected Bronze Age

Behind the carvings lies a question about metals. The Late Bronze Age saw copper, silver, and probably tin moving across Atlantic Europe, and Northwest Iberia sat at a junction of those flows, channeling goods from southern Iberia outward toward western France, southern England, and the north Atlantic, and onward to Scandinavia. Boats were the means by which that economy functioned, and the shared ship imagery fits neatly with the idea of Iberia as a hub mediating Atlantic exchange.

Some of the boat depictions, the authors suggest, may even record local communities trying to make sense of foreign travelers arriving in an era of early “globalization.” Whether Nordic crews physically reached these Atlantic shores, or whether local sailors absorbed northern designs through down-the-line contact, the carvings testify that the people of Bronze Age Iberia were looking outward across the water.

The broader message is that Bronze Age communities were far less isolated than the old picture allowed. Maritime travel carried not just cargo but cultural ideas across thousands of kilometers, leaving a trace in stone that we are only now reading clearly, with the help of lasers, 3D models, and a careful eye for the shape of an ancient prow.

Sources. Durham University; Díaz-Guardamino M, Bengtsson B, Newton E, Bettencourt AMS, Ling J, Latorre-Ruiz J, et al. (2026) “Boats on the rocks. Late prehistoric nautical iconography and landscape, from Northwest Iberia to Scandinavia.” PLOS ONE 21(6), e0349417. doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0349417

Excavation area near the perimeter of the ZAT and adjacent to the Tula River, where archaeologists uncovered a wealth of discoveries. Credit: Gerardo Peña, INAH

Carved stone panels that once decorated Pyramid B, the towering, atlante-topped temple of the Toltec capital, were pried loose around a thousand years ago, carried roughly 100 meters from the ceremonial heart of the city, and reused to adorn an elite residence on the outskirts. Buried beneath the floor of a nearby house lay the remains of six children, sacrificed together.

The discovery, announced by Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), emerged from a salvage operation that began in May 2026, prompted by the construction of a water treatment plant in the 16 de Enero neighborhood of Tula de Allende, in the state of Hidalgo. What the excavation has produced is less a single artifact than a window onto the city’s afterlife, the centuries when Tula’s monumental core was fading in significance while people on its margins worked to claim its prestige for themselves.

Researchers from INAH uncovered a 40 by 80 meter structure featuring detached reliefs from Pyramid B, along with children’s burials and evidence of ritual sacrifice. Credit: Gerardo Peña, INAH

The capital of the Toltecs

Tollan-Xicocotitlan, or Tula, was the seat of the Toltec civilization, which dominated central Mexico in the centuries before the rise of the Aztecs. The city reached its height between roughly 900 and 1100 AD, sprawling across several square miles and, by some estimates, housing tens of thousands of people. Its civic center included temple pyramids, a palace complex, ball courts, and the colonnaded structures that gave the site its monumental character. By the twelfth century, however, Tula’s influence had collapsed.

The most recognizable monument at the site is Pyramid B, also known as the Temple of Tlahuizcalpantecuhtli, the “Lord of the Dawn” or “House of the Morning Star,” an aspect of the feathered-serpent deity Quetzalcoatl associated with the planet Venus. The five-tiered pyramid is crowned by four colossal basalt warrior figures, the famous atlantes, which once helped support the roof of a temple at its summit. Its façades were originally clad in carved and brightly painted stone panels depicting processions of jaguars, coyotes, eagles, and serpents, imagery binding the Toltec rulers to war, sacrifice, and cosmic order.

It was precisely these decorative panels, or fragments matching them, that the new excavation recovered far from the pyramid itself.

The structure’s decoration featured depictions of chalchihuites, greenstone beads associated with power and wealth. Credit: Gerardo Peña, INAH

Panels carried to the periphery

The salvage area sits nearly 100 meters from the boundary of the Tula Archaeological Zone, adjacent to the river. There, archaeologists exposed a substantial building, roughly 40 by 80 meters, decorated with images of chalchihuites, greenstone beads long associated with power, fertility, and wealth in Mesoamerican symbolism. Within and around the structure they found two carved tombstone-like slabs whose iconography points unmistakably to a single origin.

One slab depicts the god Tlahuizcalpantecuhtli; the other shows a feline. Both match the imagery known from Pyramid B. The Tlahuizcalpantecuhtli panel measures about 78 by 53 centimeters, the feline panel about 53 by 42 centimeters, and both retain traces of their original stucco and polychromy. For Luis Gamboa Cabezas, the lead archaeologist on the project, the context speaks to a deliberate act of borrowed legitimacy. At a moment when the core of Tula may no longer have held the same sacred authority, he suggests, people from the periphery came to the old palace area, took the symbols they needed, and used them to identify themselves as Toltecs, to feel, and to be seen as, heirs to the city’s greatness.

The feline panel also resolves a question that had lingered for the better part of a century. In the mid-twentieth century, the archaeologist Jorge R. Acosta documented processions of coyotes and felines moving from right to left along the east side of Pyramid B, but found nothing comparable on the west. The newly recovered slab shows the animals moving in the opposite direction, from left to right, evidence that the procession of carved beasts once wrapped all the way around the structure, rather than decorating only one side.

Two reliefs were uncovered by INAH researchers, one depicting a feline and the other the deity Tlahuizcalpantecuhtli. Credit: Gerardo Peña, INAH

Six children beneath a floor

If the reused panels speak to ambition and identity, other finds from the same operation speak to something darker. Among the primary and secondary burials recovered was a single offering of six infants, aged between one and six years at the time of death, placed together beneath a house floor. Child sacrifice is well attested at Tula and across Mesoamerica more broadly; earlier work near the Toltec capital has turned up groups of children associated with rain deities and altars, and the site’s history of ritual violence is one of its most studied and unsettling features.

Another artifact deepens that picture. The excavators recovered a copper awl whose tip matches a scraping mark found on a human lower jaw, evidence, they believe, that the tool was used to remove skin in a ritual context, a practice known from later Mesoamerican religion in connection with deities of renewal and agricultural fertility.

The broader haul of material, dating from roughly 1100 to 1521 AD, reflects a community that continued to live and work in the shadow of the old capital long after its political collapse. Archaeologists recovered vessels, plates, bone awls, shell beads, seals, spindle whorls, and numerous figurines, including a blue-painted fragment showing a canid wearing a headdress and a vessel fragment bearing a feathered serpent. The area’s deep ritual significance was already apparent. In a 2018 rescue phase, researchers found 23 skulls bearing the dental and cranial modifications typical of pre-Hispanic elites, placed in vessels and aligned near an altar.

Heirs to a fading city

Taken together, the finds sketch a portrait of Tula’s long twilight. As the monumental center lost its grip on sacred and political authority, communities on the periphery did not simply abandon the Toltec legacy. They appropriated it. They stripped sacred imagery from the great pyramid, installed it on their own elite buildings, and continued to perform the rituals, including human sacrifice, that had defined Toltec religious life. Many groups settling in the area over the following centuries adopted Toltec architecture, artifacts, and styles precisely to assert their standing as the city’s rightful successors, a claim later cultures, including the Aztecs, would also stake.

The discovery carries a pointed lesson about how much remains hidden. As INAH archaeologist Carlos Arriaga Mejía noted, the protected polygon of the Tula Archaeological Zone represents only a sliver of the original pre-Hispanic city, a reminder that significant remains may lie beneath any patch of ground in the region, and that development and heritage protection must work in tandem.

Because the artifacts were recovered from land historically prone to flooding from the Tula River, their preservation demands careful handling. Each piece is transported to camps within the archaeological zone for safekeeping, then cleaned, classified, and registered in INAH’s databases for future study and possible public display. Once the architectural remains have been documented and consolidated, they will be covered with geotextile and earth to protect them. INAH and the Hidalgo State Water and Sewerage Commission have agreed to set the area aside for low-impact construction that will not bear down on the buried Toltec structures. That arrangement allows the water treatment plant to proceed while leaving the relics of the Lord of the Dawn undisturbed beneath the soil.

Source. National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), Mexico

Excavations at the newly discovered site. Credit: Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities

What makes the find unusual is its completeness. Rather than a single building or a lone cemetery, the excavators have exposed the interlocking parts of a working settlement, residential, economic, and funerary, offering a rare and rounded picture of daily life in the eastern Delta nearly three and a half thousand years ago.

A community caught in full

Sherif Fathy, Egypt’s Minister of Tourism and Antiquities, described the discovery as an important addition to understanding how people settled the eastern Delta during this era, noting that it reveals an economically and socially integrated community combining living quarters, stores, production facilities, and areas for the dead. The Ministry framed Tell el-Kua as a self-sufficient settlement, a place where the everyday rhythms of housing, food storage, manufacture, and burial can all be read from the ground.

Dr Hisham El-Leithy, Secretary-General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, stressed the strategic position of the site on the Wadi Tumilat axis, one of the most important routes connecting the eastern Delta with Egypt’s eastern borders. That location, he said, points to the settlement’s part in trade and cultural exchange, and helps illuminate the passage from the Second Intermediate Period to the beginnings of the New Kingdom.

One of the newly discovered tombs. Credit: Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities

Houses, ovens, and grain stores

According to Mohamed Abdel Badie, head of the Egyptian Antiquities Sector, the mission uncovered ten tombs built of mudbrick, some rectangular in plan and others fronted by distinctive architectural facades, all assigned to the Fifteenth Dynasty associated with Hyksos rule. Alongside the cemetery lay an organized residential quarter measuring about 30 by 60 meters, containing rooms and several halls together with ovens and silos for storing grain. The combination signals clear economic activity on the spot, a settlement that produced, stored, and consumed rather than merely buried its dead.

The site covers roughly 55 feddans, or about 23 hectares, and the evidence suggests it remained in use until the middle of the Eighteenth Dynasty. That long life span reflects an unbroken continuity of settlement across the very moment when Egypt passed from Hyksos control into the New Kingdom, a transition usually told through battles and royal inscriptions rather than through the houses and storerooms of ordinary people.

Aerial view of the site. Credit: Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities

Scarabs, bronze, and the mark of the Levant

The excavation produced a rich assemblage of small finds. Among them were scarabs, bronze tools, a range of pottery vessels, kohl pots carved from alabaster, and juglets in the so-called Tell el-Yahudiya style. That last category is telling. Tell el-Yahudiya ware, a dark, polished juglet decorated with patterns filled with white paste, is a hallmark of the Middle Bronze Age and circulated widely between Egypt and the Levant during the Hyksos period, a ceramic signature of the connections that bound the eastern Delta to the lands beyond Sinai.

A finely preserved ceramic vessel uncovered during the excavations, offering insight into daily life at the site. Credit: Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities

Study of the human remains revealed individuals who had died between the ages of 25 and 40, while animal bones recovered from the graves shed light on diet and on the offerings placed with the dead. Some of the pottery carried seals and production marks, which the team reads as evidence of broad trading networks and a possible role for Tell el-Kua as an important center for commercial distribution in the region.

A well-preserved ceramic jug with a handle, recovered from the excavation, reflecting everyday domestic pottery traditions at the site. Credit: Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities

Burials that break the pattern

For the first time at the site, archaeologists found human burials placed outside the built mudbrick tombs, some of the bodies laid in a crouched or squatting position. Mostafa Hassan, director of the Ismailia antiquities area and head of the mission, noted that this is an unusual practice that will be the subject of further archaeological study. Such departures from the expected funerary norm are exactly the kind of detail that can reshape understanding of belief and social difference in a period for which written sources are thin.

The Second Intermediate Period in context

The Second Intermediate Period, conventionally dated to roughly 1650 to 1550 BC, was a time of political fragmentation between the Middle Kingdom and the New Kingdom. In the north, the Hyksos, rulers of Asiatic and Levantine background, established the Fifteenth Dynasty and governed from their capital at Avaris, also in the eastern Delta. They introduced or popularized new technologies and maintained close ties with the wider eastern Mediterranean world, and their eventual expulsion by the Theban kings around 1550 BC opened the imperial age of the New Kingdom.

The Wadi Tumilat, where Tell el-Kua sits, was a natural gateway between the Egyptian heartland and the deserts and routes leading toward the Levant. Settlements along it stood at the meeting point of Egyptian and foreign influence, which is part of what gives this discovery its weight. By preserving the residential, productive, and funerary life of a single community in one place, Tell el-Kua promises to add flesh to a period more often defined by its rulers than by the people who lived under them, and to reinforce the standing of the eastern Delta as a vital crossroads in ancient Egyptian history.

Excavation and study at the site are expected to continue, with further analysis of the unusual burials, the human remains, and the marked pottery likely to refine the picture in the seasons to come.

Source: Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities announcement of 29 June 2026, as reported by Egyptian outlets including El-Watan News and Masrawy.

Aerial view of the Bath Complex. Credit: Soprintendenza archeologia, belle arti e paesaggio per le province di L'Aquila e Teramo

At a locality known as Case Pente, excavations have revealed the buried plan of a prehistoric village marked by the post holes of 52 huts, an associated cemetery, and, a short distance away, the remains of a Roman farm with its own private bath complex. Together the finds trace an almost unbroken human presence across several thousand years, from the close of the Copper Age to the Roman period.

The discoveries were summarized on 26 June 2026 in a statement from the Soprintendenza Archeologia, Belle Arti e Paesaggio for the provinces of L’Aquila and Teramo, the state body responsible for protecting archaeological heritage in the area. Work at the site has been under way since March 2023.

A settlement four thousand years old

The oldest and, in many respects, most striking layer at Case Pente is a village dating to the end of the Eneolithic, or Copper Age, and the beginning of the Early Bronze Age. Because the huts were built of perishable materials that decayed long ago, the settlement survives chiefly as a field of dark post holes, the footprints of timber uprights that once held up 52 dwellings. Alongside the houses, archaeologists identified a necropolis belonging to the same community.

The scale of the evidence is what makes the find exceptional. Documenting an entire village layout, rather than a few isolated structures, allows researchers to study how a community living more than four thousand years ago organized its space, how it built its homes, and how it related the world of the living to its burial ground. Excavators also recorded numerous later burials, showing that this stretch of the valley continued to be occupied and used, without long interruptions, across the millennia.

For the prehistoric sector, the Superintendence reports that the archaeological deposit has been excavated and recorded in full, in keeping with the procedures of preventive archaeology, so that the scientific information held in the soil has been recovered and preserved in the documentary record.

The Roman baths during archaeological excavations. Credit: Soprintendenza Archeologia, Belle Arti e Paesaggio for the Provinces of L'Aquila and Teramo.

A Roman farm and its baths

The Roman phase is represented by a rustic building, most likely part of a working agricultural estate, and by a more elaborate complex of heated rooms set along an ancient roadway that continued to shape the valley’s landscape in later centuries. In the bath rooms, the small brick pillars that once raised the floor are still visible. Hot air and smoke from a service furnace circulated through the cavity beneath, and the darkened earth still carries traces of that heating system.

Bath suites of this kind were a mark of prosperity. The wealthier Roman estates combined production buildings, storerooms, and workshops with a residence and, often, a small private bath, evidence that the owner had reached a certain level of comfort. Its presence at Case Pente suggests that the farm belonged to a substantial enterprise tied into the wider economy of a valley that, in Roman times, lay along routes linking the Adriatic and Tyrrhenian coasts.

Because of their historical value, the Roman walls will be conserved where they stand. The Superintendence has begun designing a visitor route that will make the structures accessible to the public, and restoration of the bath building has already been completed.

Postholes from the prehistoric settlement. Credit: Soprintendenza Archeologia, Belle Arti e Paesaggio for the Provinces of L'Aquila and Teramo.

Study, conservation, and a future exhibition

The fieldwork is one part of a broader program set out in a valorization agreement between the Superintendence and Snam, the energy infrastructure company whose project prompted the dig. The agreement provides for the restoration of all recovered finds and conserved structures, the reconstruction of a prehistoric hut beside the Roman remains, and a full scientific study of the materials. Planned analyses include anthropological and genetic study of the burials, together with archaeobotanical, archaeozoological, and archaeometric investigations and radiometric dating. The results are to be released through scientific publications and a closing exhibition intended to return the findings to the local community.

The site received its first visitors on 13 June 2026, during the European Archaeology Days, when limited numbers of residents, scholars, and enthusiasts were able to see an excavation still in progress and meet the archaeologists at work.

A long history beneath the valley

The importance of the finds is easier to grasp against the deeper history of the Valle Peligna. Before the Roman conquest the region was home to the Peligni, an Italic people who spoke an Oscan-Umbrian language and who sided with the Samnites during the Social War of the early first century BC. At nearby Corfinium, less than twenty kilometers from Case Pente, the allied Italic peoples established the capital of their confederation and pointedly renamed it Italia, one of the earliest political uses of a name that would come to identify the whole peninsula. Pelignian religion gave a central place to springs, woods, and mountains, with sanctuaries often set on high ground or beside water.

Recent work in archaeogenetics has added another layer to that picture. Studies of ancient DNA suggest that the inhabitants of Iron Age central Italy were already genetically close to the modern populations of the center and south of the country, with no sign of recent large-scale migration or population replacement. A Pelignian living in the centuries before the common era would have been broadly similar, in genetic terms, to a present-day inhabitant of Abruzzo or the neighboring regions. Their distinctiveness lay above all in culture, language, and politics rather than in ancestry.

A discovery shadowed by controversy

The Superintendence issued its statement partly in response to a public debate that had grown around the site in recent weeks. The work at Case Pente forms part of the authorization process for a Snam gas compression station, and the excavation, spread across roughly twelve hectares, is one of the largest preventive archaeology operations carried out in Abruzzo in recent years. When the project began, the area carried no archaeological protection, and what little was known came mainly from chance nineteenth-century finds.

Local activists, including a climate coalition campaigning against the plant, have argued that the construction has come at the cost of important remains, pointing in particular to a gravelled Roman road that was uncovered during the dig and then, they say, covered over as building work advanced. Critics have suggested the road may have connected Corfinium and Sulmo toward the interior of Samnium, and have linked the choices made at the site to the pressure of construction deadlines tied to substantial European recovery funding. The Superintendence, for its part, maintains that all operations were carried out lawfully and under its direct responsibility, that every find was documented, studied, and given the necessary protection, and that the most significant structures will be conserved and opened to the public.

Source: Soprintendenza Archeologia, Belle Arti e Paesaggio per le province di L’Aquila e Teramo, press release of 26 June 2026.