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Features
Pompeii's House of Dionysian Delights
Vivid frescoes in an opulent dining room celebrate the wild rites of the wine god
Courtesy Archaeological Park of Pompeii -
Features
Return to Serpent Mountain
Discovering the true origins of an enigmatic mile-long pattern in Peru’s coastal desert
Courtesy J.L. Bongers -
Features
Top 10 Discoveries of 2025
ARCHAEOLOGY magazine’s editors reveal the year’s most exciting finds
Courtesy of the Caracol Archaeological Project, University of Houston -
Letter from France
Neolithic Cultural Revolution
How farmers came together to build Europe’s most grandiose funerary monuments some 7,000 years ago
© Laurent Juhel, Inrap
Trending Articles
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Yusuf Aslan -
Features March/April 2026
Return to Serpent Mountain
Discovering the true origins of an enigmatic mile-long pattern in Peru’s coastal desert
Courtesy J.L. Bongers -
Features November/December 2013
Life on the Inside
Open for only six weeks toward the end of the Civil War, Camp Lawton preserves a record of wartime prison life
(Virginia Historical Society, Mss5.1.Sn237.1v.6p.139)
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Features March/April 2024
Discovering a New Neolithic World
Excavations in southeastern Turkey are revolutionizing how archaeologists understand the monumental achievements of hunter-gatherers
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(Scala / Art Resource, NY) -
Features March/April 2022
Exploring Notre Dame's Hidden Past
The devastating 2019 fire is providing an unprecedented look at the secrets of the great cathedral
(Patrick Zachmann) -
Features July/August 2021
The Ugarit Archives
Thousands of cuneiform tablets written in a distinctive script tell the dramatic story of a Bronze Age merchant city in Syria
(Dick Osseman/ Wikimedia Commons) -
Features November/December 2022
Magical Mystery Door
An investigation of an Egyptian sacred portal reveals a history of renovation and deception
(© The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge)
Around the World
GUATEMALA
Games were such an integral part of Maya society that they were sometimes embedded into a building’s design. A unique fifth-century a.d. patolli gaming board was found on the floor of a wealthy residential complex in the ancient city of Naachtun. While most known patolli boards—which feature a pattern of squares forming a cross—were roughly scratched into stucco floors or benches, this one was inlaid as a mosaic. It is the only one of its kind.
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IRELAND
The Vikings have long been credited with building Ireland’s first towns in the ninth century a.d. New evidence from County Wicklow, however, indicates that Irish urban traditions might be much older. A survey of the Brusselstown Ring hillfort, which was inhabited between 1200 and 400 b.c., revealed as many as 600 possible house platforms located within two concentric circular ramparts. If these structures were, in fact, dwellings, this would be the largest prehistoric settlement ever discovered in Britain or Ireland.
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UKRAINE
If there are few resources on hand, you build with what you’ve got. Some 18,000 years ago, during the last Ice Age, what people had was mammoth bone. Four circular structures built almost entirely from mammoth tusks and bones were discovered decades ago in the village of Mezhyrich. Archaeologists have been unsure whether they were houses, storage facilities, or ritual monuments. New data indicates that the structures were likely used as temporary dwellings that provided refuge during brief periods of extreme weather.