September/October 2026 Issue

Slideshow: A Wealth of Torcs

Beginning in the late 1940s, the greatest known assemblage of prehistoric jewelry in all of Europe was discovered on a forested promontory called Ken Hill in Norfolk County near England’s east coast. The caches of gold, silver, and bronze metalwork unearthed there have come to be known as the Snettisham Hoards, after the modern village at the foot of Ken Hill. Among the caches’ contents are rings, ingots, coins, bracelets, and, most importantly, torcs, or neck rings, which date to the Late Iron Age (ca. 350–60 B.C.). In an exhaustive review of the hoards, archaeologists Julia Farley of the British Museum and Jody Joy of the University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology suggest that these torcs were deposited as part of a society-wide ritual that marked a shift in how leaders communicated their authority. To read our full article on the Snettisham Hoards, click here.

VIDEO: Listening to the Ancient World

Archaeologists have unearthed fragments, and sometimes intact examples, of ancient wind, string, and percussion instruments. However, re-creating the physical spaces in which people played these instruments, many of which are inaccessible or no longer exist, presents unique challenges. By studying and modeling the acoustic properties of ancient spaces, researchers in the field of archaeoacoustics investigate how people of the past experienced sound.

An interdisciplinary team of scholars led by Jonathan Berger, composer and director of Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), are creating acoustic models that replicate how music may have originally sounded in some of the world’s most iconic architectural spaces, including Egyptian tombs, Inca temples, and the Duomo in Florence. They have also virtually reproduced the acoustic environment of southern France’s Chauvet Cave, which is famed for its stunning paintings of lions, horses, and mammoths created by Paleolithic people as long as 37,000 years ago. Geological transformations of the cave’s many chambers over the millennia—and the collapse of the entrance some 29,000 years ago—have altered its acoustic properties.

By taking precise measurements inside Chauvet, which is not open to the public, the team created an acoustic model of the cave that accounts for these changes. “We want to know how sound traveled in these spaces, if sound was audible from one chamber to another and if it sounded particularly different in one space compared to another,” Berger says. “We can now reconstruct how sound transforms as it moves through spaces and reaches stalactites and stalagmites.” This video presents a virtual reconstruction of Chauvet Cave produced by CCRMA doctoral student Luna Valentin and her colleagues, including the sounds of drums and flutes that Paleolithic artists might have heard reverberating through the cavernous galleries. To read our full package about music in the ancient world, click here.

Slideshow: Sonic Weapons

For half a millennium starting around 300 b.c., people from Spain to Scotland to Romania terrorized Greek and Roman armies with an unusual weapon. The carnyx, which accompanied Celts to war, was both a horn to rally soldiers and a symbol to frighten their enemies. The copper-alloy instrument stood around six feet tall and was likely played upright. Its bell took the shape of a fearsome beast, usually a boar. Archaeologists have been discovering carnyx fragments since the early nineteenth century, but only in recent years has the form of the instrument come into focus. To read our full package about music in the ancient world, click here.

Video: Cry of the Carnyx

Archaeologists have never found an intact ancient carnyx, but several professional horn makers have attempted reconstructions in recent decades. Their work has helped archaeologists understand how a carnyx likely sounded. It could have acted as a megaphone, amplifying battlefield orders—or it may have produced yelps and barks. Players could likely blast eerie, piercing shrieks and squeals from the horn. In this video, musician John Kenny plays two different carnyx reconstructions. To read our full package about music in the ancient world, click here.

Slideshow: Flutes and Rattles

Ancestral Puebloans spoke many languages and lived across a vast swath of the American Southwest. Though many of their musical instruments may have been broadly similar across tribes, people in different regions fashioned them from different materials. To read our full package about music in the ancient world, click here.

Video: Flute Tunes, All Types

Marlon Magdalena plays a solo concert of traditional and new Puebloan songs for flute, demonstrating the timbre of several different flute styles, including large wooden instruments and a small eagle-bone flute. To read our full package about music in the ancient world, click here.

Slideshow: Ancient Maya Art Academy

The skills and beliefs that built and sustained the great culture of the Maya for at least a thousand years were taught to young boys in school, with some pupils developing aptitude in military tactics, others in scribal arts, and a precocious few in the arcana of religion. “That knowledge has to be taught from one generation to the next,” says archaeologist Kathryn Brown of the University of Texas at San Antonio. “It’s the same from the ancient Maya all the way to ritual practitioners today.”

At the site of Xunantunich in Belize, Brown and fellow archaeologists including Jason Yaeger, Lauren Nowakowski, and Whitney Lytle have identified evocative evidence of Maya shamanism and schooling in the late seventh and eighth centuries a.d. At a shrine containing the burial of a likely shaman, archaeologists found adornments and tools the person would have used in life and, perhaps, the afterlife. Nearby, in the city’s center, the next generation was learning to draw at what archaeologists think is a school. In two rooms covered in graffiti, artists of varying skill levels tried their hands at sketching human figures, animals, and glyphs. To read our full article about Xunantunich, click here.

Dig Deeper

Do you like the stories in this issue? Here are some of our favorite ARCHAEOLOGY stories on similar topics—along with some of the books, journal articles, and other resources we drew upon as we researched and wrote the articles in our September/October 2026 issue.

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The Music of Time

Tuning in to the sounds of the ancient world

Dancing Days of the Maya
In Guatemala, murals depict performances combining Catholic and Indigenous traditions

Tomb of the Chantress
A burial chamber in the Valley of the Kings provides a glimpse into the life of an ancient Egyptian singer

Hadrian's Bugler
Near Hadrian’s Wall, archaeologists unearthed the mouthpiece of a horn that Roman soldiers played while marching

Artifact Spotlight: Magdalenian Wind Instrument
Archaeologists once thought this 18,000-year-old conch shell was broken—then they tried to play it

Listening to the Gods of Ancient Peru
The acoustics of the Chavìn de Huántar temple complex amplified the experience of the ceremonies held there

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A Change in Fashion

Hoards of lavish gold and silver neck rings buried on an English hill reflect dramatic social change

Secrets of Scotland’s Viking Age Hoard
A cache of Viking silver and Anglo-Saxon heirlooms reveals the complex politics of ninth-century Britain

Ka-Ching!
Archaeologists discovered a gargantuan hoard in the British Channel Islands—then they took it apart, coin by coin

Iron Age Britain’s Oldest Gold
Four gold torcs date to a time when people in Britain were thought to have forgone gold jewelry

The Snettisham Hoards edited by Julia Farley and Jody Joy
Archaeologists undertake an exhaustive study of the greatest assemblage of prehistoric jewelry ever found in Europe

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Cultivating Fields of Stone

Peru’s ancient farmers used intricate rock maps to plan for the future

Peru's Great Urban Experiment
A millennium ago, the Chimú built a new way of life in the vast city of Chan Chan

Return to Serpent Mountain
Discovering the true origins of an enigmatic mile-long pattern in Peru’s coastal desert

Off the Grid: Barrancas River Valley, Argentina
In the central Andes, archaeologists are studying a rock map of corrals—complete with miniature animal figures

Patricia Aparicio’s Comprehensive Works
The archaeologist has published many freely available articles on her work in Peru’s Sondondo Valley

Proyecto Alpaca
Read in-depth about research in Peru’s Colca Valley led by archaeologists Lauren Kohut and BrieAnna S. Langlie

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Where Was Ancient Egypt Born?

Archaeologists are reimagining a time before the first pharaohs

Lost Cities: Egypt’s First Capital?
Searching for Tjenu, the seat of Egypt’s 1st Dynasty pharaohs

Top 10 Discoveries: World’s Oldest Dress
Breakthrough research determined that an Egyptian linen garment is at least 5,100 years old

In Search of Lost Pharaohs
Anubis Mountain conceals the tombs of an obscure Egyptian dynasty

The Man in the Middle
How an ingenious royal official transformed Persian conquerors into proper Egyptian pharaohs

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2,000 Years Under the Sea

The story of Greece’s famed Antikythera wreck is finally being revealed

Top 10 Discoveries: Antikythera Man
At the ancient world’s largest, richest wreck, archaeologists have found a sailor who went down with the ship

History’s Greatest Wrecks: Cape Gelidonya and Uluburun
Who sailed these two Bronze Age ships, and what were they carrying?

An Elegant Enigma
The luxurious possessions of a seventeenth-century woman continue to intrigue researchers

A Portable Cosmos: Revealing the Antikythera Mechanism, Scientific Wonder of the Ancient World by Alexander Jones
The story of the Antikythera Mechanism, the Greeks who invented it, and how archaeologists reconstructed it

Uncovering Uluburun: The True Tale of the Bronze Age’s Greatest Shipwreck published by the Archaeological Institute of America
Get to know the merchants, mariners, and kings of the first great age of seafaring by donating to the AIA

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Letter from Ireland: A War Between Friends

How IRA volunteers survived the Irish Civil War in a secret mountain hideout

The Sorrows of Spike Island
Millions were forced to flee during the Great Famine—others were condemned to Ireland’s most notorious prison

Inside a Medieval Gaelic Castle
A tiny Irish island holds the secrets of an unknown royal way of life

The Vikings in Ireland
A discovery challenges long-held ideas about when Scandinavian raiders arrived on the Emerald Isle

Ancient Comfort Food
When the Romans settled into a trading post in Ireland, they brought olive oil and figs to tide them over

Off the Grid: Rathcroghan, Ireland
An area first inhabited in the Neolithic period is the setting for the beginning and end of Ireland’s national epic

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Gyrfalcons Over Baghdad

Dozens of gyrfalcons gifted to the Abbasid caliphs starting around a.d. 869 were likely imported from Iceland

Turn of the Millennium Falcon
A gyrfalcon skeleton founds in Mongolia may be associated with a nomadic Chinese dynasty

First Falconer
One of the earliest known depictions of a falconer may represent a thirteenth-century king of Norway

Hoards of the Vikings
On an island in the Baltic Sea, traders amassed vast riches—with Arab silver coins the most prized

Off the Grid: Merv, Turkmenistan
The eastern capital of the Abbasid Caliphate was a nexus of goods, languages, ideas, and religious beliefs