Features
Features January/February 2026
Top 10 Discoveries of 2025
ARCHAEOLOGY magazine’s editors reveal the year’s most exciting finds
RECENT Features
Features January/February 2026
The Cost of Doing Business
Piecing together the Roman empire’s longest known inscription—a peculiarly precise inventory of prices
Features January/February 2026
The Birds of Amarna
An Egyptian princess seeks sanctuary in her private palace
Features January/February 2026
Taking the Measure of Mesoamerica
Archaeologists decode the sacred mathematics embedded in an ancient city’s architecture
Features January/February 2026
Stone Gods and Monsters
3,000 years ago, an intoxicating new religion beckoned pilgrims to temples high in the Andes
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Features January 1, 2011
Nondestructive Radiocarbon Dating - College Station, Texas
Precisely dating archaeological artifacts is not as easy or harmless as it might seem. The most common method, radiocarbon dating, requires that a piece of an organic object be destroyed—washed with a strong acid and base at high temperature to remove impurities, and then set aflame.
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Features January 1, 2011
Early Pyramids - Jaen, Peru
Peru's towering burial mounds, with their underground chambers and layers upon layers of history, had long been thought to be a distinctive feature of the country's arid coast.
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Features January 1, 2011
Royal Tomb - El Zotz, Guatemala
A deep looters' trench led archaeologists to a series of amazing, macabre finds beneath the El Diablo pyramid at the modest Maya city of El Zotz.
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Features January 1, 2011
Decoding the Neanderthal Genome - Leipzig, Germany
This past year will always be remembered as the year we found out that the Neanderthals survived and they are us.
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Features January 1, 2011
"Kadanuumuu" - Woranso-Mille, Ethiopia
For the last 35 years, the short-legged “Lucy” skeleton has led some scientists to argue that Australopithecus afarensis didn’t stand fully upright or walk like modern humans, and instead got around by “knuckle-walking” like apes. Now, the discovery of a 3.6-million-year-old beanpole on the Ethiopian plains—christened “Kadanuumuu,” or “Big Man” in the Afar language—puts that tired debate to rest. The new fossil demonstrates these early human ancestors were fully bipedal.
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(Photo courtesy Thomas Strasser)