Table of contents for May/June 2026 in ARCHAEOLOGY

After hunter-gatherers left their nomadic ways behind to settle down with friends and family, they made their homes in different types of communities. Over the millennia, some people settled in tiny villages, others chose small-town living, and still others resided in the crowded capitals of vast empires. In this issue, you will read stories about many of the ways people have lived across the ages. One such account is that of the splendid city of Dongjing, later known as Kaifeng, the capital of China’s Northern Song Dynasty from the tenth to twelfth century A.D. At its height, Dongjing was the world’s largest metropolis, with a population of more than a million, and featured wide boulevards, bounteous markets, bustling river traffic, and a renowned bridge crossing the Bianhe River. Stories of…

AN AVIAN CONNECTION A mid thousands of small clay fragments excavated at the 12,000-year-old village site of Nahal Ein Gev II in northern Israel, around a mile east of the Sea of Galilee, one stood out to archaeologist Laurent Davin of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The object was just 1.5 inches tall, but he could see that it had been expertly molded to depict a crouching woman with a bird perched on her back. “When I first looked at this lump of clay, I recognized that there was an anthropomorphic form with something on its back, but it looked blurry,” says Davin. “Then I illuminated it at a particular angle, and I saw all the details.” As Davin and his colleagues have learned more about the tiny figurine, they’ve…

The world’s oldest known rock art, dating to at least 67,800 years ago, has been discovered in a cave in Indonesia. The extremely faint image of a hand stencil, created by placing one’s hand against a wall and blowing pigment onto and around it, was found in Metanduno Cave on Muna Island, just of the island of Sulawesi. Researchers established the art’s minimum age by dating calcium carbonate deposits that have formed on top of the pigment. These deposits contain small amounts of uranium, which decays to thorium at a steady rate. Thus, the painting’s age can be calculated based on the ratio of the two elements. The minimum age of the Metanduno Cave hand stencil is 1,100 years greater than that of a hand stencil from Maltravieso Cave in…

In southern Mexico’s Oaxaca Valley around A.D. 600, ancestors of today’s Zapotec people dedicated a spectacular tomb to an honored forebear. Archaeologists from Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History recently unearthed the funerary monument outside the town of San Pablo Huitzo, where other Zapotec tombs have previously been found. The tomb’s antechamber features a painted stucco relief depicting the face of a Zapotec lord with a headdress shaped like a massive owl. These birds represent night and death in the Zapotec belief system. On either side of the monument’s threshold are carved figures of a man and a woman, also wearing headdresses. Archaeologists believe the ancient Zapotec might have considered these figures guardians of the tomb. Inside the burial chamber, colorful murals depict a procession of men and women…

At least as early as the ninth century B.C., people traveled to Odysseus’ home island of Ithaca to honor the renowned hero. In a seaside cave on the northwest side of the island, early twentieth-century archaeologists found objects that were likely left as offerings to Odysseus. These included ninth- or eighth-century B.C. bronze cauldrons that recall those given to the hero by the mythical Phaeacian people in the Odyssey and a fragment of a clay mask incised with the words “a vow to Odysseus” left there around 100 B.C. “In the Hellenistic [323–30 B.C.] and Roman periods, there was a general trend toward hero cult, specifically of the Homeric heroes,” says University of Ioannina archaeologist Yannos G. Lolos. He believes these cults reflected the collective memory of sacred places tied…

IT TOOK THE SPANISH AND THEIR Indigenous allies only two years to capture the Mexica, or Aztec, capital of Tenochtitlan, now Mexico City, after entering the city in 1519. The Maya, however, presented a more resolute challenge. This was in part because the Maya had never been ruled by a single centralized state. Dozens of independent Maya kingdoms across southern Mexico and Central America mounted various forms of resistance to the Spaniards. While some declared allegiance to the colonizers without much of a fight, others pledged their loyalty and then broke their alliance. Still others fought fiercely against the colonizers from the outset and sustained their rebellion for decades. By 1550, the Spaniards had subjugated much of the Maya world and established a colonial capital at Mérida in the northern…

IN THE EARLY FALL OF 3909 B.C., residents of an Alpine village that included some 60 homes were busy stocking up for the winter ahead. The settlement was located in a sheltered inlet of Lake Constance, in southwestern Germany, and the homes were perched atop wooden pilings that raised their floors a few feet above the water. Villagers had socked away a bumper crop of wheat, emmer, and einkorn—more than 22,000 pounds of grain in all, plenty to last until springtime. Then disaster struck. A fire quickly spread through the tightly packed wooden houses. The blaze carbonized their contents and burned through their timber floors and wattle-and-daub walls, plunging everything into the cold lake. The village’s resourceful residents sprang into action. Within weeks, they had scoured nearby forests for anything…

As an archaeologist, I strive to undertake research that makes a difference for the present-day communities connected to the histories and material culture I study. I’ve made this a priority in all the projects I have worked with since I first began my career. For more than 20 years, I have collaborated with the Shasta Indian Nation to study a stretch of the rugged Klamath River Canyon in far northern California known as Kíkacéki. In the early twentieth century, construction of a hydroelectric dam flooded this area, dispossessing Indigenous peoples of their lands and inundating centuries of memories. Working with the Shasta Indian Nation, and especially with their cultural preservation officer, Sami Jo Difuntorum, herself a member of the Kíkacéki band of the Shasta, I rely on my training as…

Archaeologists have identified a circular labyrinth in western India’s Maharashtra State measuring 50 feet in diameter with 15 concentric rings. The labyrinth was constructed from a single type of stone found in the area and is the largest such structure to have been discovered in India. Archaeologist Sachin Patil of Deccan College has linked the labyrinth to trade between India and Rome that flourished during the Satavahana Dynasty (ca. late second century B.C.–early third century A.D.). The labyrinth’s design closely resembles patterns found on coins from Crete, evidence of India’s ties to the ancient Mediterranean. Patil believes such labyrinths probably served as landmarks for Roman merchants traveling along the western coast of Maharashtra to the rest of India. The merchants traded gold, wine, and ornamental items from Rome for Indian…

The Homeric Hymns are a set of several dozen ancient Greek poems praising the deities of the Olympian pantheon, such as Apollo and Aphrodite. In antiquity, the works were generally attributed to Homer, though modern scholars believe they date to at least a century after the epics were compiled in the eighth century B.C. Nevertheless, the poems have clear similarities to the Homeric epics, including the same poetic meter and the use of stock phrases. They also provide backstories for the divinities who play key parts in shaping the course of events in the Iliad and the Odyssey. Classicist Jenny Strauss Clay of the University of Virginia observes that, in the epics, the roles of the Greek gods are settled, whereas in the longer narrative hymns, the deities are still…

In the Homeric epics, deities possess the power to influence nature. After Odysseus blinds the Cyclops Polyphemus in the Odyssey, the one-eyed beast’s father, the sea god Poseidon, summons a series of violent storms to impede the Greek hero’s journey home to Ithaca. And, in the Iliad, the god Apollo causes a plague by showering the Greek army with infected arrows as punishment for dishonoring his priest. Yet, argues Johns Hopkins University classicist Maria Gerolemou, the epics are the earliest known works of Greek literature to convey a sense of wonder at the workings of a natural world that operates according to its own forces and logic independent of divine intervention. Along with this sense of wonder, Gerolemou says, a “protoscientific” worldview develops—an attempt to understand these forces and logic…

In a lengthy passage known as the Catalog of Ships in book 2 of the Iliad, Homer lists the towns from which a Greek armada of more than 1,100 warships set sail to fight at Troy under the leadership of the Mycenaean king Agamemnon. Shipwrecks and goods discovered as far from Greece as Egypt are evidence that the Mycenaeans were indeed intrepid seafarers. “The Mycenaeans traveled all over the eastern Mediterranean,” says archaeologist Daniel Pullen of Florida State University. “That means they had to build, maintain, and man ships that could have been used for trade and war. And they had to launch them from somewhere.” Although archaeologists have found harbor sites dating to the Late Bronze Age on Crete, from where some of the vessels listed in the Catalog…

SOME OF THE WORLD’S MOST riveting and surreal art adorns the walls of 150 rock shelters north of the Rio Grande in Val Verde County, Texas. A limestone wall at a site called Panther Cave overlooking the river is painted with a 13-foottall red figure with a U-shaped head and tassels on its body holding an atlatl, or spear thrower, in its right hand. In its other hand, the figure clutches darts connected to what archaeologists call a power bundle. There are hundreds of known depictions in the region of figures wielding atlatls. Two miles north, in Black Cave, four strange, box-like figures seem to be draped with lengths of black, yellow, and red yarn. Halo Shelter, a site some 25 miles to the northeast of Black Cave near Devils…

From practically anywhere in the center of the city of Shumen in eastern Bulgaria, a monument called the Founders of the Bulgarian State is impossible to miss under the glow of the summer afternoon sun. Its 171-foot-tall concrete bulk juts from a plateau above the city, piercing the sky over the Danubian Plain like a ship’s figurehead. Despite the monument’s intimidating contours and the fact that it was installed by the country’s repressive twentieth-century communist regime, it is beloved. Up on the plateau, kids lounge on the monument’s wide steps on a clear Saturday in July. A family from Shumen—they live in London now—has come to gawk at the enormous blocky-headed, heavy-shouldered statues of the titular founders, a collection of medieval Bulgarian khans and tsars. A few breathless visitors…

HAIR STORY I noticed that the people in the granary and bakery-brewery models in “Model ARCHAEOLOGY welcomes mail from readers. Please address your comments to ARCHAEOLOGY, 36-36 33rd Street, Long Island City, NY 11106, fax 718-472-3051, or e-mail letters@archaeology.org. The editors reserve the right to edit submitted material. Volume precludes our acknowledging individual letters. Homes” (March/April 2026) present two hairstyles, some with black hair and some who are bald. Are these styles based on class, ethnicity, job description, or education? The details in these models are amazing. Thank you for the excellent magazine. I truly enjoy how it brings the ancient world into my home. Christine Henderson Grantham, NH Egyptologist Arlette David replies: In the hot Egyptian climate, natural hair was generally kept short, while wigs were popular among those…

In the city of Fano on the coast of Italy’s Marche region, a team led by archaeologist Ilaria Rossetti of the Super intendency of Archaeology, Fine Arts, and Landscape for the Provinces of Ancona and Pesaro and Urbino has discovered the only building known to have been designed by the renowned first-century B.C. Roman architect Vitruvius. In his treatise On Architecture, Vitruvius describes the structure as a basilica measuring 164 by 114 feet, with a colonnade of eight columns on the longer sides and four columns along the shorter sides. Archaeologists unearthed two bases on which statues likely once stood, the lower parts of five of the columns along the colonnade’s long sides, and sections of the basilica’s outer walls, which were covered in plaster that was painted black. They…

GREENLAND: Paleo-Inuit people were accomplished seafarers who routinely braved treacherous seas 4,500 years ago to visit remote High Arctic locations. An archaeological survey identified evidence of seasonal occupation, such as tent rings and hearths, on the Kitsissut Islands, some 30 miles off northwest Greenland. These early sailors had to cross notoriously dangerous open water in skin-covered wood-frame crafts to hunt marine mammals and gather eggs from the islands’ thriving seabird colonies. NEW YORK: Historical research has revealed that a mysterious passageway hidden beneath the second floor of the Merchant’s House Museum was used to shelter formerly enslaved Black refugees seeking freedom, making it Manhattan’s oldest known stop on the Underground Railroad. The house was originally built in 1832 by abolitionist Joseph Brewster, who had workers include the secret chamber in the…

In book 3 of the Odyssey, the hero’s son Telemachus voyages to the kingdom of Pylos in southern mainland Greece to seek the counsel of its wise king Nestor. As his boat approaches the shore, Telemachus beholds a crowd of 4,500 people. He soon learns that the throng is participating in a sacrifice of 81 bulls to the sea god Poseidon. Scholars suggest references to such a ceremony are recorded in 13 of some 1,200 clay tablets unearthed at Pylos that are inscribed with Linear B, a Greek Bronze Age script. Carleton College classicist Jake Morton, working with archaeologists Nicholas Blackwell of Indiana University Bloomington and Kyle Mahoney of Swarthmore College, has concluded that these particular tablets contain an inventory of chairs, altars, knives, and enormous tables used during a…

Everyone in the ancient Greek and Roman world knew about the walls of Troy. In the Iliad, Troy’s towers stand “lofty” and the city is “walled to heaven.” Imaginative souls in thrall to Homer’s stories wanted to see for themselves, and the town of Ilium in western Anatolia, which had become identified with Troy by the seventh century B.C., obliged the fantasy. “The fortification walls associated with the citadel of King Priam were repaired a number of times in antiquity,” says archaeologist C. Brian Rose of the University of Pennsylvania. “That’s the central component of Ilium’s tourism industry. You need those walls to be bright and shining.” Alexander the Great (reigned 336–323 B.C.) was one of Ilium’s most noteworthy tourists. According to ancient historians, he raced with friends around the…

In 1147, a scholar named Meng Yuanlao set down his memories of Dongjing, the fallen capital of China’s Northern Song Dynasty, in his book The Eastern Capital: A Dream of Splendor. Meng had lived in Dongjing, which is now known as Kaifeng, before the city was overrun by Jurchen nomads who invaded China from their Manchurian heartland in the north. Exiled from his boyhood home, Meng composed an elegy for a vanished city. “Decorated chariots vied to park in the Heavenly Avenue, and bejeweled horses competed to spur through the Imperial Street. Gold and kingfisher blue dazzled the eye, silky cloth and silken gauze let float their perfumes,” he writes. “New sounds and sly giggles were found in the willowy lanes and flowered paths, pipes were fingered and strings were…