A sculpture known as the Hell Mouth is one of several dozen fantastical creations dating to the sixteenth century that line the paths of a park called the Sacro Bosco, or Sacred Wood, near the central ...

Two swords once carried by samurai have been found during excavations in Ichijodani, one of medieval Japan’s largest cities. On the outskirts of Fukui, a city of a quarter of a million people in ...

Excavations at the village of Fleury-sur-Orne in France’s Normandy region revealed a necropolis of 32 burial mounds dating to the Middle Neolithic period (ca. 4700 –4300 b.c.). The traces of ditches ...

How gladiators in ancient Anatolia lived to entertain the masses The sun illuminated the stadium in Ephesus, a wealthy harbor city in western Anatolia, on a day of eagerly anticipated gladiatorial ...

Archaeologists return to Nineveh in northern Iraq, one of the ancient world’s grandest imperial capitals Archaeologists didn’t know what to expect when they began searching for a 2,700-year-old ...

After a century of searching, a chance discovery led archaeologists to one of the most important sanctuaries in the ancient Greek world Archaeologists first explored Eretria in the late nineteenth ...

These ruins of the city of Babylon in Iraq date to the Neo-Babylonian Empire (626–539 B.C.). A 22-inch-high basalt stela depicting Babylon’s king Nabonidus (r. 556–539 B.C.) shows him wearing a ...

An aerial view of Peru’s Moche Valley shows Chan Chan, a massive city constructed beginning in the early eleventh century A.D. by the rulers of the Kingdom of Chimor, leaders of a people known as the ...

An archaeologist shows a group of visitors around excavations at the heart of Benin City in Nigeria, in an area that was once part of the royal palace of the Benin Kingdom. When visitors arrive at ...

At the base of a pyramid-shaped peak in the ancient Egyptian city of Abydos lies the tomb of an unknown pharaoh. After decades of ex- cavations at the site, and con-sidering the Egyptians’ usually ...

Archaeologist Marta Perea excavates a deposit near the top of a temple at the site of Ucanal in northern Guatemala. The deposit included the remains of four members of Maya royalty, 1,500 fragments of ...

In 1976, paleoanthropologist Mary Leakey discovered the oldest known hominin footprints. The footprints, in Laetoli, Tanzania, have been dated to around 3.66 million years ago and are thought to have ...