Archaeologists in Ukraine have discovered a 1,000-year-old cemetery whose dead were buried with weapons, jewelry and, curiously, buckets around some of their feet.

The 11th-century cemetery is located about 50 miles (80 kilometers) south of Kyiv. Of its 107 graves, "most of the identified burials were deposed in wooden coffins," Vsevolod Ivakin and Vyacheslav Baranov, both archaeologists at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, wrote in a paper they presented at the annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America, which was held Jan. 4-7 in Chicago.

The remnants of a bronze age tomb once thought to have been destroyed and lost to history have been discovered in County Kerry on the Atlantic coast of Ireland.

The tomb, known locally as Altóir na Gréine – the sun altar – stood for approximately 4,000 years on a hill outside the village of Ballyferriter on the Dingle peninsula before vanishing in the mid-19th century.

Georgiana Chatterton, an English aristocrat and traveller, had visited the site and sketched the monument in 1838, but 14 years later an antiquarian named Richard Hitchcock reported that it had been broken up and carried away, presumably for building purposes.

The tomb raiders, it turns out, were not so thorough.

Shiyu provides us with an opportunity to look into the life of the skillful hunters from northern China 45,000 years ago. The people inhabiting the region had a remarkably advanced tool kit, with a range of innovative tools from the Upper Paleolithic, including end-scrapers, awls, and tools of former times, including Middle Paleolithic Levallois points, various tanged tools, denticulates, and borers.

A broken 2,500-year-old silver coin unearthed near Jerusalem is rare evidence that early currency was used in ancient Judea, according to archaeologists.

It's one of only a handful of coins of this age — made in the sixth or fifth century B.C., when Judea was under the control of the Achaemenid Persians — that establish their very early use in the Holy Land.

This coin, however, was deliberately cut in two, probably so each half could be valued for its weight in silver.

A Roman-era necropolis that likely holds the remains of the upper crust has been discovered in central Italy, and it contains nearly 60 graves replete with gold jewelry and the remains of leather footwear, pottery and other precious goods.

The cemetery, found ahead of construction work for a solar energy project in the town of Tuscania, may have been associated with a hotel-like villa that served as a way station for important travelers, such as provincial officials.

"The jewels, but also the glass, pottery, the footwear, the numerous coins, give us an image of people who enjoyed a certain well-being and could afford some small luxuries," Emanuele Giannini of the archaeology firm Eos Arc and the lead archaeologist at the site, told Live Science in an email.

Archaeologists in Greece have unearthed part of one of the largest hydraulic projects from the ancient world: an aqueduct that the Roman emperor Hadrian built to supply water to the city of Corinth.

The remnants of the aqueduct were discovered in October during excavations at the archaeological site of Tenea, an ancient Greek town a few miles south of Corinth, according to a translated statement from the Greek Ministry of Culture and Sports.

Hadrian, who ruled the Roman Empire from A.D. 117 to 138, ordered the aqueduct built to carry water for more than 50 miles (80 kilometers), from Lake Stymphalia in the hills to the west of the city.

Aqueducts were already known in Greece, and Hadrian also had one built to supply water to Athens. But his aqueduct to Corinth is mentioned as a monumental work by ancient writers.

The rediscovered section is just over 100 feet (30 meters) long and runs from north to south alongside a river. It consists of a channel covered by a semicircular roof, both made of stone and mortar.

A roughly 3,000-year-old stone disk covered with enigmatic markings is actually an ancient celestial map marking the brightest stars in the night sky, researchers claim.

The tire-size stone, which was discovered near an ancient hill fort in northeastern Italy a few years ago, features 29 carved markings on its front and back that may represent the brightest stars in the night sky, researchers posit in a new study, published on Nov. 22 in the journal Astronomical Notes.

However, astronomer Ed Krupp, the director of the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, who was not involved in the stone's discovery, told Live Science he thinks any relationship between the carved markings on the stone and the brightest stars may be accidental.

Archaeologists in Greece have discovered a 2,700-year-old temple that houses a horseshoe-shaped altar overflowing with offerings.

Constructed of bricks, the temple is 100 feet (30 meters) long and is located next to the Temple of Amarysia Artemis, a sanctuary dedicated to the Greek goddess Artemis, which researchers found in 2017 on the island of Evia, according to a translated statement from Greece's Ministry of Culture.

During excavations in 2023, archaeologists found the second temple.

Major migration events in Holocene Eurasia have been characterized genetically at broad regional scales. However, insights into the population dynamics in the contact zones are hampered by a lack of ancient genomic data sampled at high spatiotemporal resolution. Here, to address this, we analysed shotgun-sequenced genomes from 100 skeletons spanning 7,300 years of the Mesolithic period, Neolithic period and Early Bronze Age in Denmark and integrated these with proxies for diet (13C and 15N content), mobility (87Sr/86Sr ratio) and vegetation cover (pollen). We observe that Danish Mesolithic individuals of the Maglemose, Kongemose and Ertebølle cultures form a distinct genetic cluster related to other Western European hunter-gatherers. Despite shifts in material culture they displayed genetic homogeneity from around 10,500 to 5,900 calibrated years before present, when Neolithic farmers with Anatolian-derived ancestry arrived. Although the Neolithic transition was delayed by more than a millennium relative to Central Europe, it was very abrupt and resulted in a population turnover with limited genetic contribution from local hunter-gatherers. The succeeding Neolithic population, associated with the Funnel Beaker culture, persisted for only about 1,000 years before immigrants with eastern Steppe-derived ancestry arrived. This second and equally rapid population replacement gave rise to the Single Grave culture with an ancestry profile more similar to present-day Danes. In our multiproxy dataset, these major demographic events are manifested as parallel shifts in genotype, phenotype, diet and land use.

Lasers have revealed a complex network of pre-Hispanic structures and roadways hidden beneath the canopy of the Amazon. At 2,500 years old, it's the earliest (and largest) example of an agricultural civilization ever recorded in South America's dense rainforest.

Archaeologists have been studying the Upano Valley site, located along a stretch of the eastern Andes, for several decades. However, it wasn't until they began viewing the Ecuadorian landscape using airborne lidar (light detection and ranging) — in which thousands of infrared laser pulses are reflected repeatedly off the landscape to reveal structures hidden beneath the vegetation — that they realized how elaborate the civilization actually was, according to a study published Thursday (Jan. 11) in the journal Science.

A special find has been made in the Alkmaar Regional Archive: A number of 17th-century book bindings contained pieces of parchment from a manuscript from the 11th century. The original manuscript may have belonged to a princess who fled England after the Norman Conquest.

Many books were printed and bound in the 16th and 17th centuries. Bookbinders used parchment to strengthen their book bindings; that material was expensive and therefore people often chose to cut up old, medieval manuscripts. This often involved manuscripts that had lost their value: books that were too Catholic or were written in a language that could no longer be read.

Something very special was found in a number of book bindings in the Alkmaar Regional Archive: 21 fragments of a manuscript from the 11th century, an almost 1,000-year-old Latin psalter with Old English glosses. Thijs Porck, senior university lecturer of medieval English in Leiden, was involved in the find and analyzed the text and provenance of the fragments.

Archaeologists in Egypt have discovered two mummies outfitted with golden tongues at the ancient town of Oxyrhynchus, bringing the total number of golden tongues found at the location to 16, archaeologists say.

During the Roman period (29 B.C. to A.D. 641), the Egyptians put golden tongues inside the mouths of some mummies so that the mummy would be able to use their tongue in the afterlife and because the ancient Egyptians believed that gold was the "flesh of the gods," Esther Pons Mellado and Maite Mascort, co-directors of the archaeological mission of Oxyrhynchus, told Live Science in an email. Mummies with gold tongues were thought to have the ability to speak with Osiris in the underworld of the afterlife.

Researchers at the Francis Crick Institute, working with University of Oxford, University of York and Oxford Archaeology, have developed a new technique to measure the number of chromosomes in ancient genomes more precisely, using it to identify the first prehistoric person with mosaic Turner syndrome (characterized by one X chromosome instead of two [XX]), who lived about 2,500 years ago.

As part of their research published in Communications Biology, they also identified the earliest known person with Jacob's syndrome (characterized by an extra Y chromosome—XYY) in the Early Medieval Period, three people with Klinefelter syndrome (characterized by an extra X chromosome—XXY) across a range of time periods, and an infant with Down Syndrome from the Iron Age.

The centrality of archaeology in articulating and espousing the politics of nation states as also erstwhile empires is today undeniable. The history of archaeological research and practice is replete with cases where material culture has been used to produce origin myths, shared imaginaries of communities simultaneous with consolidating an image of the ‘other’...

... it was important to weave together a narrative of the nation and its people using archaeological objects and combining “scientific truths” about these objects with elements of fiction ...

The creation of the two new nation states of India and Pakistan in the immediate aftermath of the Partition of 1947 provided an immediate impetus to these concerns of narrativization. The irony of the situation was of course the fact that both the nation states were creations of the politics of 1947, with their newly drawn geographical boundaries. Yet, there were interesting ways in which this irony was worked around. Even more interesting were the ways in which archaeology came to be employed in such constructions ...