Vietnamese lore tells us that over two thousand years ago the Red River Valley of northern Vietnam was home to powerful indigenous kingdoms, fortified capitals, and exquisite bronze craftsmanship. In contrast, the neighboring Chinese Han Empire claimed the region was inhabited by unsophisticated “barbarians” in need of “civilizing”, prompting imperial annexation of the region. This lecture explores the region’s archaeological record and what it means for scholarly debates, as well as for Vietnam’s national imagination, cultural heritage, and descendant identities.

One of the largest and most significant sites of rock art in northern Europe is under “catastrophic” threat.

The Vingen carvings, in Vestland county, Norway, are spectacular, and include images of human skeletons and abstract and geometric designs. Even the hammer stones, the tools used by the ancient artists to create their compositions, have survived.

In a remarkable discovery at the ancient Roman city of Pompeii, archaeologists have unearthed a fresco depicting the Greek mythological siblings Phrixus and Helle.

Gabriel Zuchtriegel, the director of Pompeii Archaeological Park, described the find as a poignant reflection of history unfolding once more.

A metal detectorist has discovered a 4,000-year-old copper dagger, likely from an elite warrior, in a forest near the village of Korzenica in southeast Poland.

"The Korzenica dagger is so far the oldest metal dagger discovered [in] south-eastern Poland," said Marcin Burghardt, an archaeologist at the Orsetti Tenement House Museum in Poland who analyzed the dagger. "The only similar dagger in Poland was uncovered in the [1960s] so the new find comes as a great surprise," Burghardt told Live Science.

A team went to examine the spot where the metal detectorist discovered the dagger but found no other artifacts. "When we examined the spot, we found neither additional finds nor traces of archaeological features," Burghardt said. Because of the lack of additional artifacts, "we cannot link the dagger to a specific archaeological culture," Burghardt added.

If we could stand in a landscape that our Mesolithic ancestors called home, what would we see around us? Scientists have devised a method of analyzing preserved hazelnut shells to tell us whether the microhabitats around archaeological sites were heavily forested or open and pasture-like. This could help us understand not only what a local environment looked like thousands of years ago, but how humans have impacted their habitats over time.

"By analyzing the carbon in hazelnuts recovered from archaeological sites in southern Sweden, from Mesolithic hunter-gatherer campsites through to one of the largest and richest Iron Age settlements in northern Europe, we show that hazelnuts were harvested from progressively more open environments," said Dr. Amy Styring of the University of Oxford, lead author of the article in Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology.

Archaeologists in Italy have unearthed a Copper Age necropolis that contains nearly two dozen tombs and a collection of weapons.

The discovery was made in November at San Giorgio Bigarello, a municipality in northern Italy, during the construction of a community garden. However, researchers had no idea how extensive the 5,000-year-old burial site was until excavations earlier this year revealed 22 tombs containing human remains. Many of the burials included flint weapons, including daggers, "perfect arrowheads" and blades, according to a translated article in ArchaeoReporter, an archaeology-focused newspaper based in Italy.

Ah, Jormagundr, we meet again.

In dozens of archaeological discoveries around the world, from the once-successful reservoirs and canals of Angkor Wat in Cambodia to the deserted Viking colonies of Greenland, new evidence paints pictures of civilizations struggling with unforeseen climate changes and the reality that their farming practices had become unsustainable.

Among these discoveries are also success stories, where ancient farming practices helped civilizations survive the hard times.

Zuni farmers in the southwestern United States made it through long stretches of extremely low rainfall between A.D. 1200 and 1400 by embracing small-scale, decentralized irrigation systems. Farmers in Ghana coped with severe droughts from 1450 to 1650 by planting indigenous African grains, like drought-tolerant pearl millet.

Ancient practices like these are gaining new interest today. As countries face unprecedented heat waves, storms and melting glaciers, some farmers and international development organizations are reaching deep into the agricultural archives to revive these ancient solutions.

When French archaeologists first began digging into the baked earth of their new colonial empire in Algeria in the mid-19th century, they fancied that they'd found kindred spirits in the Roman Empire that had come some 2,000 years before them.

The French thought they were engaged in a "civilizing mission" through their colonial subjugation of the region, just as Rome had "Romanized" the indigenous Berber and Punic people by supposedly imposing its imperial culture upon them.

It wasn't until the independence of the countries of north Africa in the 1960s that a different story began to be told. Excavations at Althiburos in north-western Tunisia, for example, showed that a sophisticated infrastructure for agriculture and urbanism existed "as early as the first half of the last millennium BCE," long before the Romans arrived—and that, in fact, the Romans followed pre-existing street plans in many of the cities that pre-dated the Roman conquest.

June 1, 1952, was Whitsunday, and provided the young Michael Ventris with a convenient break from his duties as an architect. At the end of the day he would write his 20th Work Note on Minoan Language Research, with the somewhat disbelieving title, “Are the Knossos and Pylos Tablets Written in Greek?” Responsibility was disclaimed: this was only “a frivolous digression”, that would “sooner or later come to an impasse, or dissipate itself in absurdities.” It became instead one of the great intellectual achievements of the 20th century.

The first Linear B tablets had been discovered at Knossos on the island of Crete. Kephala Hill, as it was then known, was one of the few true ‘tells’ in the Greek world and preserved rich layers of inhabitation dating back to the younger stone age (7,000 BC). The archaeological significance of the site had been clear already in the late 19th century, its first excavator being the fatefully named Minos Kalokairinos. He found great storage jars, pithoi, from which the locals began to call the site Ta Pitaria. These had been placed in hallways of great stone blocks, many carved with curious but distinctive signs.

Before he was bludgeoned to death and left in a Danish bog, an ancient individual now known as Vittrup Man was an emblem of past and future ways of living.

He was born more than 5,000 years ago into a community of Mesolithic hunter-gatherers who probably lived in northern Scandinavia as their ancestors had for millennia. But Vittrup Man spent his adult life across the sea in Denmark among farming communities, whose ancestors came from the Middle East.