https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/jqs.3586

Tucked away in rock shelters in the secluded northern mountains of Luzon in the Philippines, the Kabayan "fire" mummies lie at rest.

These mummies are what's left of a tradition that was carried out for hundreds of years up until the 19th century.

Known popularly as "meking" or the "fire mummies," these sacred remains are the preserved ancestors of the Ibaloi, one of the distinct ethnolinguistic groups of the mountainous Cordillera Benguet region.

Some of the history of the mummies has been lost over time, but what we do know is that this process of mummification dates back as early as 200 BC and involved drying and dehydrating human remains using heat and smoke from a fire—giving us the term "fire mummy."

Inscription on knife discovered by archaeologist in grave on island of Funen spells hirila, which means ‘little sword’

An engraving on an almost 2,000-year-old knife believed to be the oldest runes ever found in Denmark has been discovered by archaeologists.

The runic inscription – the alphabet of Denmark’s earliest written language – was etched into an 8cm iron knife found in a grave below an urn near the city of Odense on the island of Funen. The five characters, each about 0.5cm tall, followed by three grooves, spell out hirila, which means “little sword” in Old Norse.

In the autumn of 2021, an 800-page report crossed the desk of Washington state lands archaeologist Sara Palmer. It came from an energy developer called Avangrid Renewables, which was proposing to build a solar facility partly on a parcel of public land managed by the state. Palmer was in charge of reviewing reports like these, which are based on land surveys intended to identify archaeologically and culturally significant resources.

Developers have proposed dozens of similar solar and wind projects across the state — a “green rush” of sorts amid rising fears of climate change. With the projects came more reports.

Often, Palmer, who worked for the Washington State Department of Natural Resources, read the reports and signed off; sometimes she shared notes on any concerns or told the developer to have the archaeologists they’d contracted with do additional fieldwork. This time, as she looked at the report, she grew concerned. The consulting company that Avangrid had hired, Tetra Tech, had included a lot of boilerplate language about human history on the Columbia Plateau, but fewer details than Palmer expected about what was actually found on the land.

Palmer knew that the parcel, located on a ridge called Badger Mountain, near the confluence of the Wenatchee and Columbia rivers, was historically a high-traffic corridor for the škwáxčənəxʷ and šnp̍əšqʷáw̉šəxʷ peoples (also known as the Moses Columbia and Wenatchi tribes). The area would likely be rich in cultural resources, including historic stone structures and first foods, the ingredients that make up traditional Indigenous diets.

Palmer was used to helping developers improve their technical reports to meet state standards. So, as soon as the snow melted, she drove out to Badger Mountain to look at the land herself.

As she walked the sagebrush overlook, Palmer quickly found signs of current-day Indigenous ceremonial activity, as well as ancient sites such as stone structures that can look like natural formations to the untrained eye but serve a variety of functions, including hunting and storage.

Most of the proposed development is on private lands, which Palmer lacked the authority to access. But in about 20 hours of fieldwork on the state-owned parcel, over the course of several days, Palmer said she found at least 17 sites of probable archaeological or cultural importance not listed in Tetra Tech’s survey. She would find more on subsequent visits.

Over the next year, Palmer’s findings — and how she shared them — would pit her against corporate and political forces that seemed determined to push the project through.

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.