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 ...

The North Arabian Desert oases were inhabited by sedentary populations in the 4th and 3rd millennia BCE. A fortification enclosing the Khaybar Oasis—one of the longest known going back to this period—has just been revealed by a team of scientists from the CNRS and the Royal Commission for AlUla (RCU).

A study describing this work is published in Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.

This new walled oasis is, along with that of Tayma, one of the two largest in Saudi Arabia. While a number of walled oases dating back to the Bronze Age had already been documented, this major discovery sheds new light on human occupation in northwestern Arabia, and provides a better grasp of local social complexity during the pre-Islamic period.

The spectacular explosion of the mine at Hawthorn Ridge—a fortified German front-line position in the First World War—marked the beginning of the Battle of the Somme, and remains one of the best-known pieces of film from the whole conflict.

More than 60ft below the surface, British miners had dug a gallery for more than 900 meters from their lines and packed it with 40,000 lbs of explosives. It was one of 19 mines placed beneath German front positions that were detonated on July 1, 1916, to mark the start of the offensive.

But the detonation of the mine at Hawthorn Ridge, famously captured by film director Geoffrey Malins, took place 10 minutes before the whistles blew at 7:30am. The early detonation, later described as a "colossal blunder," alerted the Germans the infantry attack was imminent and gave them enough time to take up defensive positions in the newly-formed crater, leading to heavy losses among the attacking British troops.

Now, findings from the first-ever multi-disciplinary scientific investigation of the 107-year-old crater have been published in the Journal of Conflict Archaeology. The team of researchers, scientists and historians, led by Keele University, used a range of cutting–edge technology, including drones with imaging cameras, to examine the area like never before.

The puzzling depiction of a vicious predator — either a dragon or a snake — devouring a frog on an early medieval belt buckle from the Czech Republic may be a symbol from an unknown pagan cult, archaeologists say.

The bronze belt fitting or buckle was found by a metal detectorist near the village of Lány, about 20 miles (32 kilometers) west of Prague.

Archaeologists first thought the central design — a snake or dragon devouring a frog-like creature — must be unique. But they have since learned that in the past dozen years, almost identical artifacts have been unearthed in Germany, Hungary and elsewhere in the Czech Republic.

The abandoned fieldstone walls of New England are every bit as iconic to the region as lobster pots, town greens, sap buckets and fall foliage. They seem to be everywhere—a latticework of dry, lichen-crusted stone ridges separating a patchwork of otherwise moist soils.

Stone walls can be found here and there in other states, but only in New England are they nearly ubiquitous. That's due to a regionally unique combination of hard crystalline bedrock, glacial soils and farms with patchworks of small land parcels.

Nearly all were built by European settlers and their draft animals, who scuttled glacial stones from agricultural fields and pastures outward to fence lines and boundaries, then tossed or stacked them as lines. Though the oldest walls date to 1607, most were built in the agrarian century between the American Revolution and the cultural shift toward cities and industry after the Civil War.

The mass of stone that farmers moved in that century staggers the mind—an estimated 240,000 miles (400,000 kilometers) of barricades, most stacked thigh-high and similarly wide. That's long enough to wrap our planet 10 times at the equator, or to reach the moon on its closest approach to Earth.

Natural scientists have been working to quantify this phenomenon, which is larger in volume than the Great Wall of China, Hadrian's Wall in Britain and the Egyptian pyramids at Giza combined. This work began in 1870 and generated the U.S. government's 1872 Census of Fences. Today, scientists are using a technique called LiDAR, or light detection and ranging, to measure and map stone walls across New England.

Archaeologists in Kazakhstan have discovered two gold ornaments in a 1,500-year-old tomb that feature the earliest known depictions of the great khan, or "khagan," of the Göktürks — a nomadic confederation of Turkic-speaking peoples who occupied the region for around three centuries, according to an archaeologist who excavated the site.

The lavish gold plaques portray "the crowned sovereign, majestically sitting on a throne in a saintly pose and surrounded by servants," Zainolla Samashev, an archaeologist at Kazakhstan's Institute of Archaeology who led the excavation, told Live Science in an email. "This clearly depicts the sacred nature of power in ancient Turkic society."

The finds are from the Eleke Sazy site near Kazakhstan's remote eastern borders with China, Mongolia and Russian Siberia, where Samashev and his colleagues have worked since 2016.

Men and women might have had their fingers deliberately chopped off during religious rituals in prehistoric times, according to a new interpretation of palaeolithic cave art.

In a paper presented at a recent meeting of the European Society for Human Evolution, researchers point to 25,000-year-old paintings in France and Spain that depict silhouettes of hands. On more than 200 of these prints, the hands lack at least one digit. In some cases, only a single upper segment is missing; in others, several fingers are gone.

In the past, this absence of digits was attributed to artistic licence by the cave-painting creators or to ancient people’s real-life medical problems, including frostbite.

But scientists led by archaeologist Prof Mark Collard of Simon Fraser University in Vancouver say the truth may be far more gruesome. “There is compelling evidence that these people may have had their fingers amputated deliberately in rituals intended to elicit help from supernatural entities,” said Collard.

A multi-institutional team of anthropologists has discovered that two pieces of ancient Scythian leather excavated at sites in Ukraine were made from human skin. In their project, reported on the open-access site PLOS ONE, the group tested an account by the Greek historian Herodotus regarding certain behaviors of ancient Scythian warriors.

Prior research has found that an ancient group of people known as the Scythians lived in what is now the Pontic-Caspian steppe from approximately 700 BCE to 300 BCE. Because they were itinerant people, not much is known about them beyond their reputation as fierce warriors and excellent equestrians.

They were known to the ancient Greeks, though—famed historian Herodotus mentioned them in his writings. He said they were known to drink the blood of their slain enemies and sometimes used their scalps as a means for wiping the blood from their hands. He suggested that there had also been reports of them removing the skin from the right hand of an enemy and using it to make leather for their quivers. In this new effort, the research team looked for evidence of this last claim.

In a groundbreaking archaeological discovery, an international team led by archaeologists from Freie Universität Berlin has uncovered fortified prehistoric settlements in a remote region of Siberia. The results of their research reveal that hunter–gatherers in Siberia constructed complex defense structures around their settlements 8,000 years ago.

This finding reshapes our understanding of early human societies, challenging the idea that only with the advent of agriculture would people have started to build permanent settlements with monumental architecture and developed complex social structures.