Tag: archaeology

Unearthing Namibia’s forgotten genocide through forensic archaeology

The Namibian genocide was one of the first genocides of the 20th century. Between 1904 and 1908, tens of thousands of Ovaherero and Nama people were killed under German colonial rule.

Despite the scale of these events, the material and human legacy of this genocide remains less understood than later atrocities. Historical accounts exist, but are often incomplete or shaped by the perspectives and priorities of the colonial period in which they were produced.

The landscapes of Namibia that testify to this violence still survive, but are under increasing pressure from urban expansion, infrastructure development and environmental change. Archaeological research is playing a key role in documenting and protecting this heritage.

The Centre of Archaeology at the University of Huddersfield has, in conjunction with community representatives, the research groups Forensic Architecture and Forensis and the Swakopmund Genocide Museum, conducted fieldwork in Namibia across two seasons (2023 and 2025). Our work has focused on sites linked to German colonial concentration camps in Swakopmund and Lüderitz.

Using forensic methods, our project seeks to locate, document and protect burial sites associated with the genocide. We aim to demonstrate how archaeology can confirm historical events, provide physical evidence, support commemoration and strengthen claims for reparations.

The research combines archival study with field methods including: GIS mapping (computer-based spatial mapping and analysis of archaeological data), walkover survey (systematic on-the-ground inspection of visible archaeological features), Ground Penetrating Radar (a geophysical technique that uses radar waves to detect buried structures without excavation), GPS survey, drone imagery and targeted excavation.

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Stone Age humans built complex grass beds at Border Cave 200,000 years ago, study finds

Border Cave sits high in the Lebombo Mountains along the border of present-day South Africa and Eswatini. Archaeologists have excavated the rock shelter since the 1930s, though recent work has revealed unusual preservation of organic materials, including ancient grass bedding. Researchers from the University of the Witwatersrand examined the deposits at a microscopic level and identified six different bedding microfacies, or microscopic sediment patterns linked to different types of bed construction and maintenance.

Only a few African Stone Age sites have produced bedding remains studied in such detail. Earlier microscopic work at Sibhudu Cave and Diepkloof Rock Shelter provided much of the current understanding of ancient bedding practices. The new study greatly expands the sample from Border Cave and shows a wider range of preserved bedding structures than previously known.

Some of the newly identified microfacies closely resemble bedding types from the other South African sites. Others appear unique to Border Cave. The differences include variations in ash content, the arrangement of plant remains, and signs of trampling or burning. Researchers suggest these patterns reflect differences in how people maintained their living spaces or the types of plants selected for bedding.

The study found repeated evidence that people often built beds on layers of ash. In many cases, bedding materials rested directly above ash deposits or mixed with ash-rich sediments. Researchers believe ash may have helped keep sleeping areas dry and warm while also discouraging insects. Earlier studies at Border Cave proposed a similar function.

The evidence does not always show whether people intentionally spread fresh ash before laying down bedding or reused ash already present on the cave floor. Some ash deposits appear thick and concentrated, while others form thinner scattered layers. Still, the repeated association between ash and bedding suggests this practice formed a regular part of cave life for thousands of years.

Microscopic analysis also revealed signs of repeated maintenance. Some bedding layers had been refreshed with new plant material, trampled by human activity, and partially burned several times. One especially well-preserved “grass mat” from younger deposits contained several overlapping layers of dried and charred plant remains. Researchers describe this as the first detailed microscopic study of such a preserved Stone Age grass mat.

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14,500-Year-Old Evidence of Human Presence in South America? Experts Fire Back at Controversial Study Challenging Age of Chile’s Monte Verde Site

Experts have responded sharply to a controversial study published earlier this year that sought to challenge the dating of archaeological features at Chile’s famous Monte Verde site.

Excavations that began at Monte Verde decades ago, led by archaeologist Tom Dillehay, established evidence of a human presence at the site as early as 14,500 years ago. The discovery was significant, as it marked the first unequivocal evidence of human presence in the Americas that predates the cultural manifestation known as Clovis, which had long been assumed to be the earliest human presence in the New World.

Those findings, supported by ongoing investigations Dillehay and his colleagues have conducted over the last several decades at Monte Verde, were challenged in March in a study led by archaeologist Todd Surovell, Ph.D., who, along with his colleagues, argued that a fresh analysis of features located near the Monte Verde site suggested it could be younger than previous estimates by as much as several thousand years.

Now Dillehay, who is currently the Rebecca Webb Wilson University Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, Religion, and Culture at Vanderbilt University, and more than two dozen other experts in the archaeology of the early Americas have responded in a series of eLetters published in Science, which argue that Surovell and his colleagues’ findings are not strongly supported by existing evidence.

Pre-Clovis in Southern Chile

Following its discovery in 1976 and Dillehay’s subsequent excavations, Monte Verde has long been considered a cornerstone of early American archaeology. With its array of well-preserved artifacts that include stone tools, as well as wooden structures, botanical remains, and even a human footprint, radiocarbon dating has periodically been undertaken at the site, which consistently places its occupation at an estimated 14,500 years ago.

At the time these discoveries were made, Monte Verde became one of the earliest securely dated human settlements in the Americas. Not only that, it became one of the first major challenges to the then-dominant “Clovis First” paradigm, which insisted that evidence showed the earliest arrivals in North America occurred no earlier than around 13,000 years ago.

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Ancient Settlement Older Than The Pyramids Discovered; Rewrites North American History

An ancient Indigenous settlement unearthed near Sturgeon Lake in Saskatchewan is challenging long-held views about early human presence in North America.

Dating to around 11,000 years ago and predating Egypt’s Great Pyramid by more than 6,000 years, according to the official timeline, the site provides evidence of long-term habitation rather than temporary camps.

Archaeologists working with Sturgeon Lake First Nation uncovered stone tools, fire pits, toolmaking materials, and remains of the extinct Bison antiquus. Charcoal layers point to controlled fire management, aligning with oral traditions. The findings suggest a sophisticated society with advanced hunting strategies, including buffalo jumps.

The site, known as Âsowanânihk (“a place to cross” in Cree), lies about five kilometres north of Prince Albert along the North Saskatchewan River. It was first spotted by avocational archaeologist Dave Rondeau through riverbank erosion exposing artifacts.

Rondeau said: “The moment I saw the layers of history peeking through the soil, I felt the weight of generations staring back at me. Now that the evidence has proven my first instincts, this site is shaking up everything we thought we knew and could change the narrative of early Indigenous civilizations in North America.”

Dr. Glenn Stuart of the University of Saskatchewan added: “This discovery challenges the outdated idea that early Indigenous peoples were solely nomadic. The evidence of long-term settlement and land stewardship suggests a deep-rooted presence. It also raises questions about the Bering Strait Theory, supporting oral histories that Indigenous communities have lived here for countless generations.”

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The Archaeology of Marijuana

In June, monthly sales for recreational and medical marijuana in my hometown of Colorado reached a record high of $199 million .

The industry’s growth took eight years. In 2012, with the passage of the 64th Amendment, Colorado, along with Washington, became one of the first states in the U.S. where consenting adults could legally purchase and consume marijuana for recreational purposes.

Since then, Colorado’s tourism landscape has changed dramatically. Legalization of recreational marijuana has fueled six of the eight consecutive years of record growth in the tourism industry. In June 2019, the Colorado Department of Revenue announced that total marijuana-related revenue had reached $1 billion since sales began in 2014. This funding has generated hundreds of millions of dollars in new tax revenue for the state, which can be used for education, transportation, environmental protection, and other initiatives.

However, despite the clear economic benefits, many in the United States oppose marijuana legalization. Some of my friends dislike the smell of marijuana. Others are concerned about marijuana use among teenagers, the potential effects of secondhand smoke on children, or people driving under the influence.

I haven’t smoked cigarettes in years, and I’ve never tried edible marijuana. However, I’m very pleased that America is starting to move away from its long road of unnecessarily criminalizing mild recreational drugs.

I voted in favor of Amendment 64 because I oppose the double standards regarding alcohol in the United States. Studies show that alcohol is far more dangerous than marijuana. I also voted in favor because I oppose the systemic racism in the justice system that unfairly punishes people of color for drug-related crimes .

My perspective as an archaeologist is relevant to this matter. I pay close attention to what humanity has done in the past, and from the long-term perspective of human history, I know that not everything in the present is “normal.” The modern fear of marijuana is one of the concerns that seems particularly strange, because researchers estimate that humans have been using cannabis for at least 10,000 years.

What do scholars say about the long history of human use of cannabis? How did cannabis transform from a plant highly valued in many parts of the world to a notorious drug? 

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What a piece of 15,0000-year-old jewellery found in a Devon cave tells us about this prehistoric ‘civilization’

A piece of prehistoric jewellery, discovered in a West Country cave, is helping to shed new light on Stone Age Europe’s most spectacular culture.

Known as the Magdalenian, that 21,000 to 13,000 year old prehistoric ‘civilization’ dominated much of Western Europe, particularly southwest France, northern Spain and parts of Britain and Germany for most of the final 10,000 years of the Ice Age. A detailed scientific analysis of the British Magdalenian jewellery item, carried out at University College London and the Natural History Museum, has now revealed that it was a polished pendant made from a seal’s tooth.

It’s the first such artefact identified in Britain – and only the fourth anywhere in Europe.

The discovery adds to the substantial evidence showing that Stone Age Magdalenians were extremely fashion-conscious – and that they had a particularly strong preference for maritime-originating jewellery.

For, as well as the four seal-tooth pendants, many sites across Europe, often located far from the sea, have yielded literally thousands of marine shells, virtually all of which would have been used as personal adornments (as pendants, like the seal tooth – but also to beautify clothing and for use in necklaces, bracelets, anklets and headwear).

The scientific investigation into the British artifact (found in Kent’s Cavern, Torquay, Devon) has identified it as a premolar tooth of a grey seal, that had been polished and perforated by a Magdalenian artisan, using a handheld flint boring tool. Microscopic analysis of the wear pattern in the hole has revealed that the tooth had been worn as a pendant, suspended on some sort of cord. The wear, caused by the cord, was so substantial that the pendant appears to have been worn for many years or even decades.

Indeed, it’s conceivable that it may have been a valued heirloom, worn successively by several generations of the same family. Its value and significance to the Kent’s Cavern Magdalenian community – probably an extended family living there seasonally for many generations – is underlined by the fact that the seal tooth would have had to have initially been imported from the seashore which in Magdalenian times was between 50 and 100 miles away.

However, there would have been a direct river connection between the Kent’s Cavern area and the sea – along the river Teign’s prehistoric lower course (now submerged under the English Channel) and then along a now long-vanished major prehistoric waterway, dubbed the Channel River by archaeologists, to the Atlantic. In Magdalenian times, the Thames, the Rhine and the Seine were merely that Channel River’s major tributaries.

Even when living hundreds of miles from the sea, Magdalenian people had a strong cultural connection to it.

Via the Channel River and its many tributaries, they had an easy and direct connection to the Atlantic. They used large numbers of periwinkle, European cowrie and so-called ‘tusk’ shells as well as fossilised molluscs, sea urchin spines and sharks’ teeth to make jewellery and other adornments.

Like ordinary Atlantic seashells, these fossils must have been highly valued because they were often imported from hundreds of miles away. Shells were also imported to inland Magdalenian sites in France, Spain, Germany and Czechia from the Mediterranean. Some had travelled up to 600 miles.

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Early humans in South Africa were quarrying stone as far back as 220,000 years ago

As long as 220,000 years ago—far earlier than previously thought—people quarried rocks for their tools in places they specifically sought out. An international research team led by the University of Tübingen has demonstrated this behavior at the Jojosi site in South Africa, challenging the prevailing view that Paleolithic hunter–gatherers collected their raw materials incidentally during other activities. The study is published in the journal Nature Communications.

Evidence of deliberate rock quarrying

“At Jojosi, we found numerous traces of the quarrying of hornfels—a metamorphic shale—including blocks that were tested for their quality, flakes of various sizes, thousands of millimeter-sized pieces of production waste and hammerstones,” says Dr. Manuel Will from the Department of Early Prehistory and Quaternary Ecology at the University of Tübingen. Hornfels is a fine-grained rock that was frequently used to produce tools in the Stone Age. “People worked cobbles on site here and knapped the material until they had achieved the desired shape from the rock—probably to make tools from it later.”

The researchers almost exclusively found “production waste” here. The absence of both the end products and other traces of activity and settlement indicate that the people of Stone Age Jojosi were solely and deliberately seeking to extract the coveted raw material. Remarkably, they were doing this for tens of thousands of years, at least until 110,000 BCE, as can be seen from the luminescence dating of the finds. Given its great age and long period of use, Jojosi adds new facets to the image of early Homo sapiens, indicating that they planned the long-term acquisition of resources much earlier than previously thought.

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Archaeologists Are Mystified by These 2,000-Year-Old Bodies Found Seated Upright and Facing West in France

In 2024, archaeologists in France discovered an unusual grave site that contained 13 sets of human remains. All of the individuals appeared to have been buried sitting upright and facing west—a highly unusual and puzzling position.

Now, the researchers say they’ve identified at least five additional seated burials in a previously unexplored area of the same site. The latest discoveries raise more questions about the culture these individuals belonged to more than 2,000 years ago.

According to a March 18 statement from the French National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research (INRAP), the team unearthed the skeletons while conducting excavations during ongoing renovations of the Josephine Baker primary school complex in Dijon, located in France’s east-central Burgundy region.

Just like the remains found in 2024, the newly discovered individuals were interred upright in a seated position, with their faces turned west and their hands resting in their laps. At least three appear to have been buried in a line parallel to the initially identified graves, about 66 feet away.

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Bronze Age Artifact Made from ‘Space Metal’ Unearthed at a Sacrificial Site is Confirmed as the Oldest of Its Kind

A curious Bronze Age artifact unearthed at a ceremonial site in southwestern China has now been identified as the earliest known and the largest of its kind, according to newly published research.

Crafted from meteoritic iron, the rare discovery, described as resembling an “axe-like” instrument, was found at the Sanxingdui site in China’s Sichuan Province, one of the country’s most famous archaeological areas. The confirmation of the artifact’s age offers unique new perspectives on metallurgical practices that occurred early in Bronze Age China.

Discovery at Sanxingdui

Sanxingdui, which archaeologists believe was active from 2800 to 600 BCE, is renowned for the early evidence of industrial practices they have uncovered there, as well as its ancient sacrificial pits and other ceremonial features.

A range of items crafted from bronze have been recovered as well, and in the case of the meteoritic iron blade, analysis has shown that the object was crafted in a period that predates the use of iron smelting in this part of the world.

A key indication of the extraterrestrial origin of the metal used to craft the artifact is its high concentrations of nickel and iron, which appear to rule out the use of early smelting techniques.

While this strongly supports that the object was crafted from meteoritic iron, Dr. Zishu Yang, the co-author of a recent study detailing the discovery, recently said in a statement that current analysis is “insufficient to definitively classify the specific type of meteorite,” and that the exact variety of meteorite the material was sourced from remains unknown.

Going forward, additional analysis that Yang and his colleagues plan to undertake may help reveal further clues, including possible correlations between the unique artifact, its discovery location, and ancient Chinese historical records that may document meteorite impacts from which the iron could have been sourced.

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Archaeologists achieve a historic milestone by dating French cave paintings with carbon-14 for the first time

A team led by a researcher from the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) has achieved a milestone in prehistoric archaeology by confirming through absolute dating the age of several parietal representations from the Font-de-Gaume cave, located in Dordogne, France.

The results, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), represent the first time precise dates have been obtained for Paleolithic rock art in this region using the carbon-14 technique, something that until now had been considered unfeasible due to the chemical composition traditionally attributed to the pigments.

Until this study, there had been a widespread technical impossibility in reliably dating the cave paintings of the region, including the famous ones from Lascaux. The main reason lay in the assumption that the black lines had been made exclusively using iron and manganese oxides, mineral compounds that do not contain carbon and therefore cannot be dated through radiocarbon methods.

However, the research team found that no systematic empirical verification had ever been carried out to confirm the complete absence of carbon-based materials in those paintings. To resolve this uncertainty, the scientists decided to apply a non-invasive analysis protocol to two specific black motifs from the Font-de-Gaume cave: the figure of a bison and a design interpreted as a possible anthropomorph or mask.

The methodology used combined two advanced chemical characterization techniques. On the one hand, the researchers employed Raman microspectrometry, a technique that allows the identification of the molecular composition of materials through the interaction of light with the chemical bonds of the sample. On the other hand, hyperspectral imaging was used, a technology that measures the reflectance of light at every point on the analyzed surface and makes it possible to deduce the chemical composition of the coloring compounds present.

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