VERNON PARISH, La.—Long buried under the woods of west central Louisiana, stone tools, spearpoints, and other evidence of people living in the area as long as 12,000 years ago have become more exposed and vulnerable, due to hurricanes, flooding, and looters. This summer, archaeologists have been gingerly digging up the ground at the Vernon Parish…

ANCASH, Peru—Archaeologists working in Peru have uncovered a 3,000-year-old sealed corridor dubbed “the condor’s passageway” that likely leads to other chambers inside what was once a massive temple complex pertaining to the ancient Chavin culture. Located around 190 miles (306 km) northeast of Lima, the Chavin de Huantar archeological site is among the culture’s most…

NICOSIA, Cyprus—New discoveries including gold ornaments and fine pottery at an ancient port city in Cyprus dating back more than 3,000 years indicate that the settlement was one of the Mediterranean’s most important trading posts in the late Bronze Age, an archeologist said Tuesday. Professor Peter M. Fischer from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, said…

MADRID—A group of Spanish archaeologists have made detailed diagrams of a 2,500-year-old Phoenician shipwreck to help work out how best to recover it from the sea before a storm destroys it forever. The eight-meter-long Mazarron II, named after the municipality in the southeastern Spanish region of Murcia where it was found off the coast, is…

ROME—A fresco that depicts what might be an ancestor of the Italian pizza has been found on the wall of an house in the ancient Roman city of Pompeii, Italy’s Culture Ministry said on Tuesday. Archaeologists presume that the flat bread depicted in the painting, next to a wine goblet, may have been eaten with…

BERLIN—A bronze sword made more than 3,000 years ago that is so well-preserved it “almost still shines” has been unearthed in Germany, officials say. Bavaria’s state office for the preservation of historical monuments says the sword, which is believed to date back to the end of the 14th century B.C.—the middle of the Bronze Age—was…

Tiny bones from 12,000-year-old prehistoric birds found in northern Israel have been identified as flutes, researchers say. The seven miniature flutes, made of waterfowl bones, emit sounds like the calls of predatory birds, and the researchers suggest they might have been used for making music, hunting, or some form of communication with the birds. The paper…

Archaeologists have found the remains of a church in a sunken medieval city in Germany, and in the process, mapped out the lost city of Rungholt for the first time—a place said to be destroyed through divine intervention because of the moral depravity of its population. Known as the “Atlantis of the North,” Rungholt, located…

Over the Memorial Day weekend, a woman was taking a stroll at Rio Del Mar State Beach in Northern California when she found a mysterious object in the sand that turned out to be a tooth from an ancient mastodon.  The foot-long tooth belonged to an adult member of the extinct Ice Age species. This…

A team of researchers have found new evidence suggesting that an extinct hominin species buried their dead and made symbols as part of meaning-making behaviors, actions which were until now thought to be exclusive to larger-brained hominins like Homo sapiens. The hominin is a member of the zoological tribe hominini. Only a single species of…