When Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales in the late fourteenth century, he set one of his stories in “Sarai, in the land of the Tartars.” At that time, Sarai was widely known as the capital of the mighty Golden Horde. An independent state within the

The partial skeleton of a female gyrfalcon has been discovered near the top of a well in the citadel of Karabalgasun, the capital of the Uighur Empire (a.d. 745–840), in central Mongolia’s Orkhon Valley. Karabalgasun was destroyed and abandoned in A.

The image of a medieval knight moving slowly and stiffly under the tremendous weight of his costly armor as he readies for battle or a joust is firmly fixed in people’s imagination. But, according to art historian Matthias Goll, much of this vision i

Many of the buildings along Pompeii’s streets are covered with painted messages extolling the virtues of candidates running for office nearly 2,000 years ago. “These graffiti played a similar role to our electoral posters, to get consensus and suppor

A small, intricately carved, 4,000-year-old stone vial recovered in the southeastern Iranian city of Jiroft contains a deep red pigment that archaeologists believe may be the earliest known lipstick. The cylindrical object was one of thousands of art

Iraq The Akkadian Empire (ca. 2340–2198 B.C.) represented something entirely new in human history: a dynasty that conquered and ruled over a vast territory, incorporating people of different ethnicities who were forced to adopt its ways. At its heigh

Archaeologists in the Heddernheim section of the German city of Frankfurt have excavated and conserved an intact wooden cellar—including its five-step staircase—dating to the late first century A.D. At the time, this neighborhood was an administrativ

In the ancient city of Oxyrhynchus, just west of the Nile, a team led by archaeologists Esther Pons of Spain’s National Archaeological Museum and Maite Mascort of the University of Barcelona unearthed an underground tomb. It dates to between 332 and

The hard labor and often cruel conditions experienced by the indigent inmates of London’s workhouses are well-documented in nineteenth-century historical records and popular literature. However, recent explorations of the remnants of the St. Pancras

By the early thirteenth century B.C., the rulers of the Hittite Empire (ca. 1650–1200 B.C.) controlled most of central Anatolia and had expanded their territory by conquering new lands in western Anatolia and Syria. King Muwatalli II (reigned ca. 129

NOT FAR FROM THE Andalusian coast in southwestern Iberia, an unusual group of women was laid to rest around 4,800 years ago. Their communal tomb, known as the Montelirio tholos, was built into the east side of a natural hill. A 125-foot-long subterra

Congratulations to the individuals, projects, and publications that received awards at the Annual Meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA) in Chicago in January 2024. Susan W. Katzev and Helena W. Swiny were the recipients of this yea

Ensconced in the forested interior of modern-day Guinea-Bissau, the capital of the Kingdom of Kaabu, Kansala, was the region’s best-kept secret. Although far removed from major European trade routes, the city nevertheless dominated West Africa’s Sene

Archaeology is a difficult term to explain with ease or brevity,” writes Ann Axtell Morris in her 1933 book, Digging in the Southwest, in which she describes her fieldwork and her engagement with the landscape of the southwestern United States and it

During construction of a new drain in the village of Varuna, near the city of Mysuru in southern India, archaeologists discovered three idols belonging to followers of Jainism. One of the oldest religions in Asia, Jainism traces its history through 2

Villagers living in northeastern China around 4,000 years ago appear to have been the target of a catastrophic headhunting raid. At a site known as Honghe, archaeologists from the Heilongjiang Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology h

A vital part of the AIA’s mission is to educate and inform the public about archaeology and the importance of cultural heritage. To that end, each year at the AIA’s Annual Meeting, the Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award is presented to someon

As described by the chroniclers of the sixteenth-century Spanish de Soto expedition, the woman known to history as the Lady of Cofitachequi made a dramatic entrance to an audience with Hernando de Soto and his officers somewhere in what is now South

From at least the sixth to eighth century A.D., the diverse peoples of Central Asia’s Pamir Mountains were under the rule of various kingdoms, including the Shughnān Kingdom. Although there is a present-day region in Tajikistan and Afghanistan called

The fourteenth-century Icelandic Edwardsaga chronicles the life of Edward the Confessor, the last Anglo-Saxon king of England (reigned 1042–1066). It also describes how, in the years after the Norman Conquest in 1066—when William the Conqueror invade

IN SOUTHWESTERN OKLAHOMA, between the Washita and Canadian Rivers, the Wichita Reservation spreads across some 700,000 acres of grassland. The Wichita, known in their own language as the Kitikiti’sh, or Eminent Ones, are today made up of five bands t

There are at least 17 places off the southern coast of Britain that modern scholars have suggested might be the island of Iktis, a major center of the Iron Age (ca. 750 B.C.–a.d.43) tin trade. The confusion, however, didn’t begin in modern times, but

WYOMING: The oldest known bead in the Western Hemisphere was found at the La Prele Mammoth site near the North Platte River. The quarter-inch-long tube-shaped object was uncovered near the hearth of a temporary Paleoindian camp set up by hunters arou

If Egyptologists studied only massive stone monuments, gleaming golden sarcophagi, and brightly painted tomb walls, they would understand ancient Egypt as an almost exclusively masculine world. Most of the pyramids and temples were built to glorify m

A strip of forest with thick stands of trees including tall oaks and hickory separates the 8,300-acre Ashokan Reservoir and New York State Route 28, the main highway into the Catskill Mountains. Constructed in the early twentieth century, the reservo

According to the first-century A.D. Roman writer Pliny the Elder, the ancient city of Lixus in what is now northern Morocco was the site of the Garden of the Hesperides, where the semidivine hero Hercules is said to have slain the dragon that guarded