An intensive MIT summer course teaches students to hone their archaeological research skills through hands-on exploration, including making petrographic thin sections, and mineral analysis of ceramics.

At an excavation site in northern Mexico, BYU archaeology students and professors recently discovered artifacts that have been buried for 1,000 years, including pottery sherds, hammer stones, maize kernels and—intriguing at a location 250 miles inland—a shell bead from the Pacific Ocean.

Minecraft's next update brings new mounts, mobs, biomes, and more.

Ostrich eggs estimated to be at least 4,000 years old have been found in Israel, archaeologists announced on Thursday, providing insight into the life of ancient peoples in the region.The eight crushed eggs were discovered in fragments in the Negev desert's Nitzana sand dunes near the Egyptian borde...

Around 6,200 BCE, the climate changed. Global temperatures dropped, sea levels rose and the southern Levant, including modern-day Israel, the Palestinian territories, Jordan, Lebanon, southern Syria and the Sinai desert, entered a period of drought.

Article URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostracon Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32634771 Points: 1 # Comments: 1

Trails and Tales is just around the corner

Jay-yi Nah is an underwater archaeological site dating to the Early Classic Maya period (250-600 CE) that focused on salt production for local use or perhaps local production for down-the-line trading.

Egyptologists have recovered more than 18,000 inscribed sherds in ancient Athribis—the remains of vessels and jars that served as writing material some 2,000 years ago. The sherds, known as ostraca, document lists of names, purchases of food and everyday objects, and even writing from a school, including lines written by pupils as a punishment. It is very rare to find such a large volume of ostraca. They were…

A team of archaeologists from James Cook University and elsewhere reports the oldest securely dated ceramics found in Australia from archaeological excavations on Jiigurru (Lizard Island) on the Great Barrier Reef, northeast Australia.

Archaeologists in Israel have identified a very rare Canaanite inscription on fragments of a pottery jar from the reign of King David (10th century BCE).

Ostrich eggs estimated to be at least 4,000 years old have been found in Israel, archaeologists announced on Thursday, providing insight into the life of ancient peoples in the region.

The Shangshan culture in ancient China's Lower Yangzi region is central to understanding the origins of rice domestication and early alcohol fermentation.

Archaeologists from the Institute for Ancient Near Eastern Studies at the University of Tübingen and the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities have unearthed a collection of more than 18,000 ostraca (inscribed pottery fragments) in the ancient Egyptian town of Athribis, near to the modern city of Sohag, Egypt.

The introduction of herding—a way of life which centers on keeping herds of mobile domesticated animals—significantly changed Africa's genetic, economic, social and cultural landscapes during the last 10,000 years. Unlike other parts of the world, mobile herding spread throughout the continent thousands of years before farming and did not replace foraging in many places. This gave rise to complex mosaics of…

The sustainable development of agriculture has laid a solid foundation for the birth of human civilization and countries. Early agriculture has long been a focus of archaeology. China is the only country in the world with two independent agricultural systems, that is, rice farming in the south and millet farming in the north.

The history of Chinese trade is sometimes still a bit of a mystery due to the lack of historical records. This is where archaeologists are relying on ceramics to tell the story.

The introduction of herding – a way of life which centres on keeping herds of mobile domesticated animals – significantly changed Africa's genetic, economic,...

We stand in the open fields of Spanish Lookout, a modernized Mennonite farming community in Central Belize, looking at what remains of ancestral Maya homes. White mounds, the remnants of these houses, pock the landscape as far as the eye can see, a stark reminder of what existed more than 1,000 years ago. The collapsed buildings look like smudges on an aerial photograph, but as archaeologists, we get to see them up…

Peru's first great empire, the Wari, stretched for more than a thousand miles over the Andes Mountains and along the coast from 600 to 1000 CE. The pottery they left behind gives archaeologists clues as to how the empire functioned. In a new study forthcoming in the Journal of Archaeological Science and available as a pre-print on the SSRN server, researchers showed that rather than using "official" Wari pottery…