HistoryExtra Home of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast 2026-10-09T13:30:57.000Z https://www.historyextra.com/topic/archaeology/feed/atom Hilary Mitchell <![CDATA[Are these the world’s oldest cities? Inside the megasites that Soviet authorities didn’t want you to see]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/are-these-the-worlds-oldest-cities-inside-the-megasites-that-soviet-authorities-didnt-want-you-to-see/ 2026-10-09T13:30:57.000Z 2026-10-11T15:00:04.000Z If you were taking a quiz and were asked what the ‘world’s oldest city’ is, you’d probably get a point for answering Uruk, the ancient metropolis in what is now Iraq. It’s thought that this famous site, renowned for its monumental architecture, administrative sophistication and early use of writing, may have had an impressive 40,000 residents by its final phase in 3100 BC.
At that time, Uruk was home to people who didn’t have to sully their noble hands by farming. They were true urbanites who obtained their food from the surrounding hinterland – one of the features that many archaeologists consider to be an essential characteristic of a city.
Another site, Çatalhöyük in modern-day Turkey, also has a claim to the title of ‘world’s oldest city’, though it would appear quite strange to modern eyes: a streetless mass of houses clustered back-to-back with roof access into the buildings. Founded in around 7100 BC and abandoned in 5700 BC, it was certainly a significant and long-lasting settlement, as was Jericho in Palestine.
Archaeologists have unearthed the remains of more than 20 successive settlements in Jericho, the first of which dates back 11,000 years to 9000 BC. By 7370 BC, Jericho was a well-established town of small, round mud brick houses surrounded by a 12-foot-high stone wall with a defensive tower. UNESCO describes Jericho as the “oldest fortified city in the world.”
The existence of these famous and extremely well-documented sites gave rise to the belief that the first cities emerged in Mesopotamia, and that the area was, essentially, the cradle of urban civilisation.
However, recent research has challenged that long-held assumption.
Are these really the world’s oldest cities?
Around 6,500 years ago, an enigmatic society flourished across the forest-steppe expanse of present-day Ukraine, Moldova and Romania.
Known as the Cucuteni-Trypillia culture, or – more poetically – as “the last great Chalcolithic civilization of Europe,” (Mantu et al., 1997) its people constructed vast settlements that more than rival – in both size and organisation – the other proto-cities mentioned above.
The largest Cucuteni-Trypillia megasite is Talianki in Ukraine, which covered an area of around 450 hectares and is thought to have housed up to 21,000 inhabitants. Other significant megasites include Maidanetske (250 hectares/17,500 inhabitants), Dobrovody (250 hectares/16,200 inhabitants) and Nebelivka (275 hectares/15,000 inhabitants).
Megasites like Talianki weren’t just a random agglomeration of buildings: they appear to have been as meticulously planned out as any mass-produced postwar British suburb, with rows of houses radiating in concentric circles around a central open area, which may have been a space for community gatherings, perhaps fulfilling a similar purpose to a Roman forum.
The discovery of the Cucuteni-Trypillia megasites
In the 1960s, Russian military topographer Konstantin Shishkin was examining some aerial photographs of Ukraine when he noticed unusual shadows materialising on the ground in the vicinity of Kyiv. He saw ghostly rings in the soil, caused by differences in plant growth due to buried archaeological remains. In total, Shishkin identified what looked to be more than 250 examples of these strange shadows – all of them eerie traces of long-vanished structures.
Subsequent excavations and research confirmed that these communities represented some of the earliest examples of large-scale, low-density urban planning. And while Mesopotamian cities such as Uruk were celebrated for their temples and palaces, these sites tell a different story.
For more than 2,000 years, the Cucuteni-Trypillia culture made pots, hunted and gathered, farmed, and lived in huge settlements where all the houses were almost exactly the same size.
There were no signs of palaces, monumental tombs, or, in fact, graves of any kind. No one knows what these people did with their dead, which makes it harder to construct a clear picture of their religious beliefs or rituals.
But the lack of grave goods for most of the culture’s history may itself shed some light on the society’s world view. Instead of being buried with their owners, metal objects may have – more practically – been melted down and reused.
All houses were roughly five metres wide and up to 14 metres long. Constructed of wood and clay and resembling modern half-timbered buildings, they showed a striking degree of standardisation. “The architecture is reminiscent of Lego,” observed archaeologist Johannes Müller of Kiel University in Germany, who has studied the sites extensively since 2011.
This equality and uniformity piqued the interest of Soviet authorities at the time, who saw in these sites an almost perfect example of an idealised past: a truly classless society in line with Marxist ideology. Speaking to the BBC in 2021, Mykhailo Videiko, an archaeologist at Borys Grinchenko Kyiv Metropolitan University in Ukraine, explained why the authorities later went out of their way to suppress further scientific research and cover up the discovery.
It was thought that “Trypillia was a wonderful illustration of a pre-class, classless society or primitive communism,” said Videiko.
“As archaeologists are digging more, they start discovering megasites of Trypillia civilisation. They start finding all these huge buildings. And the question arises: Could this all be done by a classless society?” he added. Some interpreted the large structures, some over 700 square metres in size, as temples. Others thought they were more likely to be storehouses for grain.
Whatever they were, they didn’t align with the authorities’ vision of an ancient, social hierarchy-free Marxist utopia, so they cracked down on the project. Some archaeologists were convicted as being members of a terrorist spy organisation; others fled the country.
Books that furthered the study of Trypillia were published elsewhere but, Videiko explained: “Those books never reached Ukraine. They were researching something but almost no one here knew about it. Those who knew, remained silent.”
The renaissance of Cucuteni-Trypillia research
In the mid-1990s, archaeologist Roland Fletcher drew global attention to an overlooked prehistoric phenomenon: vast Neolithic-Chalcolithic settlements in Eastern Europe that appeared to defy the usual constraints of early agricultural communities.
His 1995 book The Limits of Settlement Growth describes the Cucuteni-Trypillia megasites as the sole known exception to his global model for the way in which all early settlements were limited in size and complexity.
Fletcher’s analysis highlighted a critical point: the enormous scale of these sites, some covering hundreds of hectares, would have made it virtually impossible for all inhabitants to remain in regular, face-to-face contact. This suggested either a sophisticated level of internal organisation, perhaps with designated areas, or possibly an early form of writing that aided communication.
A major step forward came in 2009, when a collaborative research team from Frankfurt and Kiel universities launched a comprehensive study of several key Cucuteni-Trypillia sites. These included Nebelivka, Talianki, Maidanetske and Dobrovody, among the most prominent mega-settlements, as well as the smaller site of Apolianka.
This ambitious project, detailed in a 2014 issue of the European Journal of Archaeology, employed cutting-edge geophysical methods to investigate the sites more thoroughly than ever before using more advanced magnetic gradiometry.
The Frankfurt-Kiel team were able to confirm that these settlements were laid out in concentric circles, suggesting an impressive degree of organisation. This suggests that all of the structures were carefully planned out before any construction began, strengthening the case that Talianki and similar megasites deserve to be called the oldest cities in history.
University of Kiel archaeologist Johannes Müller has put his cards on the table and confirmed that he considers them to be cities, saying: “When I started researching the Tripillia sites in 2012, I never thought I would call them ‘cities’.” Müller continued that now “that is beyond question for me. A city requires a concept. And here, planning is evident from the very beginning.”
“The decisive factor for me is not that they are huge settlements, but that you no longer know the people who live 1.5 kilometers away in the same settlement,” he added.
Why did the Cucuteni-Trypillia culture burn their houses?
The Frankfurt-Kiel team’s research also confirmed a particularly baffling element of the megasite mystery: the fate of the ‘Lego’ houses themselves. Many appear to have been deliberately burned, often every 60 to 80 years, leaving behind squares of ash containing magnetic oxides.
Some researchers suggest the burnings had a symbolic or ritual motive, perhaps linked to death or rebirth. Others think they served a more pragmatic purpose: perhaps hardening clay walls or clearing land for rebuilding.
Mirjana Stevanovic, an archaeologist from Serbia, has argued that the structures inside the burned house horizon “were destroyed by deliberate burning and most likely for reasons of a symbolic nature.” A Trypillia scholar, Vikentiy Khvoyka, believes that the houses were burned down when their inhabitants passed away, turning them from dwellings of the living into what he called “homes of the dead.”
However, Russian archaeologist Evgeniy Yuryevich Krichevski had a different take on the practice. He thought that the inhabitants weren’t destroying their homes, just reinforcing them. He believed that the heat of the flames would have hardened the clay walls into a ceramic surface, while the smoke would have fumigated the living space.
In 2018, a team of Ukrainian and British archaeologists decided to put this theory to the test.
They recreated two Cucuteni-Trypillia type houses, building them from scratch from the same clay and wood materials used thousands of years ago. Although wooden elements such as the roof were destroyed, the team found that the walls of both buildings were left intact, along with various clay items and ritual items the researchers had placed inside.
What artefacts are associated with the Cucuteni-Trypillia people?
Wherever Cucuteni-Trypillia people lived, archaeologists have found stylised, small female figurines, with distinctive geometric designs on their curvy bodies.
In the 1970s, Lithuanian archaeologist Marija Gimbutas, working at UCLA, California, published several influential books suggesting that the female figures were goddesses, and that the Cucuteni-Trypillia people, along with other early societies of ‘Old Europe’, were led by women – though these days, Gimbutas’s work is considered to be highly speculative.
However, whether it points to a wide-reaching, goddess-worshipping matriarchal culture or not, the material legacy of the Cucuteni-Trypillia culture is deeply compelling. Cucuteni–Trypillia pottery in particular – yellow-hued and decorated in stunning swirling patterns and vibrant colours – speaks of a deeply sophisticated artistic tradition.
Archaeologist Mykhailo Videiko has explained that the people of Trypillia “managed to implement almost all technological innovations of their time,” using kilns that were very advanced for that period.
In an attempt to raise awareness about the extraordinary craftsmanship of her ancestors, in 2021, Ukrainian fashion designer Svitlana Bevza created a line of Trypillia-influenced clothing and jewellery as a way of celebrating this – as the Frankfurt-Kiel team put it – “persistently overlooked” ancient civilisation.
Bevza told the BBC she found it unjust that “this great culture is not that well-known in the world, as Egyptian, for instance. There was no voice to the world who could talk about this culture.”
In the five years since she created her evocative collection, more light has been shed on these extraordinary settlements, and they are finally beginning to get the recognition they deserve.
In a field where terminology is often debated and definitions evolve, one thing is becoming clearer: the Cucuteni-Trypillia culture – once viewed as peripheral to early urban development – is now rightfully taking centre stage in our understanding of how cities first emerged.
]]> HistoryExtra <![CDATA[These are the 12 most underrated Roman sites in the world – how many have you visited?]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/these-are-the-12-most-underrated-roman-sites-in-the-world-how-many-have-you-visited/ 2026-10-04T18:31:03.000Z 2026-10-04T18:30:25.000Z The Mediterranean world is full of Roman structures, but it can often feel like the best sites are so overrun by tourists that it is impossible to appreciate their beauty and historical importance. So here we’ve rounded up 12 Roman sites that contain spectacular remains but few, if any, tourists.
1. Volubilis, Morocco
Located 2.5 hours east of Rabat near the spot where Roman control of eastern Mauretania (modern North Morocco) ended and the Atlas Mountains began, Volubilis contains some of the most extensive Roman ruins in North Africa. Originally founded in the third century BC, Volubilis came under Roman control in the first century AD and remained a part of the empire through at least the third century AD.
Despite its remote location, native Berbers, Punic speakers of Phoenician background, Italian and Gallic soldiers, Greeks, and Christians all lived in this cosmopolitan city. So too did a substantial Jewish community that left behind the southwestern-most Hebrew inscriptions in the Roman world.
Visitors to the site can walk along the Decumanus (the town’s main east-west street), visit the six excavated temples, tour the three public baths, wander into mansions and villas decorated with brilliant floor mosaics, and experience what life was like in a multi-cultural urban environment at the empire’s edge that once housed 20,000 people.
The site is highlighted by a large triumphal arch dedicated to the emperor Caracalla in AD 217 and the decorated façade of a palace sometimes associated with the emperor Gordian III.
2. Italica, Spain
Game of Thrones fans have flooded the Croatian cities of Dubrovnik and Split that were featured in the show, but far fewer make the trip to Italica, the location of the Roman arena used for Westeros’s Dragon Pit.
Situated about 20 minutes outside of Sevilla, Italica was originally a veterans’ colony settled by Roman soldiers around 206 BC. Later, it was the birthplace of the Roman emperors Trajan and Hadrian. In the 120s and 130s AD, Hadrian rebuilt the city in spectacular style by constructing temples (including one honouring his predecessor and adoptive father Trajan), large public works, and an amphitheatre with enough seating for 25,000 people.
Visitors to the site can tour the extensive remains of Roman villas, complete with ornate floor mosaics, and then walk over to the amphitheatre. The structure itself is made mostly of masonry, with passageways, rows of seats, and a second level that visitors can explore.
3. Vienne, France
A little more than 20 minutes by train from Lyon lies the Roman city of Vienna (modern Vienne). Vienne was originally the political centre of a local Gallic tribe called the Allobroges, before being made into a Roman colony in the first century BC. The city now contains an almost entirely intact temple dedicated to the first Roman emperor Augustus and his wife Livia.
The temple remained in use until modern times, due first to its conversion into a church in the later Roman period and then its transformation into the local centre of the Cult of Reason during the French Revolution.
A short walk away from the temple is a beautiful park featuring a terraced Roman portico that joins the remains of the partially excavated Roman Forum and the walls of a late Roman administrative building. Next to the park is the Roman theatre, a structure dug out from the hillside in antiquity that is so well preserved that it still hosts concerts and performances.
Vienne’s local museum also holds a bronze statue of a local notable named Pacatianus, one of the very few surviving Roman bronzes that depicted someone who was neither a member of the imperial family nor a god. Its survival is due to the fact that it was shattered into more than 220 small pieces and buried in antiquity. These fragments were unearthed in the 19th century and reassembled in 1957.
4. Senlis, France
The charming French city of Senlis, located less than an hour outside of Paris, is so full of cobblestoned streets and medieval houses that it has been used as a set for more than 25 French films. But Senlis (which was known as Augustomagus in antiquity) also boasts two of the more remarkable Roman monuments in north-western Europe.
The first of these, a privately owned Roman amphitheatre that once seated as many as 10,000 spectators, was fully excavated in the 19th century, and has been caringly preserved by the Société d’Histoire et d’Archéologie de Senlis.
Unlike many Roman amphitheatres in the Mediterranean, the Senlis arena also doubled as a theatrical performance space, an architectural peculiarity seen mostly in Roman Gaul. In the summer, its upper levels are filled with wildflowers and sustain a colony of bees that produce honey sold in the town under the Miel des Arènes de Senlis brand.
A little more than a 10-minute walk from the amphitheatre is the third-century AD city wall. The wall, which was made of white stone inlaid with beautiful red-brick rings and accents, was built both to protect the city from barbarian attacks and to advertise the prosperity that Roman control promised. Most of the original span still survives along with 16 of the original 30 Roman guard towers. Two of these towers were later incorporated into a castle built in the 12th century by the French king Louis VII that visitors can also tour.
5. Ostia Antica, Italy
Unless you arrive very early in the day, you will never really have the site of Ostia Antica fully to yourself, but the ancient city of Ostia (which may have once housed 100,000 people) is so large that it can often feel as if you do.
While not as celebrated as Pompeii or Herculaneum, Ostia contains ruins that are nearly as expansive and impressive as the Campanian cities buried by Mount Vesuvius. Ostia was once the main port of the city of Rome but gradually declined in the third and fourth centuries following the development of a new, more modern port under the emperor Trajan.
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It is possible to spend an entire day leisurely wandering the ruins of Ostia’s abandoned temples, private houses, restaurants, apartment buildings and commercial structures, and noticing the decorations in taverns, the mosaics on the floor of a bath, or the personal toilet tucked underneath the stairs of a private home.
Few sites offer you a better, less crowded way to see the spaces in which ordinary urban Romans lived their lives – and no other such site is only a 30-minute local train ride away from the capital.
6. Parco Regionale dell’Appia Antica, Rome, Italy
The Appian Way was built in the 310s BC by the Roman senator Appius Claudius Caecus (Appius Claudius the Blind) and is the most famous ancient Roman road.
The road begins in the centre of the ancient city, just east of the spot where the Palatine Hill and imperial palace join the Circus Maximus. For its first 2 kilometres, the Appian Way runs within the ancient city walls, taking you past the Baths of Caracalla, the family tomb of the Scipiones, and the Arch of Drusus.
The road then passes through Rome’s third-century AD Aurelian Walls at the Porta San Sebastiano, a 30-metre-tall gate with two towers that forms part of the Museo delle Mura (the Museum of the Walls). The museum allows visitors to walk the passageways within the walls that ancient soldiers used and to enjoy a panoramic view of the Appian Way and Roman countryside from atop the towers of the gate.
Traveling another 2.5 kilometres down the Appian Way brings you to the catacombs of St Callixtus, a richly decorated underground burial spot housing the remains of nine early popes.
Across the street from the catacombs is a complex of brick buildings constructed by the emperor Maxentius in the early 310s AD. It includes a palace, a mausoleum built for his son and family members, and a full-size Roman circus that once seated as many as 10,000 people. Most of the grandstands remain intact and extend in a horseshoe around the racecourse’s 520-metre length. In the summer, the racetrack is filled with blooming wildflowers.
Motorised vehicles are largely banned for the 8 kilometres of the Appian Way beyond the Circus. This transforms the road back into something approaching its ancient form and allows you to walk on ancient Roman paving stones through beautiful countryside surrounded by ancient sculptures, inscriptions, temples, villas and monumental family tombs. In the autumn and winter, your only company may be the goats who help keep the road’s shoulder from being overgrown with weeds.
- Read more | “Roman roads turn up so often” | Catherine Fletcher on what the Romans did for European transport networks
7. Felix Romuliana, Serbia
Located just over 200km from both the Serbian capital of Belgrade and the Bulgarian capital of Sofia, this fortified imperial palace was built by the emperor Galerius (ruled AD 305–311) and named after his mother, Romula.
An architectural contemporary of the famous palace that the emperor Diocletian built in the Croatian city of Split at roughly the same time, Galerius’s 10-acre compound is surrounded by walls and 20 stunning fortification towers built with alternating layers of red and black bricks.
After entering the gates, visitors find the remains of two temples, two palatial residential structures and a long corridor decorated with expertly created mosaics depicting gods and mythological scenes.
Just beyond the walls are two mounds that contain the tombs of Galerius and Romula, both of whom were deified following their deaths. Although the northern palace building has yet to be excavated, archaeologists working on the south part of the site have yielded an extraordinary array of statues, coins and inscriptions.
8. Aphrodisias, Turkey
Many travellers seek out the Roman ruins along Turkey’s Aegean coast at sites like Ephesus, but few venture the additional 150 kilometres inland to the equally extensive and better-preserved remains of Aphrodisias, the ancient capital of the Roman province of Caria.
The Aphrodisias archaeological site includes a four-sided monumental gateway, multiple temples and many private homes as well as a theatre, marketplace, bath complex and the chamber in which the town council met.
The site also contains one of the most complete stadiums in the Roman world, a mammoth running track extending for nearly 300 metres and surrounded on all sides by up to 30 rows of seats. Its capacity was (and still is) around 30,000 people.
Many of these remains are in such good condition that visitors can view the finely carved sculptures and inscriptions decorating the ancient city’s columns, archways and exterior walls. The local museum holds even more impressive statues and friezes in its public collection.
9. Qal’at Sem’an and the Dead Cities of Northern Syria
Between AD 300 and 700, the highlands separating the modern Turkish city of Antakya (ancient Antioch) and the Syrian city of Aleppo contained scores of prosperous villages that grew rich from their olive groves and vineyards.
Climate change and political upheaval led to the collapse and abandonment of these towns (which have come to be called the Dead Cities of Northern Syria) in the early Middle Ages, but the later Roman stonemasons who lived in the region were so skilled that many of the structures they built still survive almost entirely intact aside from their roofs and wooden support beams.
People travelling through these hills can see the remains of townhouses, inns and hundreds of abandoned Christian churches, but the area’s most important monument is the later fifth-century cathedral built to honour Saint Simeon Stylites.
Simeon was a Syrian monk who spent more than 30 years perched atop a large stone pillar he had erected on a mountain outside of Antioch. Soon after Simeon died in AD 459, the Roman emperor Zeno hired four teams of masons to build what was then the world’s largest church.
It was made up of four basilicas, each built in slightly different styles, that were arranged so that they formed the four arms of a cross. They are connected by an octagonal, domed space that enclosed Simeon’s pillar.
The remains of Simeon’s pillar and the central part of the church sustained major damage in airstrikes during the recent Syrian civil war, but the side basilicas and significant portions of the complex of monasteries and pilgrims’ hostels located below the church still remain.
10. Beit She'an, Israel
First settled around 5000 BC, modern Beit She’an is one of the oldest settlements in the Jordan River Valley. In the Roman period, it was known as Scythopolis and served as the capital of the late Roman province Palaestina Secunda from the later fourth through the seventh centuries.
Once home to a population of 40,000 Jews, Christians, and Samaritans, the site includes a spectacular array of Roman remains. Separate from the main archaeological park is a Roman amphitheatre that still has visible traces of the plaster forest scenes that once decorated the walls enclosing its arena floor.
The excavated city centre contains a theatre, a bath complex, sacred buildings and colonnaded streets lined with the brilliant mosaic floors that once decorated its shops and public buildings. The site is immense and 120 metres below sea level so visitors should take precautions against the heat if visiting in the summer.
11. Hegra, Saudi Arabia
Originally developed by Nabataeans whose ingenious ability to channel and store scarce rainwater enabled them to build large cities in the middle of the desert, Hegra came under Roman control following the empire’s absorption of the Nabataean kingdom in AD 106.
By that time, Hegra already contained more than 130 ornate tombs carved from the red desert sandstone.
Hegra’s structures are reminiscent of the much better-known rock-hewn structures in the old Nabatean capital of Petra, but many of the tombs in Hegra are larger and better preserved than those in Petra. In many cases, recognisable human faces, birds, and mythological creatures are still visible.
Although surviving inscriptions suggest that Hegra had a substantial population at least until it slipped from Roman control around the turn of the fourth century, there have not yet been large-scale archaeological excavations of the city’s residential districts.
But, because no Greek or Latin inscriptions have been found south of Hegra, it is likely that the city was the last major settlement before you reached the border of Roman Arabia.
12. Taposiris Magna, Egypt
Taposiris Magna (which is located about 45 kilometres west of Alexandria) was once a bustling port city that linked the Mediterranean to the Nile via the large freshwater Lake Mareotis.
Most of the city remains unexcavated, but two important monuments sit on a large bluff that separates the lake from the sea.
On the west side stands the remains of a huge temple that once honoured the Egyptian god Osiris. Initially constructed by the Ptolemaic leaders of Egypt during the Hellenistic period, the current complex dates to the late third century AD and included a barracks within the temple enclosure. A church was added later in the fourth century.
To the east of the temple is a 30-metre-tall scale model of the Great Lighthouse of Alexandria, an architectural and engineering marvel that fell into the sea following an earthquake in 1303. This left Taposiris Magna’s lighthouse as the only surviving architectural representation of what was once one of the Seven Wonders of the World.
Because some have speculated that Cleopatra and Mark Antony may have been buried at Taposiris Magna, general access to the site is limited. It is possible, however, to tour it using local guides.
Edward J Watts is Alkiviadis Vassiliadis Endowed Chair and professor of history at the University of California, San Diego. His latest book is The Romans: A 2,000-Year History (Basic Books, 2025)
]]> Kavita Puri <![CDATA[The Amazon rainforest is hiding an ancient secret – and scientists now know what it is]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/the-amazon-rainforest-is-hiding-an-ancient-secret-and-scientists-now-know-what-it-is/ 2026-10-02T14:31:04.000Z 2026-10-02T14:30:16.000Z Christopher Nolan’s box-office smash hit adaptation of The Odyssey has sparked much excitement about and interest in ancient Greece. Not only has it grossed hundreds of millions of pounds in the first few weeks of its release, but sales of Homer’s 2,700-year-old epic poem have also soared. There’s been a spike in visits to Greece, too, particularly to filming locations such as Voidokilia Beach and Nestor’s Cave in the Peloponnese.
Thanks to poems, other writings and buildings left by the ancient Greeks, we have a strong sense of that culture and its influence on wider civilisation. But other ancient peoples are only now being discovered or studied in detail through groundbreaking technology that has transformed our understanding of their worlds.
- Read more | Were the Amazons just a “male fantasy”? Here’s the truth behind the ancient world’s warrior women
LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) technology involves firing millions of laser pulses from an aircraft down at the ground. Some beams bounce up and are detected by a sensor; computer algorithms then effectively ‘erase’ vegetation to create highly detailed topographic maps – almost like X-rays of landscapes. It’s so sensitive and precise that it can pick up small bumps, depressions and artificial structures cloaked by vegetation for centuries and often invisible to the naked eye – the flattened outline of a long-gone fortification, for example. LiDAR can map 50 square miles in one day. A team on the ground would need years to do something similar.
Using this technique, experts have made discoveries in remote and difficult-to-study places such as Cambodia’s jungle. There, LiDAR mapping of hundreds of square miles starting in 2012 revealed previously unknown infrastructure around the famed Angkor temple complex. The results suggest that Angkor wasn’t an isolated religious sanctuary but, at its peak in the 13th century, was the centrepiece of an extensive city, with numerous neighbourhoods and a sophisticated water-control system.
Three years ago, LiDAR revealed hitherto hidden cities in Mexico’s Campeche region. Featuring 15-metre-tall pyramid-like structures as well as residential areas bustling with inhabitants during the Late Classic Period of the Maya civilisation (AD 600–900), they’re forcing historians to revise population estimates for that culture.
The latest breakthroughs using LiDAR have been made in the Amazon. It was long believed that, in the pre-colonial era, the Amazonian forest – which spans parts of modern-day Peru, Brazil, Bolivia and six other countries – was a wilderness inhabited by only a small number of hunter-gatherers. But new findings revealed in a July 2026 issue of the journal Nature suggest that this area may have been occupied by millions of people.
The multicultural society that lived in the Amazon region from around 600 BC to AD 850 has been given the name Aquiry. LiDAR evidence shows that they built vast geometric earthworks, with shapes that may have represented deities; many of them appear to be connected by ancient roads. Authors of the paper also suggest that the Aquiry had a major impact on the rainforest, repeatedly burning bamboo patches to clear land for planting maize, squash and manioc, and felling forests for their earthworks and the roads leading to them.
- Read more | “A tidal wave of digital material will overwhelm recordkeeping institutions”: the future of history
LiDAR has been widely available for some three decades, but has recently become more accessible and affordable for use by researchers in places ranging from Stonehenge to Guatemala. The results are transforming how we think about ancient civilisations – how these people lived and organised themselves, and even how these great empires may have risen and fallen. LiDAR has already revealed that those that came before us were more numerous and sophisticated than we had believed. Ours has been called a ‘golden age of archaeological discovery’ – and, as these techniques are further developed and utilised, no doubt more hidden cities will be uncovered around the world.
This article was first published in the October 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
]]> Colin Barras <![CDATA[These Iron Age bodies were all buried in the same bizarre way. What does it mean?]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/iron-age-burials-gaul-ritual-cultural-belief/ 2026-08-06T14:53:15.000Z 2026-08-06T14:53:15.000Z Archaeologists tend to spend a lot of time with the dead. But occasionally, an ancient burial they unearth surprises even them.
This was the case during recent excavations at a site near Dijon in France. At a settlement from Iron Age Gaul, dating to between 2,400 and 2,000 years old, a team from the French National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research (INRAP) found the skeletal remains of at least 18 bodies, each buried sitting upright.
Seated burials are almost unheard of today, and they were equally rare in the past.
Previous research has uncovered just a few dozen seated burials from the entire Iron Age of ancient Gaul – an area covering most of modern France and some neighbouring countries. This makes the 18 or so seated burials discovered near Dijon a significant find, and hints that the ancient site was a particularly important one.
“Where we find larger numbers of seated burials, we usually find a temple nearby,” says archaeologist Andrew Lamb at the University of Edinburgh, who wasn’t involved in the excavations but discussed them with HistoryExtra. “I wouldn’t be surprised if they find something big like a temple in the vicinity of the Dijon site, if it has survived.”
The Dijon finds are yet to be formally published, but in a statement issued earlier this year the INRAP team sketched out their initial findings. All of the dead had been buried in a similar manner, with each body placed at the bottom of a metre-wide circular pit and positioned to face west. All appear to have been adult men, between 40 and 60 years of age, and the skeletons suggest all had enjoyed good health during their lives. Five or six of the skeletons show signs of injuries that hadn’t healed before death, possibly indicating at least some of the men might have been intentionally killed shortly before burial.
- Read more | A brief guide to the British Iron Age
None of this explains exactly why the bodies were buried in a seated position, facing west, and the INRAP researchers didn’t speculate on the subject in their press statement. But previously published research might help us understand the puzzle that these mysterious burials present.
Did seated burials have special significance?
All burials from the European Iron Age are significant, regardless of the orientation of the body in the ground. This is because archaeologists think that most people in Europe were cremated at this point in history. “If you take Ireland during the Iron Age, you have maybe just 0.5 per cent of the population turning up in the burial record,” says Lamb.
This rarity of burials isn’t unique to Iron Age Europe.
Although the practice is popular today, burial has been the exception rather than the rule since it emerged as a human funerary rite about 130,000 years ago. The relatively few bodies that were committed to the ground feature prominently in our thinking about the past. But this is largely because buried bodies have a good chance of long-term survival, making them easier for archaeologists to find. Other funerary rites must have been available but many may have involved the rapid destruction of the body, which makes them far less archaeologically visible.
“Every now and again, you see a paper published about the missing dead, about this idea that remains were treated in different ways that we just don’t see,” says Tom Booth, an archaeologist at University College London, speaking to HistoryExtra. “It can give you a bit of vertigo because you suddenly get a sense of the depth of what we are missing.”
The reluctance to bury bodies isn’t difficult to understand. In earlier times – especially before the development of agriculture – population densities were low. “Why would you decide to dig a hole when there was plenty of open space where you could just place the body?” says Booth. “Digging a hole is not the most practical approach.”
If burying a body isn’t practical, choosing to place a body in a seated position within the grave is even less so. That makes these Iron Age burials even more of a mystery. “It’s very difficult to keep a body in that position, especially because we’ve evolved to be top-heavy with a big cranium,” says Lamb. “Bodies will fall forwards, or they will slip to the side.”
Why, then, did Iron Age Europeans take on such an impractical and challenging task? As is often the case in archaeology, there are no clear answers. But there are clues.
For instance, the archaeological evidence shows that at least some Iron Age seated burials were committed to the ground during festivals that must have involved most of the community. The best evidence of this comes from the site of Acy-Romance, which lies a few hundred kilometres to the north of Dijon. Here, at an ancient temple complex, archaeologists have unearthed 19 seated burials. Their research suggests the bodies belonged to sacrificial victims killed during a midwinter festival. Each body was then taken inside the temple and placed in a small wooden box, in which it was compressed into a contorted sitting position and left to naturally mummify for the rest of the winter. Finally, the mummified seated body was interred in a pit near the temple.
- Read more | For decades, this prehistoric grave was a mystery. Have its dark secrets now been revealed?
Such elaborate treatment of the dead was clearly linked to cultural belief, says Booth. One suggestion is that some Iron Age communities saw seated burials as symbolic conduits for communication between the living and the dead, perhaps explaining why they were placed in a seated position – a pose associated with the living. Three seated burials at the site of Reviers in northern France potentially fit with this idea. All three were buried facing towards a nearby river, and rivers were important routes of communication during the Iron Age.
But this ritualistic explanation doesn’t necessarily apply to all Iron Age seated burials, or to seated burials from other periods. “You get them occasionally distributed over the last 5,000 years or so, and I think it’s a mistake to think they are all linked in some way,” says Booth.
Why are we so fascinated by Iron Age seated burials?
Ancient burials offer evidence of how vanished communities responded to death. “I think they speak to something deep, trying to get inside the heads of people who lived in the past,” says Lamb.
But this doesn’t necessarily mean we find all ancient burials – or even all seated burials – equally fascinating. For instance, in 2013, archaeologists published a study on the early farmers buried at Tell Halula, a 10,000-year-old Neolithic settlement located in Syria. All of these early farmers were wrapped in shrouds and buried in seated positions. The research received almost no media attention.
Lamb thinks that the broader context may help explain why the seated burials near Dijon fascinate modern audiences. “The Iron Age is really quite close to our modern time. People may identify with the Iron Age in a way they don’t with the Neolithic,” he says. For people of European descent, Iron Age Europeans may even feel like members of the family and discovering that they deliberately propped up their dead in the grave might feel a little unsettling, says Lamb.
But this discomfort arguably tells us as much about modern sensibilities as it does about Iron Age communities. In modern western cultures, very few people interact with dead bodies, and the idea of manipulating the dead into a particular pose might seem distasteful or disturbing. “Death today has become sanitised and professionalised, and it’s something many of us encounter infrequently,” says Lamb.
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]]> James Osborne <![CDATA[Is the Odyssey the first historical novel? How Homer recreated a world of gods and monsters]]> https://www.historyextra.com/period/ancient-history/is-the-odyssey-the-first-historical-novel/ 2026-07-20T10:46:04.000Z 2026-07-20T10:45:53.000Z Before the Odyssey begins, Odysseus has already become one of the most celebrated heroes in the Greek world.
He has sailed to Troy with the coalition of Greek rulers determined to recover Helen, wife of Menelaus, after she was taken by the Trojan prince Paris. He has fought in a war that lasted ten years. And, according to later tradition, it was Odysseus who devised the most famous trick in ancient literature: the Trojan Horse, the enormous wooden structure used to smuggle Greek warriors inside the walls of Troy and bring the conflict to its bloody end.
But the Odyssey isn’t about the Trojan War.
It begins after Troy has fallen, when the victorious Greek armies are attempting to return home. Most of the other kings make that journey successfully, or at least relatively quickly. Odysseus instead, he spends another ten years wandering through a world of storms, hostile gods, monsters and strange islands, while his wife Penelope and son Telemachus struggle to preserve his household and kingdom on Ithaca.
To modern readers, it can seem as though the poem offers a direct window onto the heroic age itself: the world of Greek warriors, Bronze Age palaces and long-lost kings. After all, the Odyssey is one of the defining works of ancient literature and one of the main sources through which later generations have imagined early Greece.
But according to classicist Daisy Dunn, that is not quite how we should read it.
“I often describe the Odyssey as being almost like a historical novel,” she says, speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast.
“I think it’s the easiest way to think about it because we can get so lost in the idea that this is a really ancient work, so we assume that everything it’s describing is contemporary. But that’s not the case at all.”
The Odyssey is a work composed centuries after the events it describes, preserving fragments of an older world while reshaping them through the imagination, assumptions and concerns of a later age.
Looking back across four centuries
To understand the historicity of the Odyssey, there’s one fact that is central to keep in mind: it is telling a story from a time long before it was written.
“The endpoint of the Odyssey is around the eighth century BC, when you start to get a decent version of it,” Dunn explains. “But the events it’s describing belong to the Late Bronze Age, about 400 years earlier than when the poem was being composed and finished off.”
- Read more | Was Homer a real person? Michael Wood on the surprising origins of The Iliad
That is a huge distance. To put it in perspective, it is roughly comparable to a writer today producing a story set in the Tudor period.
The poem emerged from oral tradition. Long before it was written down, generations of singers – known as bards or aoidoi – performed stories about the Trojan War and its heroes. These tales were adapted for different audiences over time, while preserving recognisable characters, episodes and themes.
By the eighth century BC, those traditions had been shaped into the poems we now call the Iliad and the Odyssey, conventionally attributed to Homer. Whether Homer was a single historical individual, a name attached to a tradition, or something more complex remains one of the great unresolved questions of classical scholarship.
What matters, Dunn says, is that the poems weren’t immediate reports from the age they describe.
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Remembering a lost golden age
“We have a real disjunction between the period in which the poem was composed and the period in which it is set,” Dunn says. “It is looking back at this really glorious age, just before it fell and times became a lot darker.”
For the Greeks who heard the Odyssey, the Late Bronze Age represented something like a heroic golden age. Dunn says that the Odyssey is “partly, I think, a tribute to that age because the Bronze Age, in the Greek memory, was this time of heroes and splendour and wealth.”
Modern archaeology helps explain why that memory had such prestige.
- Read more | Was Homer a real person? Michael Wood on the surprising origins of The Iliad
From around 1600 to 1200 BC, mainland Greece was dominated by the Mycenaean civilisation: a network of wealthy palace societies centred on sites such as Mycenae, Tiryns and Pylos. These kingdoms built monumental architecture, established complex bureaucracies, traded across the span of the eastern Mediterranean and possessed considerable military power.
This was the world later Greeks associated with the great warrior-kings of legend: Agamemnon of Mycenae, Menelaus of Sparta, Nestor of Pylos, Achilles and Odysseus himself.
According to Greek tradition, these heroes fought together in the Trojan War. Then something happened that brought the Bronze Age world crashing down.
After the Bronze Age collapse
“The Trojan War is right on the cusp of the end of the Bronze Age,” Dunn explains, “and what followed was the Dark Age.”
Many historians today use the phrase “Greek Dark Age” cautiously, because it can imply a total absence of culture, complexity or evidence. That is misleading. But the Bronze Age world did collapse (precisely why is still a matter of extraordinary speculation and debate) sparking an immense decline.
“It’s become deeply unfashionable for historians to talk about the Dark Age, full stop,” Dunn says. “But in truth, the population shrank quite drastically. Art became far less ambitious than it had been. There seems to have been a kind of cultural hiatus.”
One of the most striking changes was the disappearance of writing.
“Certainly, writing was no longer taking place,” Dunn says. “Before that, in the Bronze Age, they had a certain type of writing on tablets.”
That script is known today as Linear B. It was an early form of Greek used mainly by palace administrators to record stores, livestock, taxes, workers and official inventories. When the palace system collapsed, the bureaucratic world that had sustained this writing system collapsed with it.
For several centuries, Greece appears to have been effectively non-literate. Only much later, after Greeks adapted an alphabet from Phoenician traders, did writing return. The Greek world was waking up again, now in a new era.
“Then, around the eighth century BC, the Odyssey and the Iliad come into being,” Dunn explains. “They are then written down, and Greece is kind of waking up again. It’s the beginning of the Archaic era.”
The Archaic Age saw many of the developments that would eventually define classical Greece. Greek communities founded colonies across the Mediterranean and Black Sea, and populations grew again. City-states such as Athens and Sparta began to take more recognisable shape. Art, poetry and public life flourished in new ways.
So the Odyssey belongs to a society that was rebuilding itself while looking back to a grander, more heroic past.
Can we still find real history?
“The writing is so far removed from when it’s set, and this is why the Odyssey is so fascinating,” Dunn says. “You have certain traces in it which are genuinely from that earlier period because some of these stories have been passed down across the centuries.”
Historians and archaeologists have often noticed that some features of Homeric poetry seem consistent with what is now known about the Mycenaean world. Certain forms of kingship, aspects of palace life and details of warrior culture may preserve memories of Bronze Age practices that survived through oral storytelling.
At the same time, other elements clearly reflect the eighth century BC rather than the world of 400 years earlier. The poems blend different periods together.
“There’s also this concerted effort in the eighth century BC to make the poem sound a lot older than it is,” Dunn says.
That is what makes the comparison with historical fiction so apt.
Modern historical novelists use surviving evidence, inherited stories and imaginative reconstruction to create a past that feels authentic, even though it is written from a later perspective. Something similar is happening in the Odyssey, where the poet is consciously attempting to invoke a remote heroic age.
It’s a poem that preserves memories of a civilisation that had fallen into decline centuries before, filtered through generations of oral performance, myth-making and poetic invention. It looks back to a world of palaces, kings and legendary warriors from the perspective of a later Greece, grappling with its own deep origins.
]]> James Osborne <![CDATA[Did the Trojan War really happen? Here's why even Odyssey experts can't agree]]> https://www.historyextra.com/period/ancient-greece/did-the-trojan-war-really-happen/ 2026-07-18T21:31:04.000Z 2026-07-18T21:30:43.000Z Did a coalition of Greek kings really sail across the Aegean sea to besiege the wealthy city of Troy?
Was Helen, wife of Menelaus, truly carried off by the Trojan prince Paris?
Did a 10 year war finally end when Greek warriors hid inside an enormous wooden horse and captured the city by deception?
These questions lie at the heart of Homer’s Iliad and the wider cycle of stories surrounding the Trojan War – including the Odyssey, which sees its central character Odysseus return from that conflict.
Archaeology can’t answer these questions. It can’t prove that Achilles fought Hector outside the city walls, that Helen stood on the battlements, or that Odysseus devised the Trojan Horse.
What it has shown, however, is remarkable on its own terms. Troy was a real settlement, occupied for thousands of years, strategically placed near the Dardanelles, heavily fortified, destroyed and rebuilt more than once. At least one phase of its history belongs to the world of the Late Bronze Age, the period in which any historical conflict behind the Trojan legend is most likely to have occurred.
As classicist Daisy Dunn explains, speaking on a four-part series about the Odyssey for the HistoryExtra podcast, the evidence for whether the Trojan War is myth or history is knotty and complex – like Odysseus himself.
The search for the real ancient Troy
Today, ancient Troy “is identified with the site at a place called Hisarlık, in the west of Turkey,” Dunn explains. This site is close to the Dardanelles – the narrow strait linking the Aegean Sea on toward the Black Sea.
Its location helps explain why the city may have played such a significant role in this ancient world. Anyone controlling this region could influence movement between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, making it strategically and economically important before the classical Greek world emerged.
The man most responsible for bringing Hisarlık to international fame was, a wealthy German businessman and amateur archaeologist.
“Heinrich Schliemann was the first great excavator of the site of Troy,” Dunn says. “He was tipped off as to its location. He was an incredibly rich man who had made his money through trade.”
Schliemann was convinced that Homer’s poems described real places and real events. Armed with money and determination, he travelled to Hisarlık determined to uncover the legendary city.
“He went over to where he was told Troy might be with his copy of Homer’s texts – the Iliad and the Odyssey – his digging equipment, and a little team of people, and he just began to dig.”
The man who found Troy – and almost destroyed it
Without Schliemann’s persistence, Troy might have taken far longer to excavate and identify. But modern archaeologists are highly critical of his methods.
“To modern archaeologists, he’s not really a hero,” Dunn says, “even though he’s the great excavator of the site. He made so many fundamental errors and caused so much destruction in the process of excavating Troy that he made the situation a lot muddier and murkier than it might have been.”
The problem was that Schliemann approached archaeology more like a treasure hunter than a modern field archaeologist. Today, archaeologists treat a site with immense care. Every layer of soil, every wall foundation, every broken object and every change in construction can reveal how a settlement developed. Destroying those layers destroys evidence.
- Read more | Was Homer a real person? Michael Wood explains
At Troy, this was especially damaging because Troy was not one city, but many generations of cities, built one on top of another. Unlike Pompeii, which preserves a single catastrophe, Troy developed over several thousand years.
When one settlement was destroyed – by fire, earthquake, or war – later inhabitants often rebuilt directly on top of the ruins. The result is a deep archaeological mound made up of multiple phases of occupation.
“Troy itself is a really ancient site,” Dunn explains, “so you have distinct archaeological layers from different periods in time. Archaeologists have broken these up into roughly nine main layers, with sub-layers.”
Each layer represents a different version of Troy, from the Early Bronze Age, around 3000 BC, through to the Roman period, when the city was still visited because of its legendary association with Homer.
Modern excavation depends on carefully separating these layers to establish what was built, destroyed and rebuilt at different points in time, using established techniques, like the Harris Matrix. Schliemann had no patience for that.
Digging too deep
Convinced that Homer’s Troy must lie near the bottom of the mound, Schliemann dug rapidly downwards.
“Schliemann’s rationale was, ‘Well, the Trojan War was surely the oldest thing to have happened at Troy, so to get to any evidence of Troy I need to dig to the bottom, or as deep as possible.’ So that’s pretty much what he did.”
Unfortunately, the assumption was wrong.
“If you’re an archaeologist and you just keep going down, down, down, you’re going to disrupt all those neatly sedimented layers,” Dunn explains.
“You risk one spilling into another, and you really disturb what’s actually there.”
In places, Schliemann cut vast trenches through later settlements, destroying evidence that could never be recovered. Eventually he reached what archaeologists now call Troy II, where he uncovered spectacular finds.
“We still have a lot of what he discovered,” Dunn says. “We have plates, crockery, treasure, jewellery.”
Among these objects was an extraordinary collection of gold ornaments and precious items that Schliemann triumphantly identified as the treasure of King Priam, the ruler of Troy in Homer’s Iliad.
“He had this habit of connecting whatever he found to Homer’s poetry,” Dunn explains. “So [the jewellery he found] was the treasure of Helen. It’s a very nice idea, but it’s very fanciful.”
Other archaeologists soon recognised the problem.
“The fact is – and this was discovered pretty soon afterwards – that a lot of what he found was about 1,000 years older than it should have been if it had belonged to Homer’s Troy.”
“He dug too deep. That was his big error.”
By digging so deep, Schliemann reached an Early Bronze Age settlement, many centuries older than the world traditionally linked with Homer’s heroes. Today, archaeologists looking for a possible historical context for the Trojan War focus on later layers.
“Modern archaeologists, who are trying to find evidence of the Trojan War with a more scientific approach, identify the relevant layers as Troy VI and Troy VII, not Troy II.”
These phases date broadly to the Late Bronze Age, around the 13th and 12th centuries BC – the period in which any historical conflict behind the Trojan legend is most likely to belong.
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An ancient city built for defence
“Troy VI and Troy VII are the grandest cities,” Dunn says.
“There’s really good evidence of monumental walls built from very thick limestone blocks, forming fortifications and lookout towers.”
These walls remain among the most striking features of the site. Built from massive limestone blocks, they enclosed an elevated citadel overlooking the surrounding plain. Their scale suggests a wealthy and strategically significant settlement able to command labour and resources.
Dunn says, “the kind of things we find in Homer’s poem when he’s describing what Troy looked like, those descriptions are really borne out by the evidence.”
“There are also signs of fires, and there may have been earthquakes that destroyed these layers.”
One phase of destruction was followed by rebuilding. Then came another episode of upheaval.
Preparing for danger
“One of the really interesting things is that between Troy VI and Troy VII, one of these cities is rebuilt after what might have been an earthquake.”
But it was rebuilt differently. “What had begun as quite a spread-out settlement now has much smaller houses built very close together. They also have these great big earthen pots sunk into the floors of buildings.”
Such jars could hold grain, wine, oil and other essential supplies. To archaeologists, their presence looks like preparation for insecurity rather than ordinary domestic routine; “like evidence of people trying to batten down the hatches in a time of threat.”
“They’re stockpiling. They’re putting produce underground. They’re gathering grain, wine, and whatever else they need to survive.”
Whether the inhabitants were preparing for siege, general instability, shortage or another danger cannot be proved. But Troy VII gives the impression of a city under pressure.
Is this Homer’s war?
“People who really want to find evidence of the Trojan War then say, ‘Well, look what else we’ve found. We found arrowheads. We found sling bullets. We found swords. We found bits of armour.’”
These finds show that the city certainly did experience violence and instability. But they don’t prove the scale or character of that conflict.
“They’re quite paltry remains,” Dunn notes. “You can’t look at them and say, ‘Oh, this is the material of a great big Greek army.’ There’s simply not enough there.”
A handful of weapons cannot demonstrate the decade-long siege of Homeric tradition. Nor can it identify the attackers as Greeks, or prove the involvement of figures such as Agamemnon, Achilles, Hector or Odysseus.
The destruction could have resulted from local warfare, regional instability, internal conflict or some broader Late Bronze Age upheaval.
“But there is something.”
Archaeology has shown that Troy was not an imaginary place, but a wealthy, fortified and strategically important city occupied for millennia. It flourished in the Late Bronze Age, possessed formidable walls, experienced repeated destruction and rebuilding, and at moments seems to have prepared for serious threat.
“So it’s very difficult to say exactly what happened,” Dunn says, “but certainly there was a destruction of a city, a rebuilding of a city, another destruction of a city, and another rebuilding.”
Beneath Homer’s myth and poetry is a real city with a history of wealth, danger and catastrophe. Whether one of those catastrophes was the Trojan War remains impossible to prove – for now.
Don’t miss our upcoming podcast series exploring the history of Homer’s Odyssey, featuring award-winning classicist and author Daisy Dunn. HistoryExtra members can listen to all four episodes from Sunday 19 July.
]]> Roland Hughes <![CDATA[An ancient mystery is hiding under one of Scotland's major archaeological sites – and it's about to be dug up]]> https://www.historyextra.com/period/stone-age/ness-of-brodgar-new-excavation-update-mystery/ 2026-07-03T13:01:27.000Z 2026-07-01T16:15:45.000Z The archaeological team had gathered, as they often did at the end of a day’s work, at the pub. In front of them on their table at the Ferry Inn in Stromness, the second-largest town in Scotland's Orkney archipelago, a laptop was open.
Hours earlier, they had been about five miles to the north-east at the Ness of Brodgar. This network of Neolithic (late Stone Age) buildings on a patch of land between two lochs is widely acknowledged as one of Britain’s, if not the world’s, most important prehistoric sites.
Over two days, the group, from the online archaeological show Time Team, had been slowly driving a quad bike, pulling what appeared to be a large tray over a grassy part of the Ness. It had not been mapped in detail before, and the tray was in fact a powerful ground-penetrating radar that would give them a full 3D image, made up of billions of data points, showing what lay beneath.
John Gater, a Time Team geophysicist for whom the Ness of Brodgar has been his life’s work and passion, was one of those in the pub analysing the finds on the laptop.
His colleagues already knew the results, and he had not realised that they had placed a small piece of black tape over a corner of the computer. Then they removed it, and revealed the surprise.
“I suddenly saw these results,” Gater says, and pauses. “I was quite emotional about it. That sounds over the top, but my mind was racing: ‘What have we mapped?’” Naturally, the team celebrated with a few drams of whisky.
The scans showed what has, somewhat quaintly, been called an “anomaly” – a shape buried on the edge of the Ness that was not previously known. It may end up being more than just an anomaly, however. Depending on what a dig beginning in the next few weeks shows, it could upend the narrative of the Ness of Brodgar.
The ‘anomaly’ that could rewrite the Ness story
For centuries, up to the early 2000s, no one had taken much notice of a mound of earth at the isthmus where the Ness is located. It had always appeared to be just that: an indistinct bump, albeit one in proximity to two important stone circles – the Ring of Brodgar, which dates back to the third millennium BC, and the Stones of Stenness, which, at about 5,000 years old, is probably the oldest henge in Britain.
That bump held its own secrets, however, as an archaeological survey revealed in 2002. It showed evidence of a dense cluster of structures under the ground, and further digs starting in 2004 eventually revealed the remains of close to 40 buildings.
At its heyday, the site would have been impressively tall and complex, layered with tiled roofs, coloured walls and decorated stone, suggesting it held a sense of importance to the community going back millennia.
Archaeologist Nick Card, of the University of the Highlands and Islands, has worked on the site since those early days and will be involved in this summer’s dig. His enthusiasm for the Ness of Brodgar shines through from the moment he begins talking about it.
“The Ness has transformed our understanding of many different aspects of the Neolithic in Orkney, and further afield,” he says. “It is a place where the evidence transforms our picture of social life and social change in the Neolithic, and the nature of contact and communication at broader scales.”
Why the site was covered over
But Card’s work on the Ness always had an end point, or at least a pause point. Exposing the fragile structures to the fierce elements at this meeting point of the North Sea and the Atlantic Ocean brought the risk of erosion and so, in 2024, a perhaps surprising decision was taken: the main site was covered over again. Doing so also allowed the archaeological teams to analyse and write up everything they had discovered over two decades.
“One of the reasons we covered it over was for it to be locked there for future generations, with better techniques, better technology and better science to actually deal with it in future,” Card says.
But even as the site was being covered up, there was still a sense among those who worked there that plenty more lay undiscovered. Time Team offered to fund the 3D scan of an adjoining section of the site measuring roughly 14 metres by 12. Now broadcast exclusively on YouTube since leaving Channel 4 in 2013, the programme has hundreds of thousands of subscribers, whose contributions will also fund this summer’s work.
Over four weeks, the team of up to a dozen archaeologists will remove a layer of top soil, before digging a small trench through the site, which will be excavated in sections, down to about half a metre.
“When we closed the site up in 2024, we always said: ‘That’s it, never go back, no more digging’,” says Card. “But the nature of this anomaly, we think, could add another chapter to the Ness.”
Caution before a new excavation
What exactly that chapter could be is a matter of some secrecy and caution. Everyone seems to agree that what lies under the ground is not likely to pre-date the previous Neolithic discoveries at the Ness, but it certainly is unusual.
“What’s different is we’re no longer seeing these rectilinear shapes, these large Neolithic buildings,” says John Gater. “We’re seeing something that is totally different that hasn’t been seen before on the Ness. It’s the sort of response that, although it looks very clear on the radar, there’s lots of different explanations.”
If it is indeed later than the Neolithic period, the new structure could suggest a continued occupation of the site that had not been previously known, and hint at an appreciation of the site’s significance that continued across centuries.
But that’s as much as anyone is willing to discuss – due partly to a natural caution held by archaeologists and geophysicists who don’t wish to speak too soon, and due partly to an eagerness not to reveal more before new episodes of Time Team are broadcast.
The archaeological urge not to jump the gun is understandable. Gater says that once his team carried out scans on a site that might have contained Roman ruins. They were keeping an eye out for typically straight Roman lines underground, only for scans to pick up unusual curved features. Inevitably, they were excited by this surprising discovery.
“What we had was the white lines of an old football pitch,” he says. “Where they’d been putting down lime to mark the penalty area, and so on. It had changed the moisture content of the soil.”
Even so, Gater says he is “nervously excited” about the work ahead on the site he has known for close to 50 years, and acknowledges it could lead to even further exploration.
“The rest of the landscape could be looked at, and that would be a 20-year project, I imagine,” he says. “I’ll probably be using my zimmer frame to get around, or a mobile scooter – and I could have the antenna attached to the back of that.”
]]> Colin Barras <![CDATA[Archaeologists find ancient clues that may unlock a major Stonehenge mystery]]> https://www.historyextra.com/period/stone-age/archaeologists-ancient-clues-unlock-stonehenge-mystery-bulford-site/ 2026-06-17T23:01:04.000Z 2026-06-17T23:00:27.000Z The annual solstices were so important to ancient Britons that they intentionally arranged some of the enormous stones at Stonehenge to align with the rising midsummer sun – and its winter equivalent. But the famous megalithic monument might not have been the earliest solstice-aligned structure in the area.
At a site near Bulford, 5 kilometres to the east of Stonehenge, archaeologists have found evidence of a precursor to Stonehenge’s famous solstice alignment: a simpler monument that may have served a similar purpose at least 450 years before the famous sarsen stones were raised.
“We’re talking a very precise alignment pointing at the sun, and it dates to about 2,950 BC,” says Matt Leivers at Wessex Archaeology, a UK company that provides archaeological and heritage services. “We don't have definite evidence of an alignment like that at Stonehenge until the massive sarsen stones were put in place, maybe about 2,500 BC.”
That distinction is important, because Stonehenge wasn’t built all at once. Its earliest earthwork enclosure predates the famous stone circle – erected centuries later – meaning the site’s history began long before the monument took on the form most visitors recognise today.
The discovery of the new site, which will be detailed in a forthcoming article in PAST, the newsletter of the Prehistoric Society, hints that we may need to revise the early history of Stonehenge.
A landscape crowded with ancient monuments
Stonehenge is just one of a number of ancient monuments scattered across Salisbury Plain and adjacent areas of southwest England. In the 1980s, two zones within this landscape – each more than 2,000 hectares in size – were collectively designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in recognition of this rich archaeology.
Bulford sits on the edge of the World Heritage Site, so when the UK’s Ministry of Defence announced plans to build accommodation and facilities there, they brought in a team from Wessex Archaeology to analyse the site ahead of the construction work.
- Read more | Were ancient Ireland’s ‘incestuous elites’ just a myth? A tomb older than Stonehenge has new answers
“We already knew that there was archaeology there from aerial photographs,” says Leivers. “We had a reasonable supposition that some of it might be of the same age as Stonehenge, but until we actually got in and broke the ground, we didn't know precisely what age it would be.”
A site used for more than a thousand years
The resulting excavation revealed a rich history of activity at the site, says Phil Harding, also at Wessex Archaeology. “There’s an early Neolithic phase dating to about 3,400 BC, phases of late Neolithic activity at about 2,950 BC and about 2,500 BC, and there’s also a Bronze Age phase, which dates to about 1,900 BC.”
It is the archaeology dating to 2,950 BC that most excites the researchers. “It’s precisely contemporary with the first phase of construction at Stonehenge,” says Leivers. That initial activity involved the construction of the henge itself – a circular enclosure roughly 100 metres in diameter surrounded by a bank and ditch.
“The people at Bulford, they are probably the builders of that first phase of Stonehenge,” says Leivers. “It's only five kilometres away.” But archaeologists know surprisingly little about those builders because almost none of the pottery and other material culture they used in their daily lives survives in the archaeological record. The archaeology at the Bulford site has helped plug this gap.
Clues about Stonehenge’s elusive builders
The team from Wessex Archaeology found about 50 ancient pits at the site, each about 50 centimetres deep and 60 centimetres wide, some of which were crammed with animal bones, flint tools and fragments of ancient pottery. “The contents of those pits would have been enough to get really excited about because they represent probably the largest collection of material of that date from southern England,” says Harding. “We really don't have a great deal of other material evidence of the sort of pots that they were making from that period. It’s telling us about the communities, the people who built Stonehenge.”
But two of the pits seemed to have served a different purpose.
- Read more | The secrets of Stonehenge: how was it built?
They were about twice as wide as the other pits, and had an unusual cone-like shape, tapering down into the ground. They contained none of the ancient pottery or other refuse seen in the other pits. But they did contain plenty of chalk rubble, which is a type of infill often found in pits that once held large, vertical wooden posts.
“We are talking here about posts that were probably 50 centimetres in diameter and probably two to three, maybe even four metres high,” says Harding.
A line pointing to midsummer sunrise
Harding was intrigued by the fact that there were just two of these tall posts at the Bulford site, separated by a distance of about 120 metres. He marked both points on a map of the site and joined them with a line. “I compared that to the solstitial alignment with Stonehenge, and of course they were pretty much parallel,” he says. “Then I got excited.”
The archaeologists sought advice from astronomer and archaeologist Fabio Silva at the Skyscape Academy, a UK-based educational platform. The solstice shifts position slightly over a timescale of thousands of years, so they asked Silva to calculate exactly where on the horizon the sun rose on the summer solstice at the time the posts were in place at Bulford. This confirmed that the two wooden posts were indeed aligned with the rising sun. “He told us: if you were to look along the left side of the posts, it would be pretty much bang on,” says Harding.
The researchers then realised that a small cluster of the refuse pits also lay roughly on the same line as the two large post holes. In one of these, they found a rare circular – or discoidal – flint knife. “It is an amazing piece of flint working,” says Harding. Only a few hundred of these discoidal knives have ever been found in the British Isles. “You have to believe that this is something a bit special, and when you know it’s pretty much on the sightline with the solstice then you begin to theorise,” says Harding. “Is it a representation of the sun disc?”
An earlier solstice tradition at Stonehenge?
Collectively, the discoveries suggest that the culture of people who built Stonehenge were marking the precise location of the summer solstice centuries earlier than we had thought, and long before any of the iconic stones at Stonehenge were put in place.
The Bulford discovery would be less persuasive if it stood alone. But it fits a broader pattern of Neolithic communities across Britain and Ireland paying close attention to the annual movement of the sun.
We know that ancient Britons across the British Isles had begun to build enclosures roughly aligned with the solstice even as early as 3,800 BC. “You may have an entrance of a building that faces the sunrise,” says Leivers, as an example. But between about 3,200BC and 3,000 BC, ancient Britons modified this tradition, beginning to build monuments that were perfectly aligned with the rising solstice sun.
For instance, Newgrange, a spectacular passage grave in the east of Ireland that was built around 3,200 BC, is precisely aligned with the winter solstice. On that day, light from the rising sun briefly shines directly down the passageway and into the grave’s inner chamber. “They developed an interest in actually marking the solstice with precision,” says Leivers. The finds at Bulford suggest this same interest occurred in the Stonehenge landscape on Salisbury Plain at the same time.
How strong is the evidence?
There have been other claims of early structures in the Stonehenge landscape that have a solstitial alignment, says archaeologist Vincent Gaffney at the University of Bradford in the UK. About 15 years ago, Gaffney took part in an ambitious project to survey the landscape around Stonehenge using ground-penetrating radar and other non-invasive tools. The work revealed two enormous pits at either end of the Stonehenge cursus, a 3,000-metre-long rectangular enclosure that lies a few hundred metres to the north of Stonehenge and that was constructed around 3,500 BC. “We suggested they might have solstitial linkages, but we couldn’t prove it,” says Gaffney. “The critical point is they've got dates. We haven't got dates for the pits at the cursus because there’s not been an excavation.”
- Read more | 40,000 years ago, our ancestors left these strange symbols behind. What do they really mean?
That being said, Gaffney points out that the claim of a solstitial alignment at the Burford site is made weaker by the limited evidence. “It is to a certain extent two points, and two points do make a line,” he says. Any two features can be connected geometrically; the challenge is showing that the line was intentional rather than coincidental. “That doesn’t mean it’s not significant, but proof of that is difficult.”
Why the Stonehenge landscape drew people together
It’s still unclear why ancient Britons developed an interest in marking the solstice so precisely between 3,200 and 3,000 BC. But Leivers thinks it’s less of a mystery why the Stonehenge landscape was among the places they chose to do so. Recent research in the area has suggested that the landscape there has been open and unwooded for millennia.
“The pollen evidence that we have now suggests that it was mostly turfed, with stands of trees here and there,” he says. “If you have a religion that focuses mainly on the sun, then being able to see it over a long distance is very attractive.”
It’s also clear now that it was appealing enough to attract people from across the British Isles, including those living hundreds of kilometres away. Again, this makes sense in the context of the local environment, says Harding. “You have what I call a wheel where Salisbury Plain is the central hub and then the spokes are these chalk hills – the South Downs, the North Downs, the Chilterns, the Dorset Down – that all funnel in,” he says. “They're great natural ridgeways for communicating and they all come in to the Salisbury Plain.”
]]> HistoryExtra <![CDATA[On the edge of catastrophe: life in Pompeii as Vesuvius was about to erupt]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/on-the-edge-of-catastrophe-life-in-pompeii-as-vesuvius-was-about-to-erupt/ 2026-05-15T16:01:07.000Z 2026-05-15T16:00:27.000Z On a morning in the last days of October AD 79, Pompeii pulsed with the energy of a city preparing for the shift into winter. Carts rattled over basalt blocks, their iron wheels grinding in grooves worn by decades of travel. Shopkeepers swept dust from their thresholds and fishmongers declared their prices across the forum in loud voices. On street corners, the names of politicians stretching back across the years – Popidius, Sabinus, Pansa – were scrawled in the same reds and blacks that coloured the city’s streets.
A faint tremor shook the ground underfoot. Pompeii had long learned to live with the earthquakes that had plagued the region of Campania since the great quake that destroyed swathes of the city in AD 62 – a portent of the even greater catastrophe to follow 17 years later.
Among the people travelling, shopping and working in Pompeii that October were four whose stories, woven together, reveal the texture of everyday life. A businesswoman whose estate acts as a microcosm of Pompeian society. A fish-sauce producer whose name travelled across the Mediterranean. An innkeeper serving his neighbourhood. And a priest who tended the temple of an Egyptian deity rebuilt by a freedman’s family after the AD 62 earthquake.
Thanks to studies of evidence unearthed from beneath the volcanic debris, it’s possible to identify individuals and reconstruct aspects of their personal, spiritual and professional lives. Using this knowledge, we can picture what they may have been doing on the final days before the fateful eruption.
Their lives certainly overlapped and intertwined, shaped by the same streets, the same tremors and the same currents of trade, labour and belief.
A woman of substance
The sounds that drifted over the walls of Julia Felix’s estate from the busy Via dell’Abbondanza would have been reassuringly familiar. Even in late October, Pompeii’s main shopping thoroughfare thrummed with activity.
Julia’s days were filled with activities typically undertaken by men: meeting tenants and clients, business dealings and negotiations. Her position in Pompeii was extraordinary: few women in the city – anywhere in the Roman world, for that matter – managed property of such scale or ambition.
Julia’s estate occupied an entire block. After the earthquake of AD 62, she had reshaped a damaged insula (city block) into a commercial complex that offered almost everything the people of Pompeii might need. Customers streamed into the luxurious baths, her tenants nurtured families in her rental apartments, and games-goers and travelling merchants drank in the four tabernae at the front of her property.
Earlier that year, she had commissioned a painter to advertise these facilities on the facade of her baths. In broad red letters, layered among election slogans and neighbours’ endorsements, was written: “To let, in the estate of Julia Felix, daughter of Spurius: elegant baths for respectable people, shops with upper rooms, and apartments… for five continuous years.”
Her choice to mention her father is unusual. His name, Spurius (meaning false or counterfeit), may hint at an illegitimate birth – something that most people would have avoided sharing. It is a curious and rather enigmatic detail, and one that likely raised as many questions about Julia’s background in the past as it does today. (Her name has led many to believe that she was a freedwoman of the Julii clan, which also gave us Julius Caesar.)
The more we find at Pompeii, the more we realise that women such as Julia Felix were at the heart of the Roman economy. Their legal and social freedom to engage in business helps explain why the Roman world was, economically speaking, far more dynamic than the Greek city states that preceded it. Women appear in inscriptions and wax writing tablets from Pompeii as moneylenders, traders, property owners, priestesses and workshop supervisors.
One such woman, Poppaea Note, took loans at interest. Umbricia Fortunata, a worker and, likely, freedwoman of Aulus Umbricius Scaurus – about whom we’ll read more later – sold garum (fermented fish sauce) to the people of Pompeii. The well-connected entrepreneur and priestess Eumachia constructed buildings in the forum. Other women, such as Sutoria Primigenia, wrote electoral graffiti outside their homes, despite not having the right to vote.
These realities intersected at Julia’s estate. In the city’s final days, she moved through her home surrounded by images of the world she had built: frescos showing wax tablets, purses of money, traders at work in the forum. Meanwhile, slaves prepared the dining room that opened onto her inner garden, the air cooled by water cascading over glistening marble.
Inside was a triclinium: three marble couches adorned with rich fabrics and cushions, on which Romans reclined. Around them was laid out a cornucopia of produce picked from Julia’s walled kitchen garden. The walls were painted with scenes from the Nile: of people fishing, feasting and quarrelling among reeds and riverbanks. Across the garden, set back from the long euripus channel designed to evoke the Nile itself, stood a shrine honouring Julia’s favoured deity, the Egyptian goddess Isis.
Everyman priest
The influence of the cult of Isis reached far beyond the walls of Julia Felix’s estate. Just south of the forum, where Pompeii’s busiest streets led into the theatre district, actors rehearsed in the Greek Theatre and gladiators trained in the barracks nearby. Here, somewhat isolated from that street noise within high precinct walls, stood the Temple of Isis, where the priest Amisusius was based.
Red letters above the doorway record the reconstruction of the temple: “Numerius Popidius Celsinus, son of Numerius, rebuilt the Temple of Isis from the foundations at his own expense, after it had collapsed in an earthquake. Because of his generosity, despite his age of six years, the decurions [city senators] enrolled him among their number without charge.” This confirms that Isis was seen as important to civic life, so repairing her temple was not simply pious but socially strategic, translating religious generosity into visibility and advancement.
Amisusius’s role was not limited to ceremony. He maintained the temple as a functioning place: overseeing its objects, its spaces and its routines, and acting as the point of contact between the goddess and her worshippers. In the house of Decimus Octavius Quartio, one of the temple’s regular visitors, was a painted portrait of Amisusius, labelled by name. For many Pompeians, he was the face of the cult – a familiar figure through whom access to the goddess was made possible.
Before dawn each morning, along with his fellow priests and priestesses, Amisusius rose from one of the small rooms within the precinct and began to prepare the temple for use. The scent of incense from the previous evening lingered in the portico, and statues of Isis, Anubis and Harpocrates stood waiting in the half-light. At the centre, Isis remained veiled until dawn. Her presence was something that had to be activated, and her priest controlled that access. The daily unveiling signified the beginning of sacred time, just as clearly as the opening of a workshop or market stall marked the start of work elsewhere in the city.
Once the temple was awake, Amisusius’s labour continued. Lamps were refilled, linen garments prepared, and ritual equipment arranged. Visitors arrived steadily: women hoping for help in childbirth, traders seeking protection for journeys or ventures, freedpeople and slaves asking for stability in uncertain lives. Isis was a goddess who listened to individuals’ concerns. Her temple functioned as a place where ordinary people could bring private anxieties into a public, structured space.
In the afternoon, the statue of Isis was veiled once more, closing the day’s formal interaction with the goddess. Perhaps a faint tremor beneath the priests’ feet caused the lamps to flicker. After the earthquake of AD 62, the continued performance of ritual, not least at the temple of Isis, offered a ray of hope in an unsteady world.
Fishy business
Not far away, others conducted very different rituals with similar devotion. Success in the city’s various industries required craft and commercial ambition – and few understood that world better than Aulus Umbricius Scaurus, the man behind one of the earliest recognisable brands in history.
“The flower of garum, made of the mackerel – a product of Scaurus, from the shop of Scaurus,” read the painted labels on his jars. Garum was a fermented fish sauce – the Roman equivalent of ketchup. A popular addition to the dishes of poor and rich alike, it was stirred into dishes across the Mediterranean. Sometime in the mid-first century AD, Scaurus realised just how lucrative selling garum could be.
So widespread was his operation that nearly a third of the fish-sauce jars recovered from Pompeii and Herculaneum bear his name or those of the freedmen and slaves who helped run his shops. It was undoubtedly Scaurus’s product that caused Pliny the Elder to write admiringly of Pompeii’s fish sauce in his encyclopaedic Natural History in the first century AD, stating that the city was famous for its good garum.
Scaurus oversaw a network of at least six garum workshops across Pompeii. In one of these, tucked down a side street close to the vineyards and orchards that studded the neighbourhood, sauce was fermented in large terracotta jars known as dolia sunk deep into the floor of what had once been a garden courtyard. The heavy, salty tang of fermenting mackerel emanating from the jars hit the noses of passers-by. Indeed, the odour was so persistent that, when excavators lifted the lids of these great containers nearly 1,900 years later, they reported an extraordinarily strong scent of fish still lingering within.
This workshop was where the final stage of Scaurus’s business unfolded. Apprentices stirred the prized sauce, while others ladled it into small jars known as urcei, which were labelled by mostly illiterate slaves in brisk, practised strokes. Carts then carried the output towards local shops, to the harbour and on to markets beyond the city walls.
After five decades in the trade, Scaurus himself was no longer to be found elbow-deep in garum but instead in his villa overlooking the sparkling waves of the Bay of Naples. Here he was only a stone’s throw from Pompeii’s main harbour, where much of his produce entered and left the city. The moment visitors stepped inside his villa, they were met by four carefully designed floor mosaics made with small tesserae tiles depicting his finest products. Each was labelled in the usual formula. “The flower of garum, made of mackerel, a product of Scaurus, from the shop of Scaurus,” declared one panel. “The flower of liquamen,” announced another, advertising a different grade of fish sauce.
In late October, his days were filled with routine: meeting clients, reviewing shipments and keeping stock moving smoothly before winter seas made travel uncertain. And in AD 79, life was about to become more precarious than ever.
Heart and soul
A block or so from the garum workshop of Scaurus stood Euxinus’s inn – one of the city’s ‘pub gardens’, in the heart of working-class Pompeii. Inns were spaces where customers lingered, returned daily and took part in the shared life of the neighbourhood – exchanging news, gossip and opinion while being served hearty food and drink.
That purpose was written directly onto the building itself. Election slogans jostled for space on the exterior wall in layers of faded red and black, repainted and refreshed as campaigns came and went. Among them was a shop sign designed by Euxinus himself. Below a painted phoenix perched on a shelf were Latin words meaning: “The phoenix is lucky – may you be, too.” Alongside was an election notice: “Euxinus asks you to elect Quintus Postumius and Marcus Cerrinius as aediles [magistrates], together with Iustus. Hinnulus wrote this.”
That these slogans appeared outside Euxinus’s inn is telling. Inn walls were highly visible, seen frequently by regular customers, and such messages were discussed aloud over cups of wine. Writing a notice in this space was less about persuasion than presence: a way of signalling connections, loyalties and participation in civic life. For men such as Euxinus, publicly backing candidates tied his business to the city and its people, and embedded his inn within the everyday concerns of those who gathered there.
Inside, the air was warm with the smell of wine and stew. The sounds of dice on tables and laughter bounced off the frescoed walls. As in most bars across the city, dolia were sunk into the counter, holding food and drink of varying quality, ready to be ladled to customers who flowed in and out throughout the day. Behind the bar, a wine amphora recorded the owner and his address for delivery: “The inn of Euxinus, near the amphitheatre.” It was a practical label, but also a declaration of place and reputation: Euxinus was well known in Pompeii.
The first-century AD poet Martial joked that “nowhere is the wine worse” than in cheap taverns, but Euxinus must have understood his clientele. They wanted affordability, familiarity and somewhere they could feel they belonged. He also tried his hand at winemaking. Beyond the garden door, customers lingered in the dappled calm of one of the two small vineyards he had planted, drinking a cup or two of his homemade wine, and enjoying a space that blurred the lines between work, leisure and home.
Animated lives
Imagining such vignettes reminds us that, in the weeks before the eruption, Pompeii was not a city holding its breath but a bustling, thriving place. Days unfolded within a milieu shaped by resilience and endeavour: streets rebuilt after earthquakes, workshops sustained by trade, houses and gardens enriched by cultural exchange. From dawn to dusk, small, repetitive yet disparate interactions animated life.
Within this tapestry, women such as Julia Felix show us how enterprise and property were driven by female ambition as well as by male. Merchants such as Scaurus reveal an economy that reached far beyond the city walls, with Pompeian goods dispatched to distant shores. Figures such as Euxinus embody the everyday sociability and mutual reliance that kept neighbourhood life and the informal economy in motion. And religious figures, including the priests of Isis, remind us of the spiritual networks that bound together people of different origins, languages and expectations.
- Read more | How were Pompeii and Herculaneum discovered?
Taken together, these ordinary lives inform our understanding of a city defined not by its end but by its intensity. We hear voices carried across courtyards and out onto the street, with transactions, labour, ritual and ambition unfolding side by side. Up until the moment it fell silent, Pompeii was a city profoundly and restlessly alive.
We should also remember that the eruption of Vesuvius did not extinguish first-hand memories of Pompeii. Some residents survived, having left the city before, during or immediately after the disaster, and began again elsewhere along the Bay of Naples and further afield. Their experiences are difficult to recover but, in a small number of cases, traces remain.
One is linked to the fish-sauce trade that flourished in Pompeii before the eruption. As we have seen, garum production was one of Pompeii’s most visible industries, and the Umbricius family was closely involved in its manufacture and distribution.
After the eruption, evidence of this trade and, seemingly, this family appears in the large port town of Puteoli, some 37 miles to the north. Puteoli was only lightly affected by the disaster, and remained one of the most important commercial centres in Roman Italy. And though we can’t say with certainty whether garum producer Aulus Umbricius Scaurus survived the eruption of Vesuvius, we do have one compelling hint that at least one member of his family may have escaped the carnage.
Stamps on garum containers found elsewhere bear the name L Iunius Puteolanus. That cognomen (third name, typically passed from father to son in Roman society) means ‘of Puteoli’. Terracotta jar labels with similar wording – “The Flower of Garum of Puteolanus” – to that on Scaurus’s products suggest a close, perhaps familial, connection. Was Puteolanus a relative or descendant of Scaurus? Perhaps. It certainly seems that knowledge, methods and commercial identity travelled with those who escaped the eruption.
This evidence offers a unique perspective on the aftermath of Vesuvius. Though it is difficult to trace the stories of individuals, people likely did what people have always done in the aftermath of tragedy. Displaying admirable resilience, survivors employed their skills, contacts and, if they were fortunate, remaining wealth to begin anew.
Jess Venner is Leverhulme early career fellow at the University of Oxford, and author of The Lost Voices of Pompeii: The Final Day in Seven Lives (Mudlark, 2026)
This article was first published in the May 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
]]> Hilary Mitchell <![CDATA[12 modern trends with surprisingly ancient roots]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/12-modern-trends-with-surprisingly-ancient-roots/ 2026-03-08T15:31:03.000Z 2026-03-08T15:30:09.000Z 1. Cooking competitions
Long before MasterChef, cooks in medieval Iraq also competed for culinary glory. In the 10th century, a collection of recipes from eighth and ninth-century Baghdad were compiled into a recipe book called Kitāb al-ṭabīkh (‘The Book of Dishes’) by Ibn Sayyār al-Warrāq. As well as recipes, the book also includes fascinating accounts of what could be described as very early cookery competitions. They weren’t long-running, weekly tournaments like those we see on TV, but they were still prestigious culinary events, usually staged in elite households, which allowed rival chefs to showcase their talents.
In one section that sounds very much like a challenge from The Great British Bake Off, al-Warrāq describes banquets where different chefs’ versions of the same dish were compared and judged by their patrons. There’s also another anecdote (recounted in later culinary literature) about the caliph al-Ma’mūn challenging his cooks to produce dishes using unexpected ingredients – like an early version of Ready Steady Cook.
2. Online gossip
These days, gossip pages like Deuxmoi – a popular, mostly anonymous Instagram account that shares insider info about well-known people – are a staple of social media sites. However, it’s certainly not a new phenomenon. People in ancient Mesopotamia were gossiping about the elite and writing down the most salacious rumours about them.
Cuneiform tablets written around 1800–1760 BC record a Mesopotamian mayor’s shocking affair with a married woman. An official spills the tea, writing to the king to say that the mayor of the city has been “lying with another man’s wife”, and explaining that the citizens are all outraged; everyone in the city is talking about the scandal.
The tablet is part of a group of Old Babylonian cuneiform tablets found at ancient Mari – modern Tell Hariri – in Syria, the majority of which take the form of messages sent to King Zimri-Lim about various goings-on in his country. It’s not quite an Instagram gossip column, but it’s clearly an early example of a very personal scandal spreading through social networks.
3. Memes
Memes, defined in 1976 by Richard Dawkins as a cultural idea, behaviour or style that spreads by imitation, are usually thought to be a uniquely online, modern phenomenon. However, plenty of things went ‘viral’ long before the internet.
Some of the strongest contenders for the earliest memes are the recurring images that medieval manuscript illuminators often filled their margins with: everything from rabbits jousting with snails to cats playing bagpipes. These weren’t random; they were part of a shared visual language that spread from one workshop or region to another – much like memes do online today – partly due to travelling artisans.
The knight versus snail motif appears in manuscripts from England, France and Flanders between the 13th and 14th centuries. No one knows exactly what it symbolised; perhaps cowardice or another form of social satire, but the fact that it appears repeatedly, across borders, suggests it went ‘viral’ among medieval illustrators, in a way.
4. Customer complaints
Long before review sites or consumer watchdogs, people were already putting their grievances in writing. The world’s oldest known commercial customer complaint comes from ancient Mesopotamia, around 1750 BC, and survives on a clay tablet now in the British Museum. It was written by a copper merchant named Nanni, who was furious with another trader, Ea-nāṣir, for delivering substandard copper ingots and treating his messenger rudely. “You have treated me with contempt,” Nanni scolds in Akkadian cuneiform, before demanding the return of his money and warning that he will never accept such poor service again.
The infamous Ea-nāṣir lived in the city of Ur (modern Tell el-Muqayyar, southern Iraq) and his house, excavated by archaeologists in the 20th century, contained dozens of tablets relating to his copper trade. Many of them record debts and complaints, suggesting that his bad customer service may have been a bit of a pattern. The famous tablet, with its dry fury and insistence on fair dealing, certainly reads like a modern complaint email, which in turn has led to Ea-nāṣir becoming a popular meme about bad customer service nearly 4,000 years later.
5. OnlyFans
OnlyFans – an online platform founded in 2016 where creators share exclusive, paywalled and often pornographic content for subscribers – might seem distinctively modern. However, like the other examples on this list, the concept of subscribing for privileged access or intimacy is nothing new.
In classical Greece, higher-status hetairai (courtesans) cultivated circles of wealthy patrons who paid retainers or gave gifts for their company, conversation, and, sometimes, sex. Unlike lower-status sex workers (pornai), these women were admired for their education, wit and influence, with some even able to move in elite, male-dominated political circles that were closed to most Athenian women.
The most famous was arguably Aspasia of Miletus, companion to the statesman Pericles, who was celebrated for her eloquence and rumoured to have advised some of Athens’ greatest thinkers, according to later writers. Satirical poets mocked her as a mere brothel-keeper, but others respected her intellect.
6. 'Diss' tracks
When you think of ‘diss tracks’ (short for ‘disrespect’), your mind probably conjures up the combative hip-hop feuds of the 1980s and 90s, when angry lyrics sometimes spilled into real-world violence. But the practice of using music to mock, ridicule or attack rivals has a much longer history. Well before rap battles and chart-topping beefs, composers and songwriters were crafting satirical songs aimed squarely at opponents.
In the 18th century, for example, musical ridicule was a common feature of political life. One of the best-known examples is ‘Yankee Doodle’, first sung by British troops during the Seven Years’ War to mock American colonists as uncultured and naive. The famous line “Stuck a feather in his cap / And called it Macaroni” lampooned the colonists’ attempts to imitate London fashions, portraying them as pretentious fools. It’s not exactly ‘Hit ’Em Up’ by Tupac Shakur, but the aim was still to ‘diss’ the enemy.
7. Personal trainers
Even if you don’t get to the gym as often as you’d like, your fitness ambitions have a very proud and ancient heritage. In ancient Greece, fitness wasn’t just about physical strength; it was a cornerstone of culture, identity and civic pride. The Greeks believed in the ideal of kalokagathia, the harmony of body and mind, and saw exercise as essential to both moral and intellectual development.
Gymnasia, open-air training grounds where men gathered to run, wrestle and practice discus or javelin, were also vibrant social hubs, much like today’s gyms. Athletes even trained with personal trainers (paidotribai) and coaches (gymnastai) who supervised their charges and advised them on diet and exercise.
In many ways, our modern obsession with health, aesthetics and community around fitness is a direct descendant of this ancient Greek ideal: proof that the pursuit of a buff body has a long history. Our ancestors couldn’t post their rock-hard abs on social media, but statues of the time preserve the ideal of physical perfection they were striving for.
8. Influencers
The next time you see a well-dressed young person doing a complicated viral dance in public while their friend records them on their phone, take a moment to contemplate the original ‘influencer’, Empress Theodora of Byzantium, who lived in the sixth century. She was the wife of Emperor Justinian I and rose from humble origins as an actress to become one of the most powerful – and influential – women in the Byzantine empire.
Mosaics and contemporary accounts show her wearing lavish, bejewelled outfits that set the example for court fashion. She was a particular fan of imperial purple (an elite colour manufactured from rare and expensive murex shellfish) as well as heavy jewellery and elaborate headpieces – all of which became aspirational goals for other aristocratic women. Her image was also very carefully curated – demonstrating a blend of sensuality, intellect, and authority – much like a modern social media influencer’s personal brand.
9. Dancing contests
Much-loved autumn TV staple Strictly Come Dancing is, in many ways, a more polished, spangly descendant of ancient Greek dance contests. By the sixth century BC, choreographed group dances (choreiai) were central to major religious festivals honouring gods such as Apollo, Athena and Dionysus. Festivals like the City Dionysia and the Panathenaic Festival featured formal dance contests, in which trained groups performed elaborate dances in honour of the deities. These contests were often sponsored by wealthy patrons, and participants were judged and awarded prizes.
Also, if that wasn’t ancient enough, there’s evidence of ritual dance events much earlier, in the Bronze Age Minoan civilisation (c1600 BC). Frescoes and artefacts from Knossos and Phaistos depict groups of dancers performing in ritual circles, sometimes with acrobatic elements. While there’s no formal evidence that these were competitive in the sense of judged contests, some scholars suggest they may have involved displays of skill or athleticism. Not quite Strictly Come Knossos, but coordinated, organised group dance certainly has a history stretching back over 3,500 years.
10. Fake news
In this age of online misinformation, doctored images and AI videos, we hear a lot about ‘fake news’, but propaganda is nothing new. The use of exaggerated or misleading accounts to shape public perception goes back at least to 1274 BC, with Pharaoh Ramesses II and his so-called ‘victory’ at the battle of Kadesh against the Hittites.
In reality, the battle was a stalemate. Despite this, Ramesses commissioned bombastic, braggadocious inscriptions and temple reliefs across Egypt depicting him single-handedly defeating the enemy, crushing chariots, and leading triumphant processions. These highly flattering depictions were essentially ancient PR: they reinforced his image as an unbeatable warrior-king for anyone who saw them, leaving a lasting impression of triumph, power and invulnerability that didn’t match the facts.
11. Nail art and manicures
When you get your nails done, you’re participating in a tradition that stretches back thousands of years, to the civilisations of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. Archaeological evidence suggests that male Babylonian warriors tinted their nails with kohl and crushed minerals before battle: black or green for nobles, lighter shades for other fighters. In Egypt, nails were tinted with henna, with deeper red shades signalling higher status. Cleopatra, according to later sources, favoured a deep crimson.
Wealthy elites did not paint their own nails; attendants or servants prepared henna pastes, shaped nails with small metal tools, and applied the coatings. Tomb depictions from the New Kingdom (c1500 BC) show servants grooming noblewomen, offering evidence of manicure-like services. While these attendants weren’t professional ‘nail technicians’ in the modern sense, they performed many of the same functions: mixing cosmetic pastes, shaping nails, and applying a pop of colour for aesthetic effect.
12. Cancel culture
We hear a lot about so-called ‘cancel culture’ these days, with many people – often outspoken ‘free speech’ advocates with controversial views – claiming their careers have been “ruined” because of a backlash to something they’ve said or done. However, they should probably count themselves lucky that, in 2025, ‘cancellation’ rarely includes formal banishment from your home city, which is the fate that faced ostracised Athenians in the early fifth century BC.
Ostracism was a formal mechanism that allowed citizens to exile public figures for 10 years. It was intended as a safeguard against tyranny: if an individual was deemed a threat to democracy, the citizen body could vote to remove them without resorting to legal prosecution. Each year, the assembly would decide whether to hold an ostracism; if so, citizens scratched the name of the person they wished to exile onto a pottery sherd called an ostrakon.
The ancient sources are slightly unclear, but it seems either a minimum threshold of 6,000 votes was required to validate the process, or a person needed 6,000 votes against them to be banished. Those exiled retained their property and legal rights, returning home once the 10-year period ended; possibly feeling a bit miffed about being shunned for a decade.
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