This grave is 135 years older than the founding of America.
It is 101 years older than the first use of the word dinosaur.
9 years older than the first ever coffee shop.
163 years older than trains, 240 years older than light bulbs.
66 years older than the founding of the United Kingdom
40 years older than the classical musician bach.
It reads (to the best of my knowledge) "Anne the wife of Christopher Dobson a Bishop Auckland yeoman, died in child birth December 23rd 1641.
I'm unsure of the bottom text.
I just graduated with my Associates degree and I am looking to transfer in spring 2027 to universities that are great for Mediterranean archaeology. I have a budget for universities so I am not looking at any Ivy leagues, and I am attracted to the idea of going internationally. I plan to go to Sapienza university of Rome for my masters, but I need somewhere for my bachelors that will transfer my credits over if I do international. For the US I have multiple already listed, I just wanted to see what other people recommended. For the US it doesn’t have to specifically have archaeology as the major since the US usually puts it under anthropology.
While often treated as a "mystery," the engineering of the Antikythera Mechanism is grounded in documented physics. In 2006, a 12-tonne custom CT scanner produced 3D mappings at 60-micrometre resolution, identifying a pin offset from a gear center used to drive a slotted gear. This modeled the Moon's acceleration at perigee (variable orbital speed) with extreme accuracy. I have been archiving the gear-ratio math and CT evidence from the original Cardiff University study for those interested in the hardware: Investigation: The Hardware of the Antikythera
I'm looking for any baby or young children's book recommendations having to do with archaeology. I work at Fort Frederica National Monument and I want to get a book for my niece ( turning 1) and stamp it with the park stamp so I'm trying to find something that relates to the site. Worst case I'll get a book about the marsh.
I bought Little Archaeologist but it isn't very good, there's no dialog. So I returned it and back on the hunt.
See also: The publication in Science Advances
13th century Paderborn, Germany
Klaus Schmidt started excavating Göbekli Tepe in 1995 and within a couple of seasons knew something was off. The textbook order is hunter-gatherer, then farming, then villages, then monuments. No farming, no temples. Schmidt found temples without farming. He died in 2014 still arguing the order was backwards.
A few miles away, Karahan Tepe has been excavated for the last decade under Necmi Karul, and it keeps making Schmidt look correct. Fifteen-foot carved pillars. Faces, animals, abstract symbols. Built structures around them. Roughly 12,000 years old. Before agriculture, pottery, or the wheel. Older than the pyramids by more than the pyramids are older than us. Older than Stonehenge by longer than the gap between Stonehenge and the smartphone in your pocket.
The "they were barely surviving" defense has been doing a lot of work. A diet analysis the Taş Tepeler team published recently described a focused subsistence strategy heavy on gazelle and legumes, used consistently across years. Not whatever wandered past. A planned food system. The defense is getting harder to maintain every season.
What I find more interesting than the site itself is what is not in the ground. Sea levels rose roughly 130 meters at the end of the last ice age. Doggerland is underwater. Sundaland, an area roughly the size of India, is underwater. Most of the Persian Gulf used to be dry land. The places where earlier complex sites would most plausibly be are now seafloor. That is a gap in the dataset, not a finding either way.
Then there is the Göbekli Tepe burial. Around 11,000 years ago, the people using the site appear to have filled it in with earth. Whether the burial was deliberate ritual closure or a more gradual process is still being argued. Schmidt thought it was deliberate. Other current researchers think the picture is more mixed. But take Schmidt's read for a second. People do not usually bury cathedrals. Notre Dame is not buried. The Hagia Sophia is not buried. If the burial was deliberate, then a community organized enough labor to seal the most significant structure they had ever made.
Established: both sites are real and well dated, the architecture is real, the carvings are real, they predate agriculture.
Contested: whether Schmidt's "temple first, farming second" sequence is exactly right, whether Karahan Tepe was a year-round village or seasonal, whether the buildings were temples or houses or something we do not have a category for yet, whether the burial of Göbekli Tepe was deliberate.
If hunter-gatherers were already doing this 12,000 years ago, what is the gap in the dataset hiding?
For a 19th-century geographer, a "mile" was not a static thing—it was a variable impacted by mud, slope, and weather. The railroad changed this by forcing the physical landscape to submit to the mathematics of the grid.
Analysis of the Spatial Grid and Infrastructure: How Railroads Standardized Space
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Cheikh Anta Diop smiling right now 😏
Hey everyone, frustrated seasonal CRM archaeologist here. I’m just generally looking for advice or insight into what’s happening. I finished my undergraduate degree in 2024, but have worked with my current company since my junior year of college (this is my fourth year with them). Up until last year we’d have consistent nine day projects throughout the year, but with all the DOGE and funding issues, 2025 was a very slow and poor paying season.
This year is shaping up to be even worse with my regional manager explaining projects won’t begin until mid to late June, if they happen at all. I’ve applied to several other firms for basic on-call tech positions, but haven’t gotten anything. I have plans to attend graduate school starting next year, but that’s a long time to be strung around hoping work will appear. Is this just another bad year for archaeology in general, or is it just a company issue? I fully expected to have a low income being a seasonal tech without a Master’s, but this feels especially bad.
Thanks for any insight!