A villager in Egypt's Nile Delta reported a carved block on his land, and an emergency excavation has since uncovered two colossal royal statues, at least one of them Ramesses II, plus a pink granite block bearing the pharaoh's titles. How they ended up in a village known for a temple built almost nine centuries after his reign remains unexplained.

A man in Behbeit el-Hagar, a village in Egypt’s Gharbia province, was working on a plot of land in front of his house when he came across a block covered in carvings.

He told the local antiquities inspectorate. What came out of the ground afterwards, according to a statement from Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, were the remains of two enormous royal statues. One shows Ramesses II.

The other, in all likelihood, shows the same pharaoh. A block of pink granite carrying part of his titles in hieroglyphs turned up with them. Inspectors visited the site and confirmed that the block was ancient. The local inspectorate followed the legal procedure and drew up a report, and Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, the state body in charge of the country’s archaeological sites, set up a committee and a specialist team to open a rescue excavation.

That kind of dig is not part of any research plan. It happens when something unexpected surfaces and has to be recorded and protected before it is lost.

Archaeologists at the ancient city of Kayalıpınar in central Turkey have uncovered a Hittite royal archive of 184 cuneiform tablets and fragments preserved for about 3,400 years.

The current excavation, led by Koç University in collaboration with Turkey’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism, recovered 131 tablets this season, adding to the 53 found at the site in previous years.

Kayalıpınar is located in the Yıldızeli district of Sivas Province, on land the Hittites once knew as Šamuḫa. This site served as an administrative and religious center that is frequently mentioned in surviving Hittite texts.

Excavations have been ongoing since 2021, led by Koç University Associate Professor Çiğdem Maner and a multidisciplinary team from Turkey and abroad.

The land of Šamuḫa was known for the worship of Šauška, a goddess associated with love and war.

Previous excavations have uncovered more than 50 seal impressions stamped into clay, belonging to Hittite royalty, priests, and administrators. The team suspects a building used to seal official documents may lie beneath layers containing early Christian burials.

The site has been occupied for thousands of years, with evidence of Assyrian trading posts before the rise of the Hittite state, as well as Roman and Byzantine occupation.

The newly discovered tablets add another layer to this sequence, documenting a Bronze Age period through texts written in both Hittite and Hurrian.

Finds suggest account in medieval folklore of a camp near Frenni Fawr hill was rooted in reality.

Magnus Maximus, the Roman emperor who ruled Britain in the fourth century, led his troops against the Picts and Scots, but a theory that he also established a military camp near Frenni Fawr hill in Wales has so far been based on folklore.

Now fourth-century coins, among other finds at a newly identified Roman fort in Pembrokeshire, suggest the medieval tale was rooted in reality, to the excitement of archaeologists.

The fort was discovered by Dr Mark Merrony, a leading Roman specialist at the University of Oxford. He heads an excavation that is bringing to life a story about Magnus Maximus, as told in the Mabinogion, a collection of medieval epic tales of myth, magic and miracles.

Merrony expressed excitement that this landscape held the only Roman military site close to where the Mabinogion places the emperor.

“If Magnus Maximus was there, there must have been an army there,” he said.

Really enjoyed this interview with comedian and actor George Fouracres on The Archaeologists Notebook. Always interesting to see people from outside the profession with a genuine enthusiasm for archaeology!

A geophysical survey of the Grotta delle Veneri (Cave of Venuses) in southern Italy has identified possible hidden cavities that may connect to the existing prehistoric cave system.

The Grotta delle Veneri is located near the town of Parabita in the Puglia region and is an important Palaeolithic site, with archaeological evidence of occupation by both Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans.

The cave takes its name from the discovery of two Palaeolithic Venus figurines, carved from animal bone around 20,000 years ago.

Both figurines depict stylised female forms with their arms positioned across the breasts and beneath the abdomen, which some researchers have interpreted as representations of pregnancy or fertility.

Previous archaeological investigations at the Grotta delle Veneri have also uncovered older deposits associated with Neanderthal occupation.

In a new study, researchers from the University of Malta and Italy’s Institute of Heritage Studies conducted a geophysical survey to investigate the subsurface structure of the cave and surrounding limestone.

She recently started school for her masters degree after working as a field for several years, and I know having good tools she can rely on is important. She grew up very poor and doesn't like spending money on herself, and she's bad at accepting help because she's always had to rely on herself. I had to beg her to let me pay for her new school laptop for example, and I only managed to convince her to let me pay for half.

I was thinking something like a high quality knife, but I know there are so many kinds used in the field, and I'm not an archeologist, so I don't know where to start. I'm not looking to spend thousands, but a few hundred is ok for the right thing/things.

(Don't worry I'm not going to get anything without talking to her about it lol)

The Chronicle Heritage closed more than 20 offices without a public announcement, leaving employees shocked and major archaeological projects facing an uncertain future.

The archaeology megafirm Chronicle Heritage has abruptly shut down its offices. It was the largest cultural resource management company in the country.

Jakob Sedig, a senior archaeologist with Chronicle Heritage who served as the principal investigator for the company’s Phoenix and Tucson offices, confirmed the closure to Inc.

Science first reported the closure on Tuesday, but rumors have circulated online since the beginning of this month.

The move, which has not been announced publicly by the company, came on October 1, when employees were told at a town hall meeting. According to Sedig, the executive team informed office principals the night before.

The company was a major player in the for-profit cultural heritage industry, with more than 20 offices, approximately 600 employees, and an estimated annual revenue of $100 million, according to Science.

Companies such as Chronicle Heritage are often hired to conduct legally required archaeological surveys and other reviews before major development projects. 

According to Science, some observers have estimated that Chronicle Heritage conducted up to %90 of the archaeological research performed in the U.S. last year.

Christopher Dore, president of the Society for American Archaeology, told Inc. that the industry’s first concern was for the employees being laid off with little notice.

However, Dore, who said he has no inside information about the company’s decision, noted that demand for archaeological work remains.

One of the bigger concerns is what will happen to the materials and projects Chronicle leaves behind. 

Hello, my passion for archaeology has recently come back to life and I am looking for some nice books about the topic. And what better place to ask than this!

I really like ancient civilizations from South America and, overall, any kind of civilization and culture that are lost to time and still shrouded in mystery.

Possibly books that don't exceed 200-ish pages, please.

Chronicle Heritage, the largest cultural resources management company in the United States, abruptly announced last week it was shutting down, Science has learned. The 1 October move, which has not been announced publicly, came as a surprise to the firm’s more than 600 employees, including numerous archaeologists and paleontologists who were recalled from digs and other projects around the world...

A new study examines the burial of a man at La Almoloya, an El Argar site in southeastern Spain.

Marco Mazón Gomariz of the Complutense University of Madrid published the work in ‘Ilu, a journal of religious studies.

He focuses on a skeleton labeled AY5. Excavators found the man in Room H9 of the site’s first residential complex. The layer dates to 1750-1550 BCE, the third phase of the El Argar culture.

The burial is strange. AY5 was about 40 years old and stood roughly 1.63 meters tall. His bones show no heavy labor. Builders sealed him between two floor levels.

His lower body lay under a large hearth. His face sat 1 centimeter below the surface, right where people walked. Someone shoved a big stone into his mouth. No grave goods came with him, unlike most El Argar burials.

His skeleton shows no wounds, though a cut throat or strangling would leave no mark on bone. The excavators called him “the enemy” and read the burial as punishment.

Mazón Gomariz sees a ritual instead. He thinks the setup was magic, meant to control forces of chaos the man was believed to carry.

He builds the case from far-off parallels. Mesopotamian kings carved themselves with a foot on a beaten rival, as on the stele of Naram-Sin.

Egyptian pharaohs took the idea further. Artists painted or carved prisoners on doorframes, floors, sandals and footstools, so every step crushed an enemy. Egyptians saw those enemies as agents of chaos. Trampling them kept order in place.

Mesopotamian sorcery adds more. People made clay figurines of a witch and stamped on them.

Spells often targeted the mouth of a demon or sorcerer to cut off speech. In Iran, a man at Hasanlu was buried with a cylinder seal in his mouth, which another scholar read as an attempt to seal it. Mazón Gomariz says the stone in AY5’s mouth fits.

It would silence him in life and as a ghost. Mesopotamians feared the ghosts of badly buried dead.

The room itself supports his view. H9 was a dim semi-basement with about 70 square meters of usable space. It held benches for around 50 people and a podium 1 meter high. T

he hearth covered more than 4 square meters and sat in a pit. No other hearth at the site in this phase was built that way.

Visitors reached the hall through a winding route, hidden from the main street. The author reads this as a sacred space, not just a political one. Fire there might have purified the room and driven off harmful forces.