Oldest Sun Observatory

Long before the Incas rose to power in Peru and began to celebrate their sun god, a little known civilization was building the earliest known astronomical observatory in the Americas.


While not quite as old as sites like Stonehenge, these ancient ruins, known as Chankillo, are considered a "masterpiece of human creative genius", holding unique features not seen anywhere else in the world.


Based in the coastal desert of Peru, the archaeological site famously contains a row of 13 stone towers, which together trace the horizon of a hill, north to south, like a toothy bottom grin.

The Thirteen Towers of Chankillo. (David Edgar/Wikipedia/CC BY-SA 3.0)

Apart from this remarkable structure, known as the Thirteen Towers, the ruins of the observatory also include a triple-walled hilltop complex called the Fortified Temple and two building complexes called the Observatory and the Administrative Center.


Completed over 2,300 years ago and abandoned in the first century of the common era, the site has remained a mystery to travelers for centuries.


Only when official excavations began at the turn of the 21st century, did archaeologists realize what they were looking at.  READ MORE...

Most Important Archaelogical Discoveries in 2021

Every year, we delve back through our coverage to find the most fascinating archaeological discoveries of the year, whether by a complete amateur, or as the result of years of careful study by a team of experts.

As always, archaeology news takes us around the globe and throughout the ages, from the earliest days of human history through to the contemporary era. Here are our picks for the 2021 archaeological stories worth revisiting.

Stonehenge Revelations

Stonehenge at sunrise in 2015. Photo by Freesally, public domain.

The ancient circle of stone monoliths on the U.K.’s Salisbury Plain is one of history’s most enduring mysteries. But while we may never fully understand this ancient structure, experts are learning more and more about it each year.

Thanks in no small part to the late Robert Phillips, a diamond cutter who made repairs to a fallen stone at the site in 1958, we now know that the massive monoliths are made from a nearly indestructible matrix of interlocking quartz crystals—which is why the monument has stood for millennia. Phillips drilled a three-and-a-half foot core sample during his work, which he was allowed to keep as a souvenir. He returned it in 2019, allowing scientists to conduct valuable testing on the stones, which are now protected under English heritage law and cannot be sampled.

This year also saw archaeologists discover a former stone circle in Wales that closely matches the dimensions of Stonehenge’s inner ring. That suggests that the site’s inner stone circle was originally erected 175 miles away and moved to Salisbury Plain—and carbon dating shows it was built 400 years before Stonehenge proper. If this all seems too unbelievable to be true, just wait: it perfectly matches a Stonehenge legend that Merlin stole the monument and moved it to England.

Original Flavor Pompeii—and a New Version in Egypt

The lost city discovered by archaeologists near Luxor in Egypt. Photo by Zahi Hawass, courtesy 

of the Center for Egyptology.


Do the discoveries ever seem to stop in Pompeii? A newly excavated thermopolium, a kind of Roman fast food restaurant, began welcoming visitors this summer. Archaeologists were able to identify the space in part because it was decorated with frescoes featuring some popular ingredients in Pompeii cuisine, such as roosters.

Other Pompeii finds this year included an intact chariot, slaves’ quarters, and evidence of thriving Greek theater scene.

But Pompeii isn’t the only ancient city found nearly intact. In fact, a smaller “mini” Pompeii was found hidden beneath vines in Verona by construction workers. And in Egypt, another wellspring of ancient treasures, 2021 saw what’s being hailed as the nation’s most significant discovery since Howard Carter uncovered King Tut’s golden tomb nearly a century ago: the abandoned city of Luxor.

The city was a royal metropolis outside the city of Thebes built by Tutankhamun’s grandfather, King Amenhotep III. His son, Akhenaten, appears to have abandoned the city when he started a new religion worshipping only the sun god, Aten.  READ MORE...

Indestructible Ancient Material

The full moon sets behind Stonehenge on April 27, 2021 in Amesbury, England. Photo by Finnbarr Webster/Getty Images.

A long lost piece of England’s Stonehenge monument is helping experts understand the mysterious prehistoric structure. 

Analysis of a core sample taken from one of the site’s massive slabs suggests that the stone’s geochemical composition may have made it uniquely well-equipped to stand the test of time.

Made from 99.7 percent quartz crystals, the stones are practically indestructible, according to a new study published in the journal Plos One.

“Now we’ve got a good idea why this stuff’s still standing there,” study co-author David Nash, a professor of physical geography at the University of Brighton, told Business Insider. “The stone is incredibly durable—it’s really resistant to erosion and weathering.”


The study was made possible thanks to a former diamond cutter, Robert Phillips, who died last year. 

He did repair work at Stonehenge in 1958, drilling into Stone 58 to help re-erect a fallen trilithon of three stones.  READ MORE

The Survival of Stonehenge

Much of Stonehenge has remained almost unchanged since Stone Age builders erected its massive sandstone boulders, or sarsens, 5,000 years ago on England's Salisbury Plain.

A new study reveals how the monument has stood the test of time so successfully: The quartz crystals that make up the sarsens form an interlocking structure that makes the boulders nearly indestructible.

"Now we've got a good idea why this stuff's still standing there," David Nash, a professor of physical geography at the University of Brighton who co-authored the study, told Insider. "The stone is incredibly durable — it's really resistant to erosion and weathering."

The study also revealed that some of Stonehenge's sarsens contain grains of rock that are between 1 billion and 1.6 billion years old.

The new research was born out of an act of repatriation.

In 1958, a team was repairing a cracked chunk of sandstone, and a driller named Robert Phillips took a 3-foot-long piece of Stonehenge. 

He eventually brought the relic to his home in Florida, but after 60 years, the Phillips family repatriated it to English Heritage, a charity that preserves Stonehenge.

The rock's return offered Nash's team an opportunity to investigate the monument's geological origins. Stonehenge is protected by law, so it's impossible to extract new samples for study.  READ MORE

Stonehenge Reveals Its Age

A long-lost piece of Stonehenge that was taken by a man performing restoration work on the monument has been returned after 60 years, giving scientists a chance to peer inside a pillar of the iconic monument for the first time.
     

In 1958, Robert Phillips, a representative of the drilling company helping to restore Stonehenge, took the cylindrical core after it was drilled from one of Stonehenge's pillars — Stone 58. 

Later, when he emigrated to the United States, Phillips took the core with him. Because of Stonehenge's protected status, it's no longer possible to extract samples from the stones. 

But with the core's return in 2018, researchers had the opportunity to perform unprecedented geochemical analyses of a Stonehenge pillar, which they described in a new study.

They found that Stonehenge's towering standing stones, or sarsens, were made of rock containing sediments that formed when dinosaurs walked the Earth. 

Other grains in the rock date as far back as 1.6 billion years.  READ MORE

Mystifying Monuments

A mysterious group of ancient monuments first discovered in Saudi Arabia in the 1970s, known as mustatials, predate the first Egyptian pyramids and Stonehenge by over 2,000 years, making them the world’s oldest ritual landscape, archaeologists now say.

Scattered across 77,000 square miles of desert in northwest Arabia, the mustatils (the name comes from the Arabic word for “rectangle”) were built between 8,500 and 4,800 years ago, during the period known as the Middle Holocene, according to a report published last week in the journal Antiquity.

Through satellite imagery, helicopter and ground surveys, and excavations, the study identified more than 1,000 mustatils, typically built in clusters. That’s more than double the number previously thought to exist.  

The project, led by a team from the University of Western Australia, is being funded by the Royal Commission for AlUla, which is hoping to drive tourism to the nearby site of AlUla.

Experts had previously raised numerous theories as to the structures’ purpose, including as animal enclosures, burial sites, or territory markers. But the new study shows that the mustatils‘s walls would have been too low to prevent animals from escaping.  TO READ MORE, CLICK HERE...