Archaeologists have uncovered what may be the largest royal tomb found in more than a century of work on Maya ruins in Belize, along with a puzzling set of hieroglyphic panels that provide clues to a “snake dynasty” that conquered many of its neighbors some 1,300 years ago. The tomb was unearthed at the ruins of Xunantunich, a city on the Mopan river in western Belize that served as a ceremonial center in the final centuries of Maya dominance around 600 to 800AD. Archaeologists found the chamber 16ft to 26ft below ground, where it had been hidden under more than a millennium of dirt and debris.

Researchers from the University of Victoria and colleagues in the US and Jordan just unearthed the oldest evidence of protein residue on stone tools, suggesting that early humans living 250,000 years ago in the Middle East were already using instruments to obtain food from animals. Writing in the latest edition of the Journal of Archaeological Science, paleoanthropologist April Nowell and her colleagues explained they excavated a total of 10,000 stone tools from a site known as Shishan Mars, a desert oasis located close to Azraq, Jordan.

Since the discovery of Ötzi the Iceman in a European glacier in 1991, scientists have recovered a wealth of information from his 5,300-year-old mummified remains: The brown-eyed, gap-toothed, tattooed man most likely spent his 40-odd years farming and herding, and was probably suffering from a painful stomach ache at the time that he died a quick—albeit violent—death in the Öztal Alps. After 25 years of extensive scientific research and media coverage, the Neolithic Iceman has certainly secured his place as "Europe's Oldest Celebrity."

The worse it gets, as I wade and stumble through the Great Dismal Swamp, the better I understand its history as a place of refuge. Each ripping thorn and sucking mudhole makes it clearer. It was the dense, tangled hostility of the swamp and its enormous size that enabled hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of escaped slaves to live here in freedom.

Archaeologists working with traditional Aboriginal owners have discovered astounding evidence of the earliest human habitation of inland Australia. A man answering a "call of nature" in Australia's Flinders made a chance discovery when he stumbled across the earliest evidence yet of human habitation in the country's arid interior. Clifford Coulthard, an Adnyamathanha elder, was surveying gorges in the area in South Australian when "nature called". He happened across a rock shelter, which has turned out to be one of the most important prehistoric sites in Australia.

Chinese construction workers excavating bedrock recently made an explosive discovery when they inadvertently unearthed an unusual new species of feathered dinosaur. The animal lived about 66 to 72 million years ago, right before a giant impact wiped out large dinosaurs in a catastrophic mass extinction. (Find out what happened on the day the dinosaurs died.)

A secret passageway has been found beneath the stage of the theater where William Shakespeare's Henry V, and possibly Romeo and Juliet, were first performed. The unusual feature was found at the site of the Curtain Theater, one of London's earliest playhouses. Excavations showed the stage of the 16th-century building was much longer than originally thought, and contained evidence of a mysterious passageway running beneath it.

A Viking toolbox found in Denmark has been opened for the first time in 1,000 years, revealing an extraordinary set of iron hand tools that may have been used to make Viking ships and houses, according to archaeologists.

Over 60 years after the first excavations at Qumran, researchers from Hebrew University said Wednesday that they identified a twelfth cave near Qumran they believe contained Dead Sea Scrolls until it was plundered in the middle of the 20th century. The latest excavation was conducted by Hebrew University and the Israel Antiquities Authority under the auspices of the IDF’s Civil Administration.

Archaeologists documenting Isil’s destruction of the ruins of the Tomb of the Prophet Jonah say they have made an unexpected discovery which could help in our understanding of the world’s first empire. The Nebi Yunus shrine - containing what Muslims and Christians believe to be the tomb of Jonah, as he was known in the Bible, or Yunus in the Koran - was blown up by Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) militants soon after they seized huge swathes of northern Iraq in 2014.

New facial reconstruction of a man buried in a medieval hospital graveyard discovered underneath a Cambridge college sheds light on how ordinary poor people lived in medieval England.

Archaeologists have put a face to the oldest human remains excavated from Thailand's northern highlands. The remains of the woman, who lived about 13,600 years ago, were found in the Late Pleistocene Tham Lod rock shelter in north-west Thailand. The woman was between 25 and 35 years old and between 1.48 and 1.56 metres tall.

After more than a decade of excavations, archaeologists unearthed a two-millennia-old subterranean city in Iran’s Samen, Hamedan Province. The city, located 400 km west of Tehran—provisionally dubbed the Underground City of Samen, is “under the modern city of Samen,” said Ali Khaksar, the head of the provincial office of Iran’s Cultural Heritage, Handicrafts and Tourism Organization (ICHTO).

The remains of five Archbishops of Canterbury have been found beneath a medieval parish church next to Lambeth Palace, the Archbishop of Canterbury's official London residence. Builders renovating the Garden Museum, housed at the deconsecrated church of St Mary-at-Lambeth, found a hidden crypt containing 30 lead coffins. Site manager Karl Patten said: "We discovered numerous coffins - and one of them had a gold crown on top of it".

An academic maverick is challenging conventional wisdom on Canada's prehistory by claiming an archeological site in southern Alberta is really a vast, open-air sun temple with a precise 5,000-year-old calendar predating England's Stonehenge and Egypt's pyramids.

The New World was a shockingly old goal for people or our transformative relatives, say agents of a disputable arrangement of bones and stones. A unidentified Homo species utilized stone devices to break separated mastodon bones, teeth and tusks around 130,700 years prior at a site close to what's presently San Diego.

High-tech tools divulge new information about the mysterious and violent fates met by these corpses

If you’re looking for the middle of nowhere, the Bjaeldskovdal bog is a good place to start. It lies six miles outside the small town of Silkeborg in the middle of Denmark’s flat, sparse Jutland peninsula. The bog itself is little more than a spongy carpet of moss, with a few sad trees poking out. An ethereal stillness hangs over it. A child would put it more simply: This place is really spooky.

Egypt has unearthed an ancient burial site replete with at least 17 mummies, most fully intact, the latest in a string of discoveries that the country's antiquities minister described as a helping hand from the crypt for its struggling tourism sector. The funerary site, uncovered eight meters below ground in Minya, a province about 250 km (150 miles) south of Cairo, contained limestone and clay sarcophagi, animal coffins, and papyrus inscribed with Demotic script.

45,000 years ago, in an area that is now part of Ethiopia, humans found a roomy cave at the base of a limestone cliff and turned it into a special kind of workshop. Inside, they built up a cache of over 40 kilograms of reddish stones high in iron oxide. Using a variety of tools, they ground the stones into different colored powders...