Sublime

Archaeologists can excavate a sunken ship in Denmark and determine that it was built in Ireland. Analysis of ancient DNA can make reliable sex determinations of the dead, tease out their family relationships, and even reveal the colour of their eyes and hair; it also makes possible the wider tracking of migrations and larger demographic change.

Field archaeologists record, with increasing confidence, transitions in space and time at all scales, from the remodelling and repair of individual artefacts and buildings to broad trends in settlement pattern and form: fine dinner plates broken and not replaced but mended, held together with copper wire; villas inhabited long into the fifth

Modern archaeology is a science-based humanity that sets out to reveal the way various communities interacted and how this in turn led to their rise, or decline. But you cannot do this simply by studying artefacts. You must also pay close attention to the landscapes where people lived: to changes in the local vegetation, forest cover, crops,

Some of the clues to our past, our ancestry, lie buried deep underground. They may never be discovered. They may already have disintegrated, merging with the soil, dissolving into groundwater, rendered into fragments of molecules, before anyone ever had the chance to catch them. Others have been prised out of the earth, though. The bones of

The house itself has still not been completely excavated, but is already known to have covered at least one thousand square meters, so Yabninu must have been a reasonably successful merchant. The sixty or more tablets that were discovered within the ruins of this house are thought to have originally been kept on the second floor, and include

“a town partly destroyed by fire and deserted in haste.” Here, sometime around or after 1200 BC, “loose objects were left abandoned in the courtyards and valuables were hidden in the ground. Bronze arrowheads—one of them found stuck in the side of a wall of a building—and numerous lead sling bullets scattered all over the place are eloquent proof