History & Archaeology

What did people in Bronze Age Cyprus bring to the graves of their dead besides pottery and gold? At Hala Sultan Tekke, on the island's southeastern coast, two researchers have sifted burned seeds out of tomb vessels and found something unexpected in among the barley. Remains of wild flowering plants such as field marigold, mallow and poppy turned up beside the grain, and the authors think some of them may have been burned as bouquets. The findings, published in the journal Levant on September 9, 2026, come from Teresa Bürge of the University of Bern and the University of Gothenburg and Dominika Kofel of Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, Poland. They studied plant remains from four tombs dug between 2020