In the quest to uncover the mystery behind the fall of the once-vibrant Cahokia , archaeologists have turned to an unexpected source: tree ring records, aka dendrochronology. By 1150 AD, Cahokia,...
Due to a current drought in the heart of the Amazon rainforest, enigmatic ancient engravings dating to between 1,000 and 2,000 years old have resurfaced from a riverbed. This discovery marks only the...
The Mesopotamian marshes in Iraq, once a thriving ecosystem and the heart of an ancient Marsh Arab civilization, are facing a dire threat as they wither away. Parched by a prolonged drought, the...
History has remembered Attila (c. 406 to 453) for having terrorized the Roman Empire with a campaign of violence as the ruler of a nomadic Central Asian and Eastern European people known as the Huns...
Archaeologists studying Belize’s “Midnight Terror Cave” have discovered mysterious blue fibers in the tooth plaque of sacrificed teenagers, which suggests the young sacrifice victims had been gagged...
For the world of archaeology, climate change is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, receding ice and falling water levels are bringing to the surface entire villages and ruins of civilizations. On...
It’s almost out of a fairy tale, with the added caveat of having the dirty underbelly of global warming revealed yet again! A Yorkshire sunken village with Viking origins has re-emerged after water...
A power vacuum caused by an extreme drought 1,500 years ago in the Arabian Peninsula led to political unrest, war, and societal change. These were the preconditions that led to the development and...
European Nordic seafaring pirates and raiders, known as the Vikings, would come to Greenland to settle around 950 AD, but mysteriously the Greenland Vikings vanished with the onset of the Little Ice...
Did the great Maya civilization collapse because of drought-related crop failures and starvation? New research has raised significant doubts about the viability of that theory, which in recent years...
The Tuzigoot National Monument is a small national monument located in the Verde Valley, in the southwestern US state of Arizona. The monument contains the ruins of an ancient pueblo village built by...
Refinements in radiocarbon dating technology have caused archaeologists, anthropologists, and ancient historians to modify their beliefs about the timeline of copper tools and the metalworking of the...
Sister institutes from Leipzig, Germany have just released a study that discloses important facts about major climate events that occurred during the 14th century AD. Researchers from the Leibniz...
Recent research has shown that the ancient Ancestral Puebloans culture, in what is today New Mexico, burned controlled fires in volcanic ice melt lava tubes to survive major droughts. El Malpais, or...
One of the most distinctive examples of Indian architecture is Rani ki vav, a remarkable stepwell. Astounding subterranean structures were designed to store and supply water to arid parts of India...
3,800 years ago, the people living in what is now called Vichama, Peru carved snakes and human heads into their walls alongside depictions of emaciated people. They were starving and dying and hoped...
From 2600 BC to 1533, the legacy of the Peruvian region has revealed no end of epic tales of power, growth, unification, and demise. This is shown by the myriad of deserted pyramid cities that dot...
By Alison Kyra Carter /The Conversation Cambodia’s famous temple of Angkor Wat is one of the world’s largest religious monuments, visited by over 2 million tourists each year. It was built in the...
Ancient cultures around the world have passed down their tales of devastating natural disasters in oral traditions, folklore, historical accounts, pictorial representations, and through myths...
The recent unusually warm weather has resulted in a number of important archaeological sites being revealed as vegetation has died in Europe. The recent drought has also brought to the surface some...
Did the longstanding mystery of what caused the downfall of the Maya - of one of the ancient world's great civilizations – just get solved? Nothing is mightier than an empire at its peak. Great...
The severity of drought conditions during the demise of the Maya civilization about one thousand years ago has been quantified, representing another piece of evidence that could be used to solve the...
About 590 years ago, the inhabitants of a large village in New Mexico abandoned it, just 125 years after its founding. Researchers think severe drought, food shortages, illness, and possible warfare...
Researchers have discovered unique inscriptions on the wall of a cave in China recording the effects of droughts on the local population over the course of 500 years. The inscriptions were found on...