Archeologists beam lasers from the sky to unearth ancient settlements hiding in plain sight. Lidar uses laser pulses to penetrate dense vegetation, revealing human-built structures underneath. The ...

The mystery of ice-free Antarctica has intrigued scholars and enthusiasts alike, with ancient maps suggesting a time when the continent was free of ice. These maps, such as the Piri Reis map, have ...

The Penguin Historical Atlas of Ancient Civilizations explores the world's earliest cultures, from the farming settlements of Mesopotamia to the Americas and Polynesia, via the birth of Greek city ...

The 1938 excavation of the tomb of Zhang Qian, a pioneering envoy who helped establish the ancient Silk Road across Central Asia, launched the study of archaeology at Northwest University in China’s ...

A century ago, UChicago scholars argued a controversial idea: Western civilization had its roots in the ancient Middle East—not in Greece or Rome. Today, scholars at the OI and across the University ...

Despite its relative proximity to the Pacific Ocean, South America’s Atacama Desert is so arid that scientists use it to simulate conditions on Mars. Yet a thousand years ago, farmers grew crops there ...