Topic description and stories

Cattle grazing in the River Ouse water meadows south of Ely

Casting light on the dark ages: Anglo-Saxon fenland is re-imagined

21 Jul 2017

What was life in the fens like in the period known as the dark ages? Archaeologist Susan Oosthuizen revisits the history of an iconic wetland in the...

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Example of a modified skull, a practice assumed to be Hunnic that may have been appropriated by local farmers within the bounds of the Western Roman Empire.

Tiller the Hun? Farmers in Roman Empire converted to Hun lifestyle – and vice versa

22 Mar 2017

New archaeological analysis suggests people of Western Roman Empire switched between Hunnic nomadism and settled farming over a lifetime. Findings...

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Revealed: face of ‘ordinary poor’ man from medieval Cambridge

20 Mar 2017

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

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Members of the project at the end of the 2012 season

The Monuments Men of Libya

28 Feb 2017

With Daesh militia at their heels, a handful of brave Libyan archaeologists completed the excavation of the Haua Fteah cave in Cyrenaica, North...

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Sharpening our knowledge of prehistory on East Africa’s bone harpoons

20 Feb 2017

A project exploring the role of East Africa in the evolution of modern humans has amassed the largest and most diverse collection of prehistoric bone...

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Nina O'Hare (Alumna)

Graduate, get a job … make a difference #5

08 Feb 2017

Cambridge graduates enter a wide range of careers but making a difference tops their career wish lists. In this series, inspiring graduates from the...

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The shores of Lake Burtnieks in Latvia, near where the human remains were discovered from which ancient DNA was extracted for this study.

Baltic hunter-gatherers adopted farming without influence of mass migration, ancient DNA suggests

02 Feb 2017

Ancient DNA analyses show that – unlike elsewhere in Europe – farmers from the Near East did not overtake hunter-gatherer populations in the Baltic...

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Right: Exterior of Devil’s Gate, the cave in the Primorye region near the far eastern coast of Russia. Left: One of the skulls found in the Devil’s Gate cave from which ancient DNA used in the study was extracted.

Ancient DNA reveals 'genetic continuity’ between Stone Age and modern populations in East Asia

01 Feb 2017

In contrast to Western Europeans, new research finds contemporary East Asians are genetically much closer to the ancient hunter-gatherers that lived...

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Zebu cattle pulling a wagon beside a pond at the Indus  Civilisation site of Rakhigarhi in northwest India

Rice farming in India much older than thought, used as 'summer crop' by Indus civilisation

21 Nov 2016

Thought to have arrived from China in 2000 BC, latest research shows domesticated rice agriculture in India and Pakistan existed centuries earlier...

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Aubrey Lynch, elder from the Wongatha Aboriginal language group, who participated in the study.

Unprecedented study of Aboriginal Australians points to one shared Out of Africa migration for modern humans

21 Sep 2016

The first significant investigation into the genomics of Aboriginal Australians has uncovered several major findings about early human populations...

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2,000-year-old personal hygiene sticks with remains of cloth, excavated from the latrine at Xuanquanzhi

Ancient faeces provides earliest evidence of infectious disease being carried on Silk Road

22 Jul 2016

Intestinal parasites as well as goods were carried by travellers on iconic route, say researchers examining ancient latrine.

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2,000-year-old personal hygiene sticks with remains of cloth, excavated from the latrine at Xuanquanzhi

Opinion: How we discovered infectious diseases in 2,000-year-old faeces from the Silk Road

21 Jul 2016

Piers Mitchell (Department of Biological Anthropology) discusses what we can learn from rummaging around in 2,000-year-old toilets.

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