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Signs of life dating back to the Mesolithic period have been found on a country estate in Dumfries and Galloway. A tiny burnt hazelnut shell found by volunteers on an archaeological dig at the National Trust for Scotland’s Threave Garden and Estate has been dated to between 8,547 and 8,312 BC. The Galloway Glens community archaeology project Can You Dig It found the shell during a dig in 2019 at Little Wood Hill, which dates back to the Iron Age. Since then, some of the carbonised material recovered has been sent away for radiocarbon dating at the Scottish Universities Environmental Researc...

Researchers in western Australia have been working to date all ancient cave art  They are using a technique that involves radiocarbon dating mud wasp nests The nests overhang the ancient pieces of art painted to the sides of caves The 2m drawing of a kangaroo was dated to between 17,500 and 17,100 years old It sits on the Unghango clan estate in Balanggarra country, Western Australia 

French archaeologists get near-perfect notes from a conch shell last used by hunter-gatherers.

The top artistic quality of Berber carpets has already been a source of inspiration to artists such as Paul Klee and Le Corbusier. This book reveals a new slant on the origins of Berber carpets and on the sources and meanings of its motifs. Genuine Berber carpets are not the successors of well known Oriental carpets dating from the Islamic era but similarities in knotting techniques and certain motifs point to common roots harking back to the Neolithic period in Asia Minor. Because textiles wear out over time and a sequence of carpets across millennia no longer exists to prove the point, it i...

The origins of money Ribs (Spangenbarren). Credit: M.H.G. Kuijpers From cowrie shells to native resources and animals, currency in some shape or form has long been a part of human history.  A currency of sorts was first thought to emerge as trade and exchange, with trade being tracked through the archaeological record, starting in the Upper Palaeolithic, when groups of hunters traded the best flint weapons and tools. Throughout the years, various objects were used as units of value until nearly 5,000 years ago, when the Mesopotamian shekel emerged as the first known form of currency. Now, r...