A team of astronomers led by the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard and Smithsonian have for the first time used galactic archaeology, the study of detailed chemical fingerprints in deep space, to trace the history of a galaxy outside the Milky Way. The study, published today in the journal Nature Astronomy, demonstrates a new way to reconstruct the evolution of distant galaxies, and opens up a new field of astronomy, called “extragalactic archaeology.” 

New research from the University of East Anglia (UEA) reveals that King Harold’s legendary 200‑mile march to the Battle of Hastings in 1066 never happened. Instead, the journey was made largely by sea. The findings overturn one of the most iconic stories in English history – altering how the Norman Conquest is understood in classrooms, museums, and public memory. The news comes as the Bayeux Tapestry prepares to travel from France to the UK for display at the British Museum later this year.

The new study finds that the famous Monte Verde archaeological site in southern Chile is only 4,200-8,200 years old, not 14,500 years old as posited by researchers who worked on the site from the 1970s through the 1990s.

Techniques developed to study the distant past—from dating ancient artifacts to reconstructing climate records in ice cores—are now being repurposed to better understand the lives of modern sea turtles. Using radiocarbon methods from archaeology, researchers show that sea turtle shell plates are biological time capsules that record signs of major environmental disturbances in the ocean.

A new themed issue of Advances in Archaeological Practice, published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for American Archaeology (SAA), argues that the long‑standing “leaky pipeline” metaphor obscures the real and active barriers faced by women, minority scholars, and LGBTQIA+ communities in archaeology.

An international team of archaeologist has uncovered the earliest known clay ornaments in Southwest Asia, revealing a forgotten chapter in the story of how humans began to express identity, belonging, and meaning through material culture. The findings, published this week in Science Advances, push back the symbolic use of clay in the region by thousands of years.

A new interdisciplinary study published in Nature reconstructs over 2,000 years of population history in Argentina’s Uspallata Valley (UV), a southern frontier of Andean farming spread in ancient times, with broader lessons on how agriculture shaped societies and how communities endured crises. By combining ancient human and pathogen genomics with isotopic analyses, archaeology and paleoclimate records–and working in close collaboration with Huarpe Indigenous communities–, the research reveals how local hunter-gatherers adopted agriculture, how more recent intensive maize farmers experienced prolonged stress, and how kinship-based mobility may have helped communities persist through instability.