Scholars from the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the University of Vienna and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem unveil a unique papyrus from the collections held by the Israel Antiquities Authority, offering rare insights into Roman legal proceedings and life in the Roman Near East. In a new publication in the international scholarly journal Tyche, the research team reveals how the Roman imperial state dealt with financial crimes – specifically, tax fraud involving slaves – in the Roman provinces of Iudaea and Arabia. The new papyrus furnishes a strikingly direct view of Roman jurisdiction and legal practice, as well as important new information about a turbulent era shaken by two massive Jewish revolts against Roman rule. 

Archaeologists have uncovered evidence that a house in England is the site of a lost residence of Harold, the last Anglo-Saxon King of England, and shown in the Bayeux Tapestry. By reinterpreting previous excavations and conducting new surveys, the team from Newcastle University, UK, together with colleagues from the University of Exeter, believe they have located a power centre belonging to Harold Godwinson, who was killed in the Battle of Hastings in 1066.

Prior to this discovery, the site of Dmanisi in the country of Georgia was thought to contain the oldest evidence of hominin activity outside of Africa, dated to roughly 1.8 million years ago. Confirming the age of the marks establishes both the presence of hominins in Eurasia 200,000 years earlier than previously thought as well as tool use by them, providing some of the earliest evidence of hominin activity in this area. 

Ahead of International Holocaust Remembrance Day: Amid the recent years’ wave of antisemitism worldwide, the “For A Righteous Cause” report, published for the fourth year by the Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry at Tel Aviv University, highlights an encouraging phenomenon: new exhibitions and museums commemorating the Holocaust and heroism that have opened or are under construction in Muslim countries.

Scientists studying pine trees and juniper shrubs in northern Scandinavia are revealing the weather of the past by looking at tree rings — which can tell us far more than just the trees’ age. ‘Blue’ tree rings, which indicate that the cell walls of that year’s growth never lignified properly, show us when a summer was too cold for the plants to grow. The scientists identified blue rings caused by particularly cold summers in 1877 and 1902, which could potentially have been caused by the eruptions of far-off volcanoes Cotopaxi in Ecuador and Mount Pelée in Martinique.  

Peter Turchin, from the Complexity Science Hub, and an international team of collaborators decided to evaluate the historical knowledge of advanced A.I. models such as ChatGPT-4, Llama, and Gemini. According to the results, the A.I. chatbots struggled with historical knowledge. GPT-4-Turbo emerged as the best-performing model but still only achieved a 46% balanced accuracy—barely above the baseline of random guessing. 

Archaeologists have uncovered a rare Tetrarchic boundary stone at the site of Abel Beth Maacah in northern Israel. Originally marking land borders under Roman Emperor Diocletian’s tax reforms, the stone provides insight into ancient land ownership, local settlement patterns, and imperial administrative practices. The discovery also introduces two previously unknown place names, expanding our understanding of the region’s historical geography and socio-economic landscape.