The image of a medieval knight moving slowly and stiffly under the tremendous weight of his costly armor as he readies for battle or a joust is firmly fixed in people’s imagination. But, according to ...

The Semien Mountains in northern Ethiopia were for centuries home to Jews known as the Beta Israel. The community included a class of ascetic high priests, known as meloksewoch, who oversaw prayers, ...

Planks of medieval shipwreck on the seafloor off the coast of Copenhagen, Denmark Painted wooden dish. COPENHAGEN, ...

How gladiators in ancient Anatolia lived to entertain the masses The sun illuminated the stadium in Ephesus, a wealthy harbor city in western Anatolia, on a day of eagerly anticipated gladiatorial ...

After defeating the forces of Atahualpa, the last Inca emperor, in 1533, Francisco Pizarro dispatched his brother Hernando to a vast religious center on Peru’s central coast called Pachacamac. Just ...

An array of luxurious artifacts was discovered in the tomb of Feng Sufu, a Northern Yan Dynasty (a.d. 407–436) general, near the city of Beipiao in northeastern China. These include (clockwise from ...

Panels of artwork engraved by Native Americans between 1,000 and 400 years ago have been found deep within a cave now known as Unnamed Cave 11. More than 100 such caves have been discovered in the ...

An eighteenth-century map shows the plan of St. Augustine, the capital of the Spanish colony of Florida. The location of Fort Mose, which was established in 1738 and was home to a militia consisting ...

An archaeologist shows a group of visitors around excavations at the heart of Benin City in Nigeria, in an area that was once part of the royal palace of the Benin Kingdom. When visitors arrive at ...

A rock shelter known as Spirit Cave overlooks Nevada’s Lahontan Basin. A burial discovered there held a man whose mummified remains are the oldest known in the world. Genetic testing has established ...

A tree stump from an ancient submerged forest that is at least 6,000 years old protrudes from a beach at low tide at Pett Level in Sussex, England. (M.J. Thomas) (Ken Feisel) Experts from the British ...

Traces of the city’s earliest beginnings as an economic and trading powerhouse lie just beneath the streets of South Street Seaport Over the past 250 years, perhaps no stretch of land in America has ...