Featured news
12 Feb 2026
Rich medieval Danes bought graves ‘closer to God’ despite leprosy stigma, archaeologists find
Study of inequality in medieval graves shows that stigmatized illnesses didn’t bar people from socially prestigious burials
8 news posts in Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology
Featured news
06 Nov 2025
Landscapes that remember: clues show Indigenous Peoples have thrived in the southwestern Amazon for more than 1,000 years
In this guest editorial, Frontiers author Prof Carla Jaimes Betancourt, an anthropologist focusing on the Amazon, present the results of interdisciplinary and collaborative archaeological research conducted in the southwestern Amazon. Their work highlights the rich cultural heritage found at the sites and the importance of protecting these landscapes.
Humanities
31 Jul 2025
4,000-year-old teeth record the earliest traces of people chewing psychoactive betel nuts
New methods make the ‘invisible visible’ to find evidence of deeply rooted cultural practice which otherwise might have been lost in the archaeological record
Featured news
17 Jul 2025
Specialty of the house: Neanderthals at two nearby caves butchered the same prey in different ways, suggesting local food traditions
Differences in cut-marks left behind by butchery can’t be explained by different resources, tools, or skill levels, indicating cultural practices might be responsible.
Humanities
24 Jul 2024
Cook like a Neanderthal: scientists try to replicate ancient butchering methods to learn how Neanderthals ate birds
A pilot study indicates that fire-roasted birds are easier to process, but only birds butchered raw show cutmarks — evidence that we can use to understand Neanderthal diets.
Humanities
17 May 2024
A devastating fire 2,200 years ago preserved a moment of life and war in Iron Age Spain — right down to a single gold earring
A violent blaze, possibly linked to the Carthaginian army crossing the Pyrenees to fight the Romans, flared up so quickly people couldn’t save their animals or their valuables
Featured news
29 Feb 2024
Seeing the wood for the trees: how archaeologists use hazelnuts to reconstruct ancient woodlands
Archaeologists analyze the carbon isotope values of hazelnuts from ancient sites to see what the local woods were like.
Featured news
07 Feb 2023
Proof that Neanderthals ate crabs is another ‘nail in the coffin’ for primitive cave dweller stereotypes
by Angharad Brewer Gillham, Frontiers science writer Image: Tomasz Ochocki/Shutterstock.com Scientists studying archaeological remains at Gruta da Figueira Brava, Portugal, discovered that Neanderthals were harvesting shellfish to eat – including brown crabs, where they preferred larger specimens and cooked them in fires. Archeologists say this disproves the idea that eating marine foods gave early modern humans’ brains the competitive advantage. In a cave just south of Lisbon, archeological deposits conceal a Paleolithic dinner menu. As well as stone tools and charcoal, the site of Gruta de Figueira Brava contains rich deposits of shells and bones with much to tell us about the Neanderthals that lived there – especially about their meals. A study published in Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology shows that 90,000 years ago, these Neanderthals were cooking and eating crabs. “At the end of the Last Interglacial, Neanderthals regularly harvested large brown crabs,” said Dr Mariana Nabais of the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution (IPHES-CERCA), lead author of the study. “They were taking them in pools of the nearby rocky coast, targeting adult animals with an average carapace width of 16cm. The animals were brought whole to the cave, where they were roasted on coals and […]