Three new Roman fortified camps have been identified across northern Arabia by a remote sensing survey by the University of Oxford's School of Archaeology. Their paper, published today [Thurs] in the journal Antiquity, reports the discovery may be evidence of a probable undocumented military campaign across south east Jordan into Saudi Arabia.

The camps were identified using satellite images. According to the research team, they may have been part of a previously undiscovered Roman military campaign linked to the Roman takeover of the Nabataean Kingdom in AD 106 CE, a civilisation centred on the world-famous city of Petra, located in Jordan.

Dr Michael Fradley, who led the research and first identified the camps on Google Earth, suggests there is little doubt about the date of the camps. He says, 'We are almost certain they were built by the Roman army, given the typical playing card shape of the enclosures with opposing entrances along each side. The only notable difference between them is that the westernmost camp is significantly larger than the two camps to the east.'

According to Dr Mike Bishop, an expert on the Roman military, 'These camps are a spectacular new find and an important new insight into Roman campaigning in Arabia. Roman forts and fortresses show how Rome held a province, but temporary camps reveal how they acquired it in the first place.'

A microscopic analysis has revealed that Norse colonists imported timber from Northern Europe and North America to Greenland.

Greenland, or Grœnland in Old Norse, was settled by Norwegian and Icelandic explorers in AD 985 or 986. The settlers established two colonies on the southwest coast: The Eastern Settlement or Eystribyggð, in what is now Qaqortoq, and the Western Settlement or Vestribygð, close to present-day Nuuk.

In a study published in the journal Antiquity, archaeologists from the University of Iceland have conducted a wood taxa analysis on pieces of timber found in 11th to 14th century AD Norse farmsteads.

The purpose of the study is to differentiate between native wood, imported wood, and driftwood, revealing that 0.27% of the wood was unambiguous imports, including oak, beech, hemlock and Jack pine. Another 25% of the total wood was either imported or driftwood, including larch, spruce, Scots pine and fir.

In an announcement by the Osaka Centre for Cultural Heritage, archaeologists have uncovered an 1800-year-old ritual mask in the Osaka Prefecture, Japan.

The discovery was made during excavations to extend the Osaka Monorail in the city of Higashiōsaka, where the team found a mask hewn from a cedar tree with a representation of a human face.

The mask measures around 30cm in height by 18cm wide and features two eye holes, a mouth, and a perforated hole surviving on one side that probably held string for holding the mask on the wearers face.

A new study reveals that Nerja is the European cave containing Paleolithic Art with the most confirmed and recurrent visits during Prehistory

For 41,000 years human beings have been visiting the Cave of Nerja; for a few of them, it has been exploited as a tourist attraction, and for almost the same amount of time, the object of scientific study. Throughout its history, and even today, it continues to stun visitors and researchers from around the world.

The latest surprise from the cave, located in the province of Malaga, was just published in Scientific Reports by an international team including researchers from the University of Córdoba; Marian Medina, currently at the University of Bourdeux; Eva Rodríguez; and José Luis Sachidrián, a Professor of Prehistory and the scientific director of the Cave of Nerja.

How the Renaissance revival of ancient alchemy birthed the mythos of modern science.

The European Renaissance was defined as a cultural rebirth, but what was it actually a rebirth of? This "rebirth" was a disastrous reintroduction of Hermeticism into European scholasticism, establishing the Hermetic tradition as a crucial factor in the development of modern science. Quite simply, the Renaissance was the rebirth of neoplatonic astral magic flooding into European culture.

This Hermetic dominance of modern scholastic thought can be quite obviously seen in its great impact on the Copernican revolution. With the entire Renaissance being funded by the Medici Italian banking family, their Laurentian library was the knowledge hub of Europe, housing countless occult manuscripts that ushered in the golden age of alchemy. As Erasmus of Rotterdam saw this alchemical obsession begin to unfold, he forewarned, "I have a fear and it is, that, with the study of ancient literature, ancient Paganism will reappear."

Copernicus worked out his heliocentric cosmological model under the mystical influence of Hermes Trismegistus, who is considered the founder of science, religion, mathematics, geometry, alchemy, philosophy, medicine, and magic. The notion that the sun is at the center of the cosmos and not the earth is a belief not found in the Bible but in the Heremetica of Hermes Trismegistus, a compilation of ancient esoteric texts believed to contain the wisdom of the ancient Egyptians. The author of the Arabic Hermetic text, the Pecatrix, wrote that Hermes built a temple to the sun, and in the Corpus Hermeticum V, it states that the sun is supreme among the gods of heaven. The Asclepius lists the sun as far greater than all the planets.

Massive volcanic eruptions millions of years apart caused two mass extinctions during the Middle Permian Period, according to a study of uranium isotope profiles in marine samples. The findings highlight the potential effects of modern-day global warming on ocean food chains and the importance of addressing environmental issues to prevent further extinctions.

Long before dinosaurs, Earth was dominated by animals that were in many ways even more incredible.

Carnivores such as Titanophoneus, or "titanic murderer," stalked enormous armored reptiles the size of buffalo.

Turncoats posed as agents of the SMERSH counterintelligence service in an attempt to get close to the Soviet leader...

A family of Nazi spies on a mission to assassinate Joseph Stalin impersonated the very people tasked to identify them - agents of the military security service SMERSH, a veteran Russian counterintelligence officer has said in an interview.

SMERSH was a Soviet wartime organization, the name of which translates as "death to spies." It was created in 1943, after the tide had turned against the Axis invaders, and the leadership of the USSR needed greater focus on collecting fresh intel for planning offensive operations and stopping would-be saboteurs.

Wednesday marked the 80th anniversary of the creation of SMERSH. Rossiyskaya Gazeta spoke on this occasion to Col. Gen. Aleksandr Bezverkhniy, a former Russian counterintelligence commander and enthusiast of the history of clandestine operations.

The plot to assassinate Stalin was hatched by Operation Zeppelin, Nazi Germany's effort to recruit Soviet citizens and use them against the USSR. The would-be killers were a married couple, who posed as Pyotr Tavrin, the deputy commander of a SMERSH department in the Baltic, and his typist Lidia Shilova.

When he was expanding diplomatic relations with England, the first Russian tsar, Ivan the Terrible, could hardly have anticipated that, shortly afterwards, his "partners" would want to turn part of the Tsardom of Muscovy into their own colony.

The English set foot on Russian soil for the first time on August 24, 1553. The Edward Bonaventure ship belonged to an English trading company known as the 'Mystery and Company of Merchant Adventurers for the Discovery of Regions, Dominions, Islands, and Places Unknown' and Richard Chancellor was its captain. The ship entered the mouth of the Northern Dvina and moored not far from the Nikolo-Korelsky Monastery, 35 km from Arkhangelsk. From there, Chancellor went to Kholmogory and then on to Moscow, where he handed Ivan the Terrible a letter from King Edward IV. From that moment on, the tsar allowed the British to trade in Russia.

The Mayan calendar's 819-day cycle has confounded scholars for decades, but new research shows how it matches up to planetary cycles over a 45-year span. That's a much broader view of the tricky calendar than anyone previously tried to take.

In a study published in the journal Ancient Mesoamerica, two Tulane University scholars highlighted how researchers never could quite explain the 819-day count calendar until they broadened their view.

"Although prior research has sought to show planetary connections for the 819-day count, its four-part, color-directional scheme is too short to fit well with the synodic periods of visible planets," the study authors write. "By increasing the calendar length to 20 periods of 819-days a pattern emerges in which the synodic periods of all the visible planets commensurate with station points in the larger 819-day calendar."

Polynesian peoples are renowned for their advanced sailing technology and for reaching the most remote islands on the planet centuries before the Europeans reached the Americas. Through swift eastward migrations that are now well covered by archaeological research, Polynesian societies settled virtually every island from Samoa and Tonga to Rapa Nui/Easter Island in the east, Hawai'i in the north, and Aotearoa/New Zealand in the south. But little is known about Polynesian migrations west of the 180th meridian.

In order to better understand the relationship between these Polynesian societies of the western Pacific, Melanesia and Micronesia — often referred to as "Polynesian Outliers" — a multidisciplinary team of researchers analyzed the geochemical signature of stone artifacts collected in Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands and the Caroline Islands between 1978 and 2019. An international research team, led by the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, was able to identify the geological origin of these artifacts after comparing their geochemical and isotopic compositions with reference datasets of natural rocks and archaeological quarries in the region.