Nearly 1,500 years ago, a Byzantine merchant ship swung perilously close to the Sicilian coastline, its heavy stone cargo doing little to help keep it on course. A wave lifted the vessel’s 100-foot hull and dashed it on a reef, sending as much as 150 tons of stone—columns, capitals, bases, and even an ornate church pulpit—to the seafloor. Archaeologist Justin Leidwanger has been excavating the Justinian-era “Church Wreck” near Marzamemi since 2014. He joined the Archaeological Institute of Ameri

The latest archaeological research findings were presented at the ongoing 2025 Sanxingdui Forum in Deyang, Sichuan, officially confirming the exact dating of the sacrificial pits at the Sanxingdui Site. A joint study by the Sichuan Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology and Peking University, using radiocarbon dating, shows that the burial dates of Pits Nos. 3, 4, 6, and 8 have a 95.4 percent probability of falling between 1201 BC and 1012 BC, corresponding to the late Shang Dyn