Presenting the biggest discoveries and news in archaeology for the month of August 2025. I source my news from lots of places but the blog https://exploratornews.wordpress.com/ is very comprehensive and I use it to help me see which stories are ‘biggest’.

Tracing Soil Contamination from Pre-Roman Slags at the Monte Romero Archaeological Site, Southwest Spain Survey of Archaeological Research on Tartessos How the World Made the West Tartessos & the Phoenicians in Iberia

It’s 60 B.C. in the Roman world. The Republic is staggering through its twilight. Pompey and Crassus dominate politics, Cicero is in the Senate, and a young Julius Caesar is scheming for power. Far from Rome’s marble forums, on the wild northern frontier of Gaul, the governor Quintus Metellus Celer receives a mysterious gift. Not amber. Not furs. Not the slaves that oiled the gears of diplomacy on the Rhine frontier. The gift is people. A group of castaways. Their faces are unfamiliar, their story stranger still. They claim a storm had ripped them from their homeland, flung them across an endless sea, and left them stranded on the windswept beaches the Romans called Germaniae litora, “the shores of Germany.” The record calls them Indi, or “Indians.” But did they really come from India? Or were they survivors from a land the Romans could not imagine, castaways from the Americas, delivered by the Atlantic’s vast conveyor belt? This is no legend. It is a two-line report from Rome’s earliest geographers. And if true, it could rewrite the history of when Old World and New first met...

For over 10,000 years the Chumash have inhabited the Santa Barbara coast and channel islands. During that time, they thrived in a lush landscape, creating ocean worthy plank canoes, large towns, sophisticated societies and minting lots of money in the form of shell beads. In this episode, we'll explore ancient Chumash culture, it's development, how it survived colonization and how it's still going strong today. *One small correction: I mentioned in the video that there is only one federally recognized Chumash tribe and while that is true, there are also Chumash that are part of the federally recognized Tejon Indian Tribe in Kern County, California.

High on a remote mountaintop in southern Mexico stands one of the grandest and most mysterious megalithic structures in the ancient Americas. Built in the shape of a cross of huge stone blocks over 12 feet long and weighting as many as 15 tons, it was only recently rediscovered after having briefly reported and excavated over a century ago. Its megalithic style and refined carvings offer a striking contrast with the extreme simplicity of the nearby ruins, as if the two belonged to entirely different epochs and entirely different builders. Nothing like this exists in any other part of Mexico or ancient Mesoamerica, its purpose lost into the mists of time. Was it a tomb, like the subterranean chambers of Mitla, just a few miles away? Or was it something else altogether, an astronomical observatory perhaps, or something even stranger? Follow us to this remote and virtually unexplored site, where we will be uncovering the remnants of a whole lost city of huge, forest-covered buildings, mysterious tunnels, and unexplained megalithic constructions.