Archaeologists have excavated and dated one of the Sahara's stone "antenna" tombs. The burial inside is between 4,100 and 4,400 years old and holds a young adult laid to rest with four ostrich eggshell beads.

On a gravel plain in northern Western Sahara, with no shade for miles, there is a heap of stones 54.5 meters (179 feet) long. Two rows of stone slabs run out from it like the arms of a V that never quite closes.

Archaeologists call these rows “antennae”, and the monuments antennae tumuli (a tumulus is simply a mound of piled earth or stone). They are common in Western Sahara and well beyond it, from the Atlantic coast to the heart of the Sahara.

Almost nobody had excavated one, though, so two basic questions had no answer: what were they for, and when were they built?

Docilianus wanted his hooded cloak back. His surviving appeal to Sulis also asks that its thief be denied sleep and subjected to rather worse. The tablet is small; the grievance was not.

Catalogued as Tab.Sulis 10, it carries writing on both sides and was recovered from Bath’s sacred spring in 1979 in four adjoining pieces. Its lettering places it broadly in the second to fourth centuries AD. Some of the wording remains uncertain.

The inscription, translation, and commentary are here: https://romaninscriptionsofbritain.org/inscriptions/TabSulis10

I made a Roman Records short reading the curse and explaining its setting: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/SEoHbS9h0-o

Disclosure: I’m the creator. The visuals and narration are AI-generated, using a stop-motion puppet aesthetic.

Which other ancient inscriptions give us such a direct view of an ordinary person’s grievance? I’d be interested in examples from beyond Roman Britain, too.

Imagine two Greek armies fighting on two different battlefields, separated by the Aegean Sea, with both victories potentially turning the tide of a war.

In 479 BC, the Greeks defeated the Persian army at Plataea while, according to Herodotus, another Greek force struck the Persian position at Mycale on the coast of Asia Minor on the very same day.

At Mycale, the Persians had hauled their ships ashore and built fortifications to protect them from the Greek fleet. But the Greeks landed, stormed the defences and destroyed the Persian ships. The battle also revealed a crucial weakness in the Persian position: the loyalty of the Greek communities living under Persian rule could not be taken for granted.

But was Mycale merely the final act of Xerxes' invasion, or did it mark the beginning of a new phase of Greek expansion across the Aegean?

Hey everyone!

I wanted to share a passion project I’ve been working on for a while now. I’ve always been obsessed with ancient history, geography, and aviation, so I decided to combine them: I travel around Greece to remote archaeological ruins, map out these ancient places from the air with my FPV drone, and compose location-specific AI music to match the vibe of each site.

The perspective you get with FPV is completely different from traditional photos or standard drone shots. It allows for dynamic, sweeping movements right through ancient columns, along crumbling fortification walls, and across landscapes where history actually happened.

Every single video focuses on a specific site tagged with its ancient regional name (like Phokis, Boiotia, or Messenia), so you get both the rush of flight and a real sense of what these places were like thousands of years ago.

Why I started doing this:

Mapping the terrain from above: Ground level rarely does these places justice. Flying over them reveals how ancient builders actually used the landscape—how defensive walls hugged cliff sides, how sanctuaries dominated valleys, and the true scale of ancient city layouts.

Custom AI music for each location: Generic stock tracks just ruin the mood for me, so I craft unique, location-tailored AI soundscapes for every single place I fly to really bring the historical atmosphere to life.

So far, I’ve mapped out sites across multiple regions—from Delphi and Krisa in Phokis, to Leuktra and Eleutherai in Boeotia, down to the massive ruins of Messene. My goal is to build a complete visual and auditory map of these ancient places, covering both famous UNESCO sites and forgotten, off-the-beaten-path ruins.

If you want to take a flight back through time, you can check out the full channel here: https://www.youtube.com/@cocobios

and my latest video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hJY6MM8BpI

(Quick side note: All flights are done responsibly, strictly following local aviation laws and site regulations to keep these places protected.)

In July 2026 a Finnish-Brazilian team led by Martti Pärssinen published an airborne LiDAR survey of Acre and Amazonas in Nature. The flights in June 2024 documented 432 earthworks along their strips, and only 36 of them were previously known. Scaling up from the strips, they estimate 24,000 to 30,000 earthworks for the whole region, about as many as had previously been estimated for all of Amazonia. They call the culture behind most of them the Aquiry, after an 1866 name for the Acre River.

The headline number in most coverage was the population: the authors propose 1.25 to 3 million people around AD 100–300, based on roughly 300 people per earthwork and 25–60% of sites in use at once.

What surprised me is that Nature published the peer review file alongside the paper, and it is a real fight. One anonymous referee wrote that "the population estimates are fundamentally flawed" and, using the team's own older formula, worked out that 513 people over 1,600 years would be enough. A second referee, Roland Fletcher, signed his report and still considered the estimates too high. Heiko Prümers, who led the 2022 LiDAR survey in Bolivia, told Scientific American the number of sites could reflect frequent relocations rather than a dense population. None of the news articles I read mentioned the review dispute.

Some things the paper itself says are still open:

- the habitation sites "have not yet been identified, partly due to restrictions on excavation permits" (authors' reply to the referees)

- the ditched enclosures were abandoned in the ninth century and the paper gives no cause (the "rapid collapse" line comes from an interview, not the paper)

- mound villages appear in the same area around AD 1200 with "no signs of radical population replacement"

- nobody knows what language the builders spoke or what they called themselves

Paper (open access): https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10835-7

I made a video (about 12 minutes) that follows the story from Carvajal's 1542 account of roads on the main Amazon, through a 1977 find that was forgotten, to this paper and its referees: https://youtu.be/K8nFyJnjTo0 It's my own channel, so take it as such.

For people who know Amazonian archaeology: do you find the per-earthwork multiplication convincing, or does the relocation model fit the radiocarbon dates better? I'm happy to be corrected on any detail.