Every year there is a seemingly endless supply of amazing and revelatory discoveries from the archaeological community around the world – and 2024 was no exception.

Elizabeth Graham, Emeritus Professor of Mesoamerican Archaeology, UCL Institute of Archaeology

The best discovery was the huge hearths that processed salt on an industrial scale. Found on an offshore island, but the salt was traded to the mainland during the Classic Maya period (especially AD 600 to 800)

Professor Joann Fletcher, Department of Archaeology, University of York

For me, it was news that the whereabouts of the sarcophagus of the Egyptian pharaoh Ramses II had finally been identified. his own burial at the site of Abydos – all thanks to the brilliant detective work of French Egyptologist Frédéric Payraudeau.

Michael E. Smith, Professor of Archeology and Former Director, ASU Teotihuacan Research Laboratory, School of Human Evolution & Social Change, Arizona State University

I do archeology to learn about past peoples and cultures. Individual finds, such as a king’s tomb or a new location in the jungle, are far less important than research that brings new insights into the past.

As my colleague David Hurst Thomas says, “It’s not what you find, it’s what you find out.” My favorite find of 2024 was the research described in the publication by a team led by Philis Riris (Bournemouth University) that identified social resilience in past societies.

They found that over long periods of time (thousands of years), those societies that experienced more frequent shocks and failures were able to learn from their past and more successfully recovered from downturns and turmoil.

Dr. Luis Jaime Castillo Butters, Professor Principal de Arqueología, Departamento de Humanidades, PUCP

The discovery of hundreds of new geoglyphs and figures in Nazca, Peru using AI, he led
Masato Sakai and Yuichi Matsumoto from the Universities of Yamagata and Osaka
The most remarkable find is the Ethnographic Museum.

Not only did they reveal a large number of new characters that are slightly older than the world-famous Nazca Lines, but they did it with the help of artificial intelligence, which helped them in the difficult task of overcoming hundreds of square kilometers of desert.

Monica L. Smith Professor, Department of Anthropology and Institute for Environment and Sustainability, Navin and Pratima Doshi Chair of Indian Studies, UCLA

My favorite archaeological “find” of 2024 is something that is now increasingly part of our field, which involves looking for very unusual objects in the published record and trying to find overall patterns because just waiting for the next of something rare to turn up , can take years.

An excellent example is Gilligan, Ian, Francesco d’Errico, Luc Doyon, Wei Wang, and Yaroslav V. Kuzmin (2024), Paleolithic Eyed Needles and the Evolution of Dress, Scientific advances 10:1-12.

It is literally looking for needles in the proverbial haystack, in this case understanding when “clothing” as we understand it first began to be made.

Of course, the actual clothing won’t survive because it’s made of things like leather that would have rotted long ago, so needles made of bone and other durable materials serve as stand-ins.

Needles first appeared around 40,000 years ago across Eurasia from Siberia to Spain, suggesting that “clothing” as we know it—including the concept of “fitted” and “fashionable” clothing and underwear—was made possible through the use of sewing. and has an extremely long human social history!