Compiling a list of the top archaeological finds in a given year is always a weird exercise in time dilation. I’m tasked with revisiting past lives through the art, shipwrecks, and bones left behind. Some items on this list were lost for merely a century; others for millennia. No matter how old they are, though, they’re all relegated to a relativistic ‘then’—a world that’s well and truly gone, except for these tantalizing clues we’re sometimes lucky enough to find.
These are the archaeological discoveries that were the most significant, bizarre, or just plain fun in 2022.
