In some cases only a segment of the finger is missing, while in others several fingers have been lost. Until now, missing fingers have been attributed to artistic license and resulting from medical issues such as frostbite.

“There is compelling evidence that these people may have had their fingers amputated deliberately in rituals intended to elicit help from supernatural entities,” archaeologist Mark Collard of Simon Fraser University in Vancouver told the Guardian.

Dani women from the New Guinea Highlands, for example, “sometimes have one or more fingers cut off following the death of loved ones, including sons or daughters. We believe that Europeans were doing the same sort of thing in palaeolithic times, though the precise belief systems involved may have been different. This is a practice that was not necessarily routine but has occurred at various times through history, we believe.”

Having faced challenges to the theory from peers in recent years, Collard and PhD student Brea McCauley gathered more data. They looked at both prints (a hand with pigment pressed against a wall) and stencils (the painting pigment around a hand pressed against a wall) across four cave sites, Maltravieso and Fuente del Trucho, Spain and Gargas and Cosquer, France.

Looking more globally, four sites in Africa, three in Australia, nine in North America, five in south Asia, and one in south-east Asia also contain evidence of finger amputation.

“This practice was clearly invented independently multiple times,” they argued. “And it was engaged in by some recent hunter-gatherer societies, so it is entirely possible that the groups at Gargas and the other caves engaged in the practice.”

While it may seem radical, Collard noted such rituals as fire-walking, face-piercing, and the hooking of skin for heavy hauls. “People become more likely to cooperate with other group members after going through such rituals. Amputating fingers may simply have been a more extreme version of this type of ritual.”

In November, experts identified that Pingtan Island was home to Austronesian people roughly 3,000 to 7,500 years ago. They also discovered evidence that the inhabitants developed into a complex society between 5,000 and 6,500 years ago with residential homes, as well as buildings for handicrafts, waste removal, and food processing. There, they additionally found remains of the earliest-known rice cultivation.

On another part of the island, archaeologists discovered remnants of communal spaces dating from 3,000 to 4,200 years ago. Through a genetic testing on human remains uncovered, they discovered a match to Austronesian people.

Austronesians were a large ethnic group that started in Taiwan and spread as far as present-day Chile’s Easter Island. The early tribes that once covered most of Southeast Asia, Micronesia, Polynesia, New Zealand, and the US state Hawaii, today has an estimated 400 million descendants.

Until now it has been widely believed that Austronesians originated in present-day Taiwan and started migrating over the last 5,000 years due to population growth. The findings on Pingtan, however, suggest that these origins could be geographically larger than Taiwan and, perhaps, could also include mainland China.

Perhaps some of the most interesting have involved innovative technology that has allowed archaeologists to dig deeper than before, such as the discovery of an ancient temple, now underwater, in a sunken city off Egypt’s coast and an ancient Greek catacomb found below the southern Italian city of Naples. Others, however, have been directly tied to current events, among them, the ancient Greek city Cyrene which emerged after floods devastated Libya.

Some early settlements like a Neolithic monument and a mysterious sanctuary were identified on Scotland’s Isle of Arran and in the Netherlands’ town of Tiel, respectively, offering deeper understandings of their ancient societies. There were also culturally significant treasures revealed like a 3,000-year-old sealed corridor in a massive Chavin temple complex in Peru, sixty mummified bodies that were found in two tombs in the ancient Egyptian city Luxor, and, while not a discovery, the Vatican’s reopening of an ancient Roman necropolis to the public.

While these have all been important, there are a selection that stood out among the rest. Below is a look at the ten archaeological finds that are likely to have an impact not just this year, but on our understanding of human history for years to come.

Since 2010 the Interamna Lirenas Project by the University of Cambridge’s Classics Faculty, has been conducting surveys and excavations in what, in modern times, looks like a field of crops, but in antiquity was the Roman town of Interamna Lirenas, according to Popular Mechanics.

“We started with a site so unpromising that no one had ever tried to excavate it,” Alessandro Launaro, the study’s author and Interamna Lirenas Project lead at the University of Cambridge’s Classics Faculty, said in a statement. “That’s very rare in Italy.”

According to the Cambridge Classic’s website the town was founded in 312 BC as a Latin colony affiliated with Rome both politically and militarily, as part of the Roman expansion into Central Italy. 

Study of the area began 13 years ago with deep radar and magnetometry of the around 60 acres of open fields as part of the programs mandate to study “the long-term relationship between town and countryside as reflecting the broader transformations taking place in Roman Italy from Republic to Empire.” 

“There was nothing on the surface, no visible evidence of buildings, just bits of broken pottery,” Launaro said. “But what we discovered wasn’t a backwater, far from it. We found a thriving town adapting to every challenge thrown at it for 900 years.”

The key to studying the Interamna Lirenas site was pottery. According to Launaro, the lack of imported pottery at the site led scholars in the past to believe the city was declining by the second century. But by focusing on the pottery used by average citizens in the region instead of the imported wares used by the wealthy the team of archaeologists were able reveal that the town thrived well into the 3rd Century with close to 2,000 inhabitants, and once, in 46 BC, even hosted Julius Caesar himself.

The town was located at the intersection of two important routes, the Via Latina which connected Lazio and Campania, and the river Liris. Over the course of their excavations, archaeologists have discovered a large warehouse, which hints at the possibility that Interamna Lirenas was a port town. They also uncovered evidence of a temple, three bathhouses, and a roofed theater that could hold 1,500 people. Launaro said the theater was “a major status symbol. It displayed the town’s wealth, power, and ambition.”

The town was eventually abandoned in 6th century C.E., likely because of the Lombard invasion of Italy, according to Cambridge. Soon after its inhabitants began salvaging materials to build farms elsewhere. Those that chose to stay, along with new inhabitants, spread dirt and debris over what was left of the town in order to make the land suitable for growing crops.

While modern methods of ploughing the earth have damaged the structures that remained buried, they have also helped uncover the thriving civilization that one lay among the crop fields of Central Italy.

The cramped room contains only small windows secured with iron bars at the top of the wall. The floor still has indentations remaining from the animals that would have walked together, blindfolded, for hours in coordinated labor.

It is “a space in which we have to imagine the presence of people of servile status,” Pompeii’s director Gabriel Zuchtriegel said in a statement. “It is the most shocking side of ancient slavery […] reduced to brute violence”.

The bakery was only one part of the working quarters in a much larger residential structure with well-preserved frescos.

This is not the first time quarters for the enslaved have been uncovered at Pompeii. Earlier this year, for instance, archaeologists found a small bedroom used by enslaved people, as well as a middle class home. These discoveries shed additional light on enslaved conditions in the ancient world.

Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE, burying nearby cities in a thick layer of ash, which preserved some of the ancient Roman residents and their dwellings.

These most recent excavations are part of a larger project aimed at securing the slopes around unexplored areas of the ancient Roman city. Funding from the European Union has allowed conservators and researchers to undertake new efforts at the archaeological park in recent years.

“In the face of government indifference to the harm this road will cause…we had no choice but to bring this legal action,” John Adams, the chair of Stonehenge Alliance (SA), said in a statement. “As before we hope we are successful in overturning this proposed vandalism. We hope justice will be served over the next three days.”

Meanwhile, the organization Save Stonehenge World Heritage Site (SSWH), which brought the legal case to the court’s attention, is pursuing a judicial review of the government’s initial approval of the project.

The £1.7 billion plan was approved earlier this year by Mark Harper, the UK’s transport security head, and is being managed by a UK government agency called National Highways. The scheme would reroute the A303 road, which runs parallel to the ancient stone circle in Wiltshire and turn it into a dual-carriage highway that critics say passes perilously close to the fragile formation. The existing A303 road would become a public walkway.

In September, UNESCO asked the UK government to “not proceed” with the controversial plan, to no avail. In response, for the first time ever, Stonehenge is now at risk of being added to the cultural body’s list of endangered World Heritage sites. It has requested to make the requested alterations to the plan by February 1, 2024.

According to the statement from the agency, the current plan “remains a threat” to the long-lasting value of Stonehenge as world heritage.

On November 17, it opened a gate along its walls to enter the Via Triumphalis Necropolis, an ancient Roman burial ground that lies beneath Vatican City. It is replete with marble sarcophagi, open burial graves, and Roman mosaics and frescoes.

The tombs date between the 1st century CE and the 4th century CE. They contain the remains of “slaves, freedmen, artisans of the city of Rome,” Leonardo Di Blasi, an expert from the Vatican Museums, told Euro News. Some were even identified as the imperial property of the Emperor Nero. 

“We begin to learn about people we did not know, particularly about rituals that seem more related to family, neighborhood, town, or personal traditions than to official religion,” Di Blasi continued.

Graves associated with a custodian of Pompeii’s theater who would have cared for the set design, as well as a custodian charged with caring for the woods, have been identified.

Previously, the only people who could access the necropolis were approved scholars and specialists. The public can now experience the city of the dead through the Saint Rose Gate entrance for the exhibition “Life and Death in the Rome of the Caesars.”

The necropolis is located outside Rome proper, as Roman law dictated that cremation and burials take place beyond city limits as a safety and hygiene precaution. It was uncovered in 1956 during the construction of the Vatican Autoparco. In 2003, the Santa Rosa section was revealed during parking lot construction.

The site spans roughly 10,764 square feet along a section of the ancient Via Triumphalis.

At the Middlebeck housing site, experts were called in to survey the area where they identified evidence of human activity. Dating back 12,000 years, they discovered 73 Roman kilns, as well as a circular ditch with upright timbers.

The pottery, an Oxford archaeology spokesperson told BBC News, “probably represents a previously unknown pottery production centre that is of regional, if not national, importance.”

An enclosure dating to 3300 BCE contained the remains of internal posts and pits. The team believes they may have formed one or more concentric arcs of erect timbers. Situated at the beginning of a spring may indicate a larger cultural and religious signifcance.

Additionally, a polished stone axe head from Langdale, Cumbria was identified and is believed to be from the same period. It was, however, found with Iron Age pottery from roughly 3,000 years later and has marks indicating possible reuse as a whetstone.

Thirty-five cremation burials from the Bronze Age were also found on site, with necklace beads from the same time. The team believes these are traces of a large Iron Age farming cohort.

The area is known for its connection to the 17th–century Civil War, but there have also been traces of human existence identified in previous excavations that date back to the end of the ice ages.

A 694-acre extension south of Newark, Middlebeck is expected to grow to accommodate more than 3,000 homes that will be serviced by a £100 million ($1.24 million) link road.

Archaeologists found a significant portion of the original buildings that revealed new details about the masters and residents who lived there. In particular, Gwilym Williams, a project manager at the Museum of London Archaeology (Mola), told the Guardian Wednesday that the findings painted a “very different picture compared with the dark, dingy workhouses often depicted in popular culture.”

Unlike what Dickens portrayed, for example, archaeologists found brightly colored plaster and fireplaces measuring roughly three feet tall. Prior to these findings, little was known about the building, with the exception of its overall shape outlined on parish maps.

In the early 19th century, workhouses were created to help the poor. In exchange for hard labor such as picking oakum fibers and breaking stones, inmates received basic food and housing. Those depicted in the written record were often described as bug-infested and overcrowded.

St Pancras, which opened in 1809, appears to have been initially more focused on providing support for those experiencing difficult times. Despite original intentions, however, the building intended to house 500 held 1,900 inmates by the 1850s.

“While the facilities are spartan, the inmates were not there to be punished,” Williams told the Guardian. “There were gardens, an infirmary and nursery. These acknowledge their needs as much as the heated rooms, or the pale blue paint on the walls.”

The team also found institutional tableware and the remains of a bone toothbrush with horsehair bristles.

Though it’s still debated, some believe that the St Pancras facilities may be those featured in Dickens’s 1838 novel Oliver Twist. It has been confirmed that, at the very least, his friend and contributor Henry Morley wrote about the St Pancras workhouse.

In 1929 the workhouse was converted into a hospital, which was partially bombed in World War II and subsequently demolished.

The excavated areas have been unearthed ahead of the construction of Oriel, a new facility for eye care, research, and education, as a combined initiative between Moorfields Eye Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, UCL Institute of Ophthalmology, and Moorfields Eye Charity.

A company was planning to build a factory in the area where the coins were located. Bundled with straw rope, archaeologists found 1,060 bundles of coins containing 100 pieces each in an area measuring roughly two feet high by three feet wide.

Some of the coins date back to the Chinese Empire more than 2,000 years ago. The teams examined 334 coins and discovered that the coins date back to at least 44 different years.

The oldest coin identified thus far is an engraved Ban Liang bronze coin with a hole in its center dating back to 175 BCE. The most recent coin, by contrast, dates to 1256 CE. That coin is thought to to have been buried that same year, during the Kamakura period (1185–1333).

Additionally, a number of other relics were found at the excavation site. Experts think the site may have once been a central part of Kozuke province, which proceeded Guman Prefecture between the late 3rd to late 7th centuries.

It is believed the coins were hastily buried for safekeeping, as they’re located near previously large residences of notable people who were present at a time when war was brewing.