Campania

The stern of the shipwreck Endurance.Photo: Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust/National GeographicCompiling 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…

A chest and table in one of the newly discovered rooms in the House of the Lararium.Photo: Courtesy of the Archaeological Park of PompeiiArchaeologists at Pompeii have announced the discovery of several furnished rooms in the House of the Lararium, a middle class residence on the ancient city’s northern side.Pompeii was famously preserved by the devastating eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE, an eruption that baked and suffocated its cosmopolitan habitants in superheated pyroclastic flows. The eruption covered the…