At first glance, it looks like an ordinary wardrobe. It has solid wooden doors, a sturdy frame and barely hints at anything unusual. Open it, though, and instead of shelves or hanging rails, there is a bed tucked inside. For hundreds of years, these enclosed sleeping spaces were part of everyday life across parts of…

Archaeologists working on farmland between the villages of Halberton and Sampford Peverell in Devon have uncovered a striking mosaic floor from a fourth-century Roman villa, along with an elaborate bathhouse that suggests the site once belonged to a family of considerable wealth. The discovery is the latest breakthrough from the Saving Halberton’s Ancient Roman Environment…

Long before modern theatres began using motorised stages and rolling sets, ancient Greek theatre builders appear to have solved the same problem using wood, stone tracks and simple wheels. New research from a team at Kumamoto University in Japan has strengthened the case that theatres from the Hellenistic period used large, moveable wooden stage structures…

A coral reef off the coast of Benin, long presumed dead, has just been found alive and full of activity, more than sixty years after scientists first wrote it off. Old surveys from the 1960s, carried out mainly to locate good fishing spots, had picked up signs of a possible deep-water reef sitting more than…