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  • TECHNOLOGY FEATURE

How pollutants and poo paint a picture of past civilizations

A blend of chemistry and molecular-biology techniques are enabling archaeologists to mine ancient sediments for clues about the people who once lived there.
By
  1. Katarina Zimmer

    1. Katarina Zimmer is a freelance journalist in Berlin.

Soil core split lengthways, seen alongside a ruler and a paper with annotations on a desk.

A sediment core that was extracted about 11 kilometres from Mount Hora in Malawi, a site with a rich history of human occupation. Credit: David K. Wright/University of Oslo

In 2019, environmental archaeologist David Wright at the University of Oslo visited what was, at first glance, an extremely unappealing field site: a cluster of leech-infested swamps in northern Malawi. At times ankle-deep in the grassy water, he and his colleagues set up a percussion auger — an instrument used in the extraction of cylinders of mud by hammering a long plastic tube into the ground. The hard part was getting the cores back out again. With his knees bent, Wright would brace the auger against his shoulder and push against the ground. In one swamp, the sediment was so sticky that the auger snapped in half. “It’s pretty tough work,” Wright says, and the leeches settling around the team’s ankles were an added bonus.

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Nature 651, 545-548 (2026)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-026-00705-7

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