Every year, there is a seemingly endless trove of awe-inspiring and revelatory discoveries across the world from the archaeological community -- and 2024 was no exception.

So Newsweek asked a number of archaeologists: What has been their favorite find of the year? Here's what they told us.

Best discovery were huge hearths that processed salt on an industrial scale. Found on a coastal island but salt was traded to the mainland during the Maya Classic period (especially 600 to 800 A.D.)

For me it was the news that the whereabouts of the sarcophagus of C.13th BC Egyptian pharaoh Ramses II had finally been identified, not in its original location in his tomb in the Valley of the Kings, but having been reused by a later priest for his own burial at the site of Abydos -- all thanks to brilliant detective work by French Egyptologist Frédéric Payraudeau.

I do archaeology to learn about past peoples and cultures. Individual finds like a king's tomb or a new site in the jungle are far less important than research that yields new insights on the past.

As my colleague, David Hurst Thomas, says, "It's not what you find, it's what you find out." My favorite find of 2024 was research described in a publication by a team led by Philis Riris (Bournemouth University) that identified social resilience in past societies.

They found that over the long haul (thousands of years), those societies that experienced more frequent shocks and setbacks were able to learn from their past and recover more successfully from downturns and disturbances.

The discovery of hundreds of new geoglyphs and figures in Nazca, Peru, using IA, led

by Masato Sakai and Yuichi Matsumoto, from the University of Yamagata and the Osaka

Museum of Ethnography is the most spectacular finding.

They have not only revealed a great number of new figures, that are slightly older than the world-famous Nazca Lines, but they have done it using artificial intelligence to help in the daunting task of coming hundreds of square kilometers of desert.

My favorite archaeological "find" of 2024 is something that is increasingly part of our field now, which involves searching the published record for very unusual objects and trying to find overall patterns because just waiting for the next one of something rare to show up might take years.

For this, an excellent example is Gilligan, Ian, Francesco d'Errico, Luc Doyon, Wei Wang, and Yaroslav V. Kuzmin (2024), Paleolithic Eyed Needles and the Evolution of Dress, Science Advances 10:1-12.

It's literally about looking for needles in the proverbial haystack, in this case to understand when "clothing" as we understand it first started being made.

Of course, the actual clothing doesn't survive, being made of things like leather that would have long since rotted away, so needles made of bone and other durable materials serve as a proxy.

Needles first appeared starting around 40,000 years ago across Eurasia from Siberia to Spain, suggesting that "clothing" as we know it -- including the concept of "fitted" and "fashionable" clothing as well as underwear -- was made possible by the use of sewing and has an extremely long human social history!