ARCHAEOLOGY

LIVING BY RITUAL

Regular readers of this magazine will be familiar with the idea that archaeologists often interpret sites and artifacts as having had ritual significance to people of the past. Scholars often joke among themselves that, when confronted with a puzzling feature of

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Palaces Of The Golden Horde
When Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales in the late fourteenth century, he set one of his stories in “Sarai, in the land of the Tartars.” At that time, Sarai was widely known as the capital of the mighty Golden Horde. An independent state within the
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Many of the buildings along Pompeii’s streets are covered with painted messages extolling the virtues of candidates running for office nearly 2,000 years ago. “These graffiti played a similar role to our electoral posters, to get consensus and suppor
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Which Island Is It Anyway?
There are at least 17 places off the southern coast of Britain that modern scholars have suggested might be the island of Iktis, a major center of the Iron Age (ca. 750 B.C.–a.d.43) tin trade. The confusion, however, didn’t begin in modern times, but

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