November/December 2023

ARCHAEOLOGY

ARCHAEOLOGY magazine brings the ancient world to life.

ARCHAEOLOGY2 min read
Archaeology
Editor in Chief Jarrett A. Lobell Deputy Editor Eric A. Powell Executive Editor Daniel Weiss Senior Editor Benjamin Leonard Associate Editor Ilana Herzig Editorial Assistant Malin Grunberg Banyasz Creative Director Richard Bleiweiss Maps Ken Feisel
ARCHAEOLOGY2 min read
Twenty-first Century Tool Kit
The range of scientific tools archaeologists have at their disposal is remarkable, and advances have provided today’s researchers with insights into people of the past that previous generations of scholars could never have imagined. One of the most f
ARCHAEOLOGY2 min read
Puzzling Out The Past
To love archaeology is to love puzzles, to embrace weaving together multiple small fragments of past lives into complete pictures. A concrete form of this puzzle-piecing comes from the work of reassembling objects. Imagine opening the cardboard box c
ARCHAEOLOGY3 min readChemistry
DIGS & DISCOVERIES
Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Edo people of the Kingdom of Benin, which controlled territory on the west coast of Africa that is now part of Nigeria, produced thousands of artworks that have come to be known as the Benin Bronzes
ARCHAEOLOGY3 min read
From Our Readers
It has been a while since an article astonished me as much as “Secrets of Egypt’s Golden Boy” (September/October 2023). I was fascinated by how Sahar Saleem used new technology to unwrap the body and even make a 3-D copy of the heart scarab that she
ARCHAEOLOGY1 min read
The Queen’s Jewels
Archaeologists excavating the tombs of pharaohs, queens, and nobles of ancient Egypt have found rooms filled with objects made of gold—solid gold masks, golden furniture, and thousands upon thousands of pieces of gold jewelry. Perhaps surprisingly, t
ARCHAEOLOGY1 min read
The Medusa Of Mérida
While digging in a large Roman house in the Spanish city of Mérida, archaeologists uncovered a vibrant mosaic featuring geometric and plant motifs, depictions of fish and animals, and, at its center, the head of Medusa. The mosaic covered the floor o
ARCHAEOLOGY1 min read
A Horse Is A Horse?
Nearly 25 years ago, a team working in Hohle Fels Cave in southern Germany’s Swabia region unearthed a small piece of carved ivory they believed represented a horse’s head. Even as three more small ivory pieces that were part of the same figurine wer
ARCHAEOLOGY1 min read
Child’s Play
Several years ago, archaeologists recovered more than 2,500 stone and shell beads from a child’s burial at the Neolithic village of Ba’ja in southern Jordan. Most of the beads were found still in place on the neck and chest of an eight-year-old girl,
ARCHAEOLOGY1 min read
Sea God’s Sanctum
The ancient city of Paestum in southern Italy is well known for its three massive stone temples, which were built in the sixth and fifth centuries b.c. by Greek colonists who founded the settlement in 600 b.c. and named it Poseidonia. Archaeologists
ARCHAEOLOGY1 min read
A Stitch In Time
Off the coast of present-day Croatia in the Adriatic’s Bay of Zambratija, a team of archaeologists recently retrieved the remnants of the oldest hand-sewn boat discovered in the Mediterranean, dating to between the twelfth and tenth centuries b.c. Fi
ARCHAEOLOGY1 min read
Imperial Datebook
A team of researchers recovered two marble fragments of a Roman document known as the Fasti Ostienses while digging in the ancient harbor town of Ostia outside Rome. The Romans were meticulous record keepers and engraved important events in chronolog
ARCHAEOLOGY2 min read
Island Commander
On the tiny island of Bryher, off the southwest coast of England, a farmer happened upon a grave in 1999 that proved particularly intriguing. The grave dated to late in the Iron Age (ca. 750 b.c.–a.d. 43). It contained an iron sword sheathed in a cop
ARCHAEOLOGY1 min read
Anglo-saxon Style Marker
Dozens of enigmatic ivory rings have been found in the graves of Anglo-Saxon women buried in England in the fifth and sixth centuries a.d. Their function has been an open question, as has the source of the ivory. Archaeologists were unsure whether th
ARCHAEOLOGY1 min read
Trading On Their Looks
Little is known of the Hirota people, who lived on the southern Japanese island of Tanegashima from the third to the seventh century a.d.—except that they seem to have engaged in long-distance shellfish trade and to have had unusually shaped skulls.
ARCHAEOLOGY2 min read
Plum Bayou Mounds, Arkansas
A dozen miles southeast of Little Rock, two large mounds rise from the flat Arkansas River floodplain. These structures—one almost 50 feet high and the other standing 39 feet—once marked the main religious and political center of an Indigenous group
ARCHAEOLOGY10 min read
Worshipping a Forbidden Goddess
At the dawn of the Roman Empire, as the future imperial powerhouse was still getting its footing, Rome’s leaders conquered faraway lands and pursued diverse methods of expanding and unifying their territory. Under Rome’s first emperor, Augustus (reig
ARCHAEOLOGY1 min read
The Four Altars
“Sacred to [---] of the island [---], protectress, mighty in [---], Calpurnia, daughter of Lucius Piso augur, granddaughter of Gnaeus Piso, offered (this) as a gift.” “BBDOMHBIMV, to the triumphant, Lady of the earth and the sea, protectress, who has
ARCHAEOLOGY10 min read
China’s River Of Gold
FOR MOST OF THE seventeenth century, China was in an almost constant state of political upheaval. After nearly 300 years of rule, the Ming Dynasty was collapsing under the weight of widespread corruption, domestic rebellion, and foreign invasions. Th
ARCHAEOLOGY8 min read
Paleolithic Pathfinders
NEARLY 55,000 years ago, a group of migrants reached a lofty rock shelter over-looking the Rhône River in what is now southern France. Though pelted by the dusty mistral winds, the alcove offered a sweeping view of the river valley, where bison herds
ARCHAEOLOGY11 min read
Assyrian Women Of Letters
The parents of an Assyrian woman named Zizizi were furious. Like many of their neighbors’ children, their daughter had dutifully wed an Assyrian merchant. Sometime around the year 1860 b.c., she had traveled with him to the faraway Anatolian city of
ARCHAEOLOGY12 min read
Who Were the Goths?
DURING THE LATER centuries of the Roman Empire, writers described barbarian incursions from the east that slashed across their lands, including a fierce battle near the shores of the Black Sea in a.d. 251 that ended in the death of a Roman emperor an
ARCHAEOLOGY12 min read
Uneasy Allies
Pedro Escalante is one of the few people who can truthfully say that they have found a lost city in the jungles of Central America. Now a well-known Salvadoran writer, Escalante was a 25-year-old law student in 1970 when local farmers told him about
ARCHAEOLOGY2 min read
ARCHAEOLOGICAL INSTITUTE of AMERICA
For the past 18 years, I have excavated in and around Nemea, in Greece, where there are archaeological remains dating from 6000 b.c. to the fifteenth century a.d. In summer 2023, my team focused on Nemea’s early Christian basilica, which dates to the
ARCHAEOLOGY2 min read
Spreading The Word
Over the past 50 years, excavations of settlements and graves around Hrubieszów, a small Polish town near the Ukrainian border, have shown that Gothic cultural practices had spread south by around a.d. 150 into a region inhabited by people of the Mas
ARCHAEOLOGY1 min read
From The Field
One of the important ethical and professional responsibilities archaeologists are charged with is to document and report the state of cultural heritage in areas where they conduct fieldwork. We are living through a particularly perilous time when sit
ARCHAEOLOGY2 min read
Photo Credits
COVER—Jacques Marthelot/Bridgeman Images; 6—Courtesy Şükran Köroğlu; 9—Courtesy Tobias Skowronek; © The Trustees of the British Museum/Art Resource, NY; 10—Brandon Clifford, Whydah Pirate Museum, Yarmouth, Massachusetts; Consortium of the Monumental
ARCHAEOLOGY2 min read
Artifact
Statues of gods featured prominently throughout the ancient world, but many of those that are best known from literary evidence have never been found. These include the nearly 40-foot-tall ivory and gold statue of the Greek goddess Athena that once s

ARCHAEOLOGY

More Issues From ARCHAEOLOGY