The copper road
For the first time in human experience, a substance could be melted and converted into something new. If you set off by car from the Volga River to Hungary, you will have
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Archaeology as immersive historical simulation
When I began studying archaeology nearly 70 years ago, my professor illustrated his lectures with the aid of glass slides projected through an antediluvian machine known as an epidiascope
A world of discoveries
The 6th Shanghai Archaeological Forum has just drawn to a close, and it is time to reflect on its many highlights. This year, the field trip was scheduled on the first day, and we were given the choice of visiting freshly uncovered shipwrecks and the new Shanghai Museum, or to take the bus south to visit two key sites: Jingtoushan and Hemudu.
Ancient newsreels
It portrays a ferocious Maya chief clad in a jaguar skin, with a jaguar’s head on his own, spearing an unfortunate captive. First seen by an outsider in 1946, the paintings are as close a reflection as you are likely to see of life in an elite Maya centre.
Rise of the elites
… you can peer down into a deep square where Bronze Age burials are left in the ground following an earlier Thai excavation. Your eyes alight on the grave of a man accompanied by a remarkable number of pottery vessels and a socketed copper-base axe.
The Princess of Khok Phanom Di
The Princess was not buried alone. Alongside her was a grave big enough for an adult, which contained the ochre covered skeleton of a little girl aged about 18 months, covered in about 15,000 shell beads and, lo and behold, a tiny clay anvil for shaping pots.
Seeking a legendary lost city
The civil war had been very disruptive. There had been looting, pillage, and social upheaval. There are records of a most heinous crime, rooting up the boundary markers of land ownership, for which those guilty were impaled.
Surveying Verulamium
We all gathered round on another day, when a whoop of excitement emerged from the next-door shop, where Professor Frend was working in a cellar. He had just found the lovely bronze statuette of Venus, now a proud exhibit in the Verulamium Museum
The Treasures of Sanxingdui
The contents of those two pits amaze. They include some of the most remarkable bronzes from the ancient world: human face-masks with protruding eyes, thought to depict Cancong, the mythical first king of Shu.
Vikings of the Sunrise
Originating in the remote past on the island of Taiwan, these Austronesian-speaking people were ultimately to settle from Malagasy to Rapa Nui, Easter Island. But did they go even further, and reach the Americas before Columbus?
Tea with the junta
For some unaccountable reason, perhaps a case of mistaken identity, Polly and I were ushered into a private room to sit down to afternoon tea with the junta.
A new world of communication
One of the most breathtaking experiences in my archaeological life was to mount the steps and look out over the assembled ranks of the terracotta army.
In praise of volunteers
My excavations, including Khok Phanom Di, have yielded well over 1,000 human graves, and often the dead were interred with multiple mortuary offerings from fine pottery vessels to thousands of ornaments in gold, silver, bronze, iron, carnelian, glass, shell, and agate.
In Praise of Antiquity
There is no email I await with greater anticipation and, indeed, trepidation, than one captioned ‘Your radiocarbon results’.
Discovering Denny
Charles Higham looks at how a routine DNA analysis resulted in a stunning discovery about the prehistory of our human past