Sylvanus Griswold Morley

In those days, Mesoamerican archaeology was not for the faint-hearted, and Sylvanus Griswold Morley – ‘physically frail, short of stature, squeaky-voiced and near-sighted’, according to Prudence Rice and Christopher Ward – wasn’t really cut out for it. He suffered stomach complaints, malaria, and dysentery, and one of his ‘huskies’ (as…

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The Corbett Society

Harold James Dyos, late Professor of Urban History at the University of Leicester, wrote that London underwent three distinct periods of growth: an increasingly dense build-up of the population in the centre, its spill-over into the outer districts of London, and the development of the outer suburbs of Greater London…

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Hilda Petrie (1871-1956)

Having learnt Arabic, Hilda would hire and pay their workers. She slept in a hut at Tarkhan with 80 skulls by her bed, living off canned pilchards and bully beef.…

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John Wesley Gilbert (1863-1923)

Gilbert was one of the first Americans – of any ethnicity – to undertake archaeological work in Greece. There, he is likely to have met Heinrich Schliemann, rediscoverer of Troy, and certainly he did groundbreaking excavation work on the neighbourhoods of Athens…

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A century of Tutankhamun

What Carter and his Egyptian team found at the bottom of the stairs and along a short corridor stunned the world, of course – especially those countries barely beginning to recover from the dreadful losses of the First World War.…

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Halet Çambel

This ruined city had richly carved monumental gateways and, even more significant, an 8th-century BC stela that, bearing the same text in both the Phoenician alphabet and Luwian hieroglyphics, gave Çambel the key to unlock the Luwian language for future scholars.…

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War Classics: From the Dreadnought to Scapa Flow

More than half a century after its publication, it is widely regarded as the inescapable starting point for scholars working on early 20th-century British naval history. What made Marder such an outstanding historian? Above all, it is his command of the primary sources.…

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Roland Penrose, ‘camouflage evangelist’

‘The tendency in warfare up to very recent times,’ wrote Roland Penrose in his 1941 book The Home Guard Manual of Camouflage, ‘has been to rely on sheer strength and even ostentation rather than concealment.’ Be it the shining armour of medieval knights, the scarlet coats and prominent headgear of…

Michael Ventris

Michael Ventris' decipherment of a mysterious ancient script, Minoan Linear B, was dubbed by The Times as ‘the Everest of Greek archaeology’……

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Writing archaeology

Neil went on to propose using what R G Collingwood called ‘the historical imagination’ by blending data and interpretation to ‘tell the story’. He was convinced that this ‘must be done if archaeology is to be interesting and worthwhile’.…

Women War Photographers

Calum Henderson explores the lives and works of war photographers Gerda Taro, Endre Friedmann, Françoise Demulder, Anja Niedringhaus, Lee Miller, and Catherine Leroy.…

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