David Breeze, Tatiana Ivleva, and Rebecca Jones consider the contribution made to the study of Roman frontiers by Brenda Heywood, who died last December, and other contemporary female archaeologists.…
Text by Andrew Robinson…
These same people would not hesitate to wear a scarab-ring taken off a dead man’s hand… Their objections – their opinions even – are an offence to science.…
A scientific approach to the study of ancient Egyptian mummies.…
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…
'As early as 1958, she took part in the first excavation of a 13th-century BC Bronze Age shipwreck.'…
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…
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.…
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…
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.…
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.…
Historian Janina Ramirez tells Diana Bentley about her latest work delving into stories of celebrated archaeological discoveries and the people behind them, and of the medieval women all-too-often overlooked by history.…
Dig into archive records. Leaf through forgotten research in books that were written in foreign tongues. Centuries-old observations can provide important perspectives on the archaeological record, as Eva Mortensen and Rubina Raja highlight in this account of a pioneering Danish explorer in the Syrian Desert.…
A letter in the Penn Museum archives sets Richard Hodges and Alessandro Pezzati on the trail of a memorable moment in the pioneering days of archaeological broadcasting.…
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.…
‘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…
At the end of last year, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston – the city known as ‘the Athens of America’ – opened a renovated suite of five galleries devoted to the art of Greece, Rome, and Byzantium. Lucia Marchini speaks to curators Christine Kondoleon, Laure Marest, and Phoebe Segal…
Michael Ventris' decipherment of a mysterious ancient script, Minoan Linear B, was dubbed by The Times as ‘the Everest of Greek 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’.…
Calum Henderson explores the lives and works of war photographers Gerda Taro, Endre Friedmann, Françoise Demulder, Anja Niedringhaus, Lee Miller, and Catherine Leroy.…