elites

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This week: Elites

These days, it sometimes seems hard to read a newspaper, or scan a news website, without coming across an article about the ‘new elites’ who run our world. Often this is in reference to the richest ‘1 percent’, who are…

Peru North Highlands Pacopampa Chavin style Feline Mortar 1957.494.a Cleveland Museum of Art.jpg

This week: Pacopampa

Understanding burial practices and funerary customs is a vital part of any attempt to understand an ancient culture – for while the need to separate the living from the dead is common to all human societies, the way in which…

Skattefund fra Terslev

This week: Danish treasure

No written records exist to explain why people in early medieval Europe chose to bury collections of their most valuable objects or artefacts – known to archaeologists as ‘hoards’ – though logic suggests that burying your treasures at moments of…

BELOW This tiny infant was buried with 20 pots, 2,154 shell beads, and a copper axe. Note, too, the bivalve shells, which we think symbolised rebirth. The big bangle is made of marble.

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.