How did Egypt build the pyramids? It is a question that has excited the imagination of scholars and visitors for millennia. Now papyri documenting work on the Great Pyramid are revealing fresh insights into construction work. Pierre Tallet and Mark Lehner told Matthew Symonds how combining text and archaeology can expose the secrets of an extraordinary building project.
Deep in the Jordanian desert lies an extraordinary ruin. It is a Roman fort that can stake a claim to being the best-preserved example anywhere in the former empire. But this relic of imperial power is in urgent need of conservation work. David Breeze, Mark Driessen, and Fawzi Abudanah discuss why Qasr Bshir is special, and the challenges that lie ahead.
Chris Peers, author of a new minute-by-minute study of the fighting on 22 January 1879, analyses the extraordinary endurance of the mission-station garrison.
When it was completed in 1209, medieval London Bridge was the only fixed crossing of the Thames downstream of Kingston-upon-Thames (until Fulham Bridge was built in 1729). Remarkably, it was also home to some 500 people – equivalent to the population of a small medieval town. In London Bridge and its Houses, Dorian Gerhold has scoured the archives of Bridge House – the medieval charity that managed the bridge – to find out more about the community that lived on this extraordinary structure, as Chris Catling reports.
William V Wenger offers a forensic analysis of the American victory, apparently against the odds, in the war of 1775-1783.
A seemingly unassuming lump of corroded bronze has confounded investigators for more than a century, ever since it proved to contain precision gearwheels that simply should not have existed in the ancient Greek world. A new study, using cutting-edge techniques, has now revealed what this machine could do, and how it did it, as Tony Freeth explains.