Flinders Petrie, an established Egyptologist, excavated three prehistoric sites in Egypt for the Egypt Exploration Fund during the 1890s
The Search for Immortality at The Fitzwilliam Museum
The Han Dynasty was founded in 206 BC, and their 400 years of near-continuous rule represent a Golden Age for China. By the 1st century AD their territory rivalled the Roman Empire for population and power, but this success was hard-won, forged through long struggles with neighbouring states. Now the Fitzwilliam Museum’s new exhibition, The [...]
Book Review: Settlement and Lordship in Viking and Early Medieval Scandinavia
Bjørn Poulsen and Søren Michael Sinbaek (eds.) Brepols, £79.00 ISBN 978-2503531311 Recent advances in settlement archaeology have uncovered a treasure trove of new information about social power in Early Medieval Scandinavia, and this comprehensive work brings together 17 papers, ranging from landholding and the changing influence of royal and Church authorities, to insights into all levels [...]
Book Review: Hajj: journey to the heart of Islam
May 28, 2012
Filed Under: Issue 53, Books, Saudi Arabia
Venetia Porter (ed.) British Museum Press, £25.00 ISBN 978-0714111759 Drawing on a recent British Museum exhibition of the same name, this beautifully illustrated catalogue contains stunning photographs of artefacts, sites, and artwork associated with the Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca, as well as a wealth of information on the evolution of the Hajj and the lives of [...]
Book Review: Violence, Ritual, and the Wari Empire
Tiffiny A. Tung University Press of Florida, £64.50 ISBN 978-0813037677 Between AD 600-1000, the Wari Empire represented one of the first politically centralised states in the New World. This study reveals the biological and social impact of the military aggression on which this power was founded, with groundbreaking DNA and osteological data shedding light on [...]
Book Review: The Archaeology of Northeast China: beyond the Great Wall
Sara Milledge Nelson Routledge, £26.00 ISBN 978-0415513472 Elegantly illustrated and admirably comprehensive in its scope, this synthesis of recent archaeological research into the prehistoric peoples of Donbei – best known in the west as Manchuria – sheds new light on a region rather less discussed than the civilisations of central China. Nelson’s introduction, contrasting the [...]
Book Review: Cracking the Egyptian Code
Andrew Robinson Thames & Hudson, £19.95 ISBN 978-0500051719 In 1922 Howard Carter could be confident that he had found Tutankhamun’s tomb, but when Giovanni Belzoni discovered the tomb of Seti I in 1817, the pharaoh was initially misidentified as ‘Psammis’. The difference was that in Belzoni’s day nobody could read hieroglyphs; this knowledge had faded [...]
Review: Hajj
May 28, 2012
Filed Under: Issue 53, Books, Saudi Arabia
Following the success of the British Museum’s recent exhibition Hajj: Journey to the Heart of Islam, Nadia Durrani was intrigued to find out more about Britain’s first pilgrims to the holy shrine at Mecca. Who were they, and what were their experiences?
Richard Hodges travels to: Rhodes
As we crossed from Marmaris to Rhodes, the hydrofoil skimming through the hammered blue seas, my thoughts turned to one of my favourite books, Lawrence Durrell’s Reflections on a Marine Venus. Few writers are better at capturing the magic of the Mediterranean than Durrell, who was born a century ago this year. Here is a [...]
CWA travels to: Thera
On the letters page of CWA 52, Martin Davie asked for more information about Thera. Well, Martin, I may just be able to help. As many of you will know, I am devoting my semi-retirement from Current Archaeology to writing a History of the World – well, isn’t that what everyone does in their retirement? – [...]
Chris Catling on…
Droit du seigneur One of life’s most uncomfortable experiences is to be engaged in conversation by a family-history buff. Often these are people who have selflessly devoted their retirement years to tracing all the branches of their family tree. This rapidly becomes an all-absorbing obsession, and there is a huge international industry devoted to taking [...]
Easy Money
Both Diggers on the National Geographic Channel and Spike TV’s American Digger follow the exploits of metal-detecting teams as they search for buried artefacts. Both productions depict the frequent and careless removal of antiquities, with the sole objective to collect treasure for monetary gain. Archaeologists have angrily denounced the series as a promotion of mercenary [...]
Charles Higham: A prehistoric mystery
The McDonald Institute at Cambridge University has, for many years, held special symposia on topics that traditionally lie on the ‘edge of knowability’. These involve about 20 specialists, each of whom delivers a brief summary of a pre-circulated paper, before the floor is opened to discussion. I have been lucky enough to be invited to [...]
Turkey: Ancient language discovered
News breaking as we go to press that archaeologists have discovered an unknown language dating back 2,500 years to the days of the Assyrian Empire will not surprise CWA readers, who were given an early exclusive by Dr John MacGinnis in his feature on the ancient site of Ziyaret Tepe in Turkey (CWA 50). He [...]
Oetzi: cold case
Researchers studying 5,300-year-old ‘Oetzi’ have found traces of blood, the oldest red blood cells ever recovered, showing he died shortly after his wound was inflicted. Tissue samples from his fatal arrow wound revealed the distinctive ‘doughnut’ shape of red blood cells, and fibrin, a protein associated with blood clotting. The traces of fibrin show the [...]
Archaeologists protest
Greek archaeologists picketed a recent auction of antiquities at a London auction house in protest against cuts to state heritage services in Greece. Ten demonstrators stood outside Christie’s during the sale of Egyptian, Greek, Mesopotamian, and Roman artefacts, holding placards with images of shattered museum cases. This article is an extract from the full article [...]
South Africa: Burning evidence
May 28, 2012
Filed Under: Issue 53, News, South Africa
Humans used fire a million years ago – more than 300,000 years earlier than previously thought, according to a team led by Michael Chazan of the University of Toronto and Liora Kolska Horwitz, Hebrew University, whose findings are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Excavation at Wonderwerk cave in South Africa [...]
20,000-year-old huts in Jordan
Excavations in Jordan have unearthed 20,000-year-old huts that could reshape our view of how humans lived before the development of agriculture. The research, recently published in PLoS One, suggests hunter-gatherers in this region had fixed settlements with extensive trade networks 10,000 years earlier than previously thought. ‘Kharaneh IV is one of the densest and largest [...]
Egypt: Missing manuscript
Lost fragments of an ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead have been rediscovered in Australia. On a visit to Queensland Museum, British Museum Egyptologist Dr John Taylor noticed a familiar name on one of the pieces of papyrus on display – a ‘once-in-a-lifetime discovery’, he said. Archaeologists had been searching for the missing pieces of [...]
UNESCO protects the Titanic
The Titanic has been granted official protection from unscientific exploration by UNESCO. According to the UN’s cultural agency, over 700 divers have visited the wreck but after passing the centenary of her sinking on 15 April, the ship fell under the 2001 Convention on the Protection of Underwater Cultural Heritage. For more information on the [...]
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