Richard Hodges tours the island’s Greek temples. Sicily in February. Cheating winter with the smell of new grass and the first flowers and blossom, I promised two friends that in three days we would chase down the ancient Greeks and their Mediterranean setting. To get into the mood, I watched Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard. Now […]
Author: Nick Bartos
Forgotten kingdom: Searching for lost royalty from the days of the Aksumite Empire
In 2015, CWA reported on the discovery by Louise Schofield of the remarkable grave of a young woman she nicknamed ‘Sleeping Beauty’. Now further excavation in in Ethiopia’s Tigray Province has revealed that ‘Beauty’ was not alone – and nearby remains, assumed to be a fort, are looking suspiciously like those of a royal residence. […]
CWA 83 – New Book Reviews
Mountains and Lowlands: Ancient Iran and Mesopotamia; Three Stones Make a Wall; Rock Art Studies: News of the World V; The Caribbean before Columbus; Human Mobility and Technological Transfer in the Prehistoric Mediterranean; Life and Death in the Mesolithic of Sweden
National Museum Zurich
The Swiss past with a modern twist. Follow the flow of the rivers Sihl and Limmat into downtown Zurich, and you will arrive at a scenic fork in the water. Here is the home of the country’s newest cultural attraction: Archaeology in Switzerland, the first permanent exhibition to take up residence in the recently opened […]
Interviewing Richard Hodges: an Englishman abroad
Richard Hodges chats to Caitlin McCall about people, places, and the ‘alchemy of archaeology’. The trouble with Richard Hodges is keeping him to a single subject. I’m catching up with him on one of his flying visits to London, to discuss his new book, Travels with an Archaeologist. This collection of vignettes, along the lines […]
Reviews: Film & Apps
Letters from Baghdad The story of Gertrude Bell (1868-1926) – archaeologist, explorer, spy, British political powerhouse, and the uncrowned ‘Queen of the Desert’ – requires no Hollywoodisation, and this film lends almost none. In a bold approach, directors Sabine Krayenbühl and Zeva Oelbaum rely on the photographs and writings of Bell herself, alongside contemporary film […]
Travel: St Pierre Cathedral
Hazel Blair explores ancient Celtic roots beneath early Christian Geneva. In the 21st century, Geneva is a lively hub of international politics and underground quantum research, but archaeologists should not feel out of place in this lakeside cosmopolis: if your passion for stratigraphy trumps your interest in the Higgs boson, Geneva has another secret subterranean […]
Beyond the Pillars of Hercules – Excavating an Iron Age seat of power
A new discovery deep in the Guadiana Valley of the Iberian Peninsula is revealing the secrets of a little-known and intriguing Iron Age civilisation. Sebastián Celestino Pérez and Esther Rodríguez González tell CWA about the latest finds from a political powerhouse: the kingdom of Tartessos. In the 5th century BC, the Greek historian and geographer […]
CWA 83
Though recorded in historical sources, the indigenous people in the south-west corner of the Iberian Peninsula have largely eluded archaeologists. We know they traded their silver and gold with the Phoenicians, and we know they had a coastal city called Tartessos, because the Greek historian Herodotus wrote of it in the 5th century BC. But […]
Sir John Soane’s Museum
CWA tours a London secret. Sir John Soane (1753-1837) was one of England’s most innovative architects, an esteemed professor at the Royal Academy, and the principal designer of the Bank of England. He was also a wildly eccentric enthusiast of the ancient Mediterranean, converting his London home into an architectural laboratory, an educational studio, and […]
Neil Faulkner considers the Pyramids and alternative facts
Apparently, we now live in a ‘post-fact’ world. The new American president denounces the truth as ‘fake news’. A leading White House spokesperson rejects the truth in favour of ‘alternative facts’. Veteran Middle East journalist Robert Fisk has argued that there is nothing new here: what is happening is called ‘lying’, and politicians have always […]
Book Review: The Fifth Beginning
Brian Fagan reviews Robert L Kelly’s new book to discover ‘what six million years of human history can tell us about our future’. Robert Kelly is an eminent North American archaeologist and an accomplished author. He modestly calls himself a ‘dirt archaeologist’, but his learning is formidable and his perspective truly global. The Fifth Beginning is […]