Rome’s military is renowned as one of the finest fighting forces of the ancient world. But what was life really like for…
Last summer, one day stands out above all others: my first trip to Gordion (ancient Gordium), a Turkish city associated with Midas,…
The Hijaz Railway was vital to Ottoman ambitions in the First World War. Armed with Royal Flying Corps plans, a camera, and…
Spanning Emperor Constantine’s inauguration of Constantinople in AD 330 to the city’s fall to the Ottomans in AD 1453, Byzantium is one…
This summer the treasures of Alexander the Great’s family will grace the Ashmolean Museum. Andrew Selkirk examines the grave goods of a…
The remains - remarkably unprepossessing amid the spectacular ruins of classical Rome all around - comprise postholes, wall-slots, and drainage gullies, defining…
Not long after sunrise on 13 July 2010, two archaeologists descended a long aluminium ladder into a 25-ft deep pit immediately south…
In August 1903 Gabriel Gustafson, director of the University Museum of Antiquities in Kristiana (now Oslo), received an unexpected visitor. The caller,…
In the summer of 1911, the young Arnold Toynbee (1889-1975) went on a bicycling tour around Rome and began to realise that…
Today, Gravina is one of those little-known Italian towns that every tourist falls for. Meaning ‘ravine’ in Italian, the town is aptly…
In 1996, Alastair Small and his wife Carola launched a major fieldwalking project to examine the countryside near Gravina. Focusing on the…
The fate of the inland cities of Southern Italy depended to a considerable extent on the fortunes of the Greek colonies springing…
The Samnites were hardy folk. Living in a region dominated by the Apennine mountains to the southeast of Rome, they proved reluctant…