Searching for Samnites in the ‘Region of Little Cities’ Surprisingly few people have heard of Molise. Yet this is one of the most beautiful and the most historically engaging areas of Italy. Emerging from the road-tunnel that leads into the region, you get the impression you are entering a forgotten world – and in […]
Category: Europe
Travel: Greek Temples of Sicily
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Travel: Thasos
With guidebook in hand, Martin Davies explores the untrammelled heritage of an idyllic Greek island. I first came across Thasos as a schoolboy reading Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: it was one of those exotic, magical names that sprinkle the Bard’s works and stir the imagination. Lying just off the coast of Macedonia in the Aegean, the island of […]
Secrets of the dolmens: Discovering lost masterpieces by ancient artists of the Iberian Peninsula
Rock-art specialists George Nash and Sara Garcês reveal spectacular prehistoric paintings hidden in the burial chambers of central-north Portugal. Thousands of late prehistoric burial-ritual sites litter the Atlantic façade of Europe, most dating to the 5th millennium BC, when first Neolithic and then Bronze Age pastoralists tended the fertile plains and valleys. These societies were […]
Byzantine Ephesus: Life in the city after Empire
The grand architectural monuments of Ephesus attest to its glory days as a sophisticated metropolis of the Roman Empire. But what happened when the Empire ended in the 4th century AD? Following recent excavation, Sabine Ladstätter and Michaela Binder reveal new evidence of life in the city during the turbulent days of Byzantine rule. Visitors […]
NEWS: Vasa ship look-alike found in Swedish waters
Underwater archaeologists have discovered a historic vessel off the coast of southern Sweden which is similar in construction to the famous Vasa, the ornate 17th-century warship on display in a dedicated museum in Stockholm. Around 45m in length with 68-70 cannons, experts from the Sjöhistoriska Museet believe the ship is the Blekinge, which was built […]
FILM REVIEW: Finding Altamira
Paul Bahn sifts fact from fiction in the silverscreen telling of an extraordinary discovery. Rarely does a true archaeological story become the basis of a movie. Yet this is what we have with Finding Altamira. It recounts the discovery in 1879 of Ice Age art on a cave ceiling at Altamira, provoking intense and acrimonious […]
NEWS: Heartbroken in a French convent
Analyses of graves in the Jacobin convent in Rennes (western France) have revealed previously unknown burial practices, challenging earlier interpretations about the history of death and belief in Europe. Constructed in 1369, the convent became a principal burial site for the aristocracy of Rennes, the seat of Brittany’s parliament. Excavations there by the Institut national […]
NEWS: Death of a Byzantine Mother
An early 13th-century AD skeleton found on the outskirts of ancient Troy has yielded preserved bacterial DNA from a deadly maternal infection – an unparalleled find. The genetic material came from two calcified nodules located at the base of the chest of a 30-year-old pregnant woman discovered in a stone-lined grave by archaeologists affiliated with […]