March/April 2019

ARCHAEOLOGY

ARCHAEOLOGY magazine brings the ancient world to life.

ARCHAEOLOGY2 min read
The Meaning Of Home
Each time we put together a new issue of the magazine, we are struck that people separated by distances of thousands of miles and by many millennia share markedly similar experiences. In this issue, you will read several stories of the very diffieren
ARCHAEOLOGY2 min readFashion
Clothes Make The Man Or Woman
In my letter for the preceding issue of ARCHAEOLOGY, I considered the typical diet of Galilean villagers in the time of Jesus. Soon after, a documentary television producer asked me about ancient Jewish clothing, and I started thinking about what vil
ARCHAEOLOGY2 min read
From Our Readers
Jarrett A. Lobell’s article “What Sank San Diego?” (January/February 2019) rightly commemorates a little-known but significant event of WWI. After spending my career at the Naval Undersea Warfare Center, retirement has allowed me time to study the hi
ARCHAEOLOGY3 min read
Fairfield’s Rebirth In 3-d
At the time it was completed in 1694, southeastern Virginia’s Fairfield Plantation was one of the largest and most architecturally innovative houses in the American colonies. Its distinctive features, including triple diamond-stack chimneys, hipped r
ARCHAEOLOGY2 min read
Off The Grid
Modern conveniences such as electricity, running water, and telephone lines that were hallmarks of post–World War II development across Ireland never arrived on the island of Inishark, which lies around five miles off the coast of Connemara in County
ARCHAEOLOGY1 min readChemistry
The Magic Mineral
To the Greeks and Romans, a red pigment known as miltos was a sort of multipurpose supersubstance. Ancient writers, from Theophrastus to Pliny, record that the fine-grained, red iron oxide–based material was much sought after for use in decoration, c
ARCHAEOLOGY1 min read
The Chicken People
When future archaeologists excavate sites dating to the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, what will define our era won’t be the smartphone, the plastic straw, or any other artificial product of our throwaway culture. It will instead be
ARCHAEOLOGY3 min read
World Roundup
NEW MEXICO: Between 1540 and 1542, Spanish conquistador Francisco Vasquez de Coronado explored northern Mexico and the American Southwest. Although it had been theorized that he passed through the area of today’s Coronado Historic Site near Albuquerq
ARCHAEOLOGY2 min read
The Obelisks of Heliopolis
The mighty stone monuments of ancient Egypt known as obelisks, a word derived from the Greek obeliskos, meaning “skewer” or “spit,” were known in Egyptian as tekhenu, which means “to pierce.” These monolithic, four-sided, pyramid-topped pillars rose
ARCHAEOLOGY11 min read
Egypt’s Eternal City
AS GEOGRAPHICAL GUIDES, creation myths can be unhelpfully vague. Christians, Jews, and Muslims have long searched in vain for the location of the Garden of Eden. For the ancient Egyptians, things were a bit easier. The world, they believed, began on
ARCHAEOLOGY6 min read
A Memory Of Home
For days or even weeks around the year A.D. 90, the sky over Ecuador’s Jama Valley must have been nearly black, even at the height of the day. Massive clouds of ash from the eruption of a volcano called Guagua Pichincha obscured the sun, buried crops
ARCHAEOLOGY9 min read
Between Two Empires
THE TWO SKELETONS lay buried for more than 2,500 years high on a mountaintop on the Anatolian Plateau. When the woman’s body was discovered, she was lying face down, her left hand covering her face and her right arm outstretched, as if attempting to
ARCHAEOLOGY2 min read
A Hint from Herodotus
Since the 1920s, there has been a debate about the identification of a city called Pteria mentioned by the Greek historian Herodotus. Kerkenes Project archaeologists have embraced the idea that the city at Kerkenes might be Pteria. Pteria, Herodotus
ARCHAEOLOGY8 min read
Art At The End Of The Ice Age
ACROSS THE RIVER from the port town of Brest in western Brittany, a quartzite outcropping rises above a forested coastline dotted with stately homes. Known as Rocher de l’Imperatrice, or “Rock of the Empress,” in honor of Napoleon III’s wife Eugenie,
ARCHAEOLOGY6 min read
Sicily’s Lost Theater
GOING TO THE THEATER was an essential part of ancient Greek civic and religious life. Plays such as the tragedies of Aeschylus and Euripides, the comedies of Aristophanes and Menander, and likely numerous other works that have not survived, were regu
ARCHAEOLOGY10 min read
On The Range
During the summer roundup, rancher Bob Macy doesn’t saddle up a horse to move his cattle into the pens next to Macy Ranch headquarters, a collection of a dozen low-slung buildings some 30 miles southeast of Lubbock, Texas. He is much more likely to w
ARCHAEOLOGY1 min read
The Year Of Troy
The year 2018 marked the 20th anniversary of the ancient city of Troy’s listing as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Located in the Çanakkale province in Turkey, Troy is the famous site of the Trojan War as first described in Homer’s Iliad. Over the cent
ARCHAEOLOGY2 min read
Photo Credits
COVER—Pictures from History/Bridgeman Images; 1—Marco Merola; 3—(clockwise from top left) Courtesy Andrew Peachey (ArchSol), Courtesy of Fairfield Foundation, Agata T. Gondek, Eitan Klein/Israel Antiquities Authority, © Frédéric Colin, University of
ARCHAEOLOGY3 min read
Dispatches from The Aia
archaeological.org The AIA kicked off 2019 in San Diego with the 120th AIA-SCS Joint Annual Meeting, a gathering of archaeologists, classicists, philologists, and archaeology enthusiasts. This year’s meeting included more than 70 sessions, seven work
ARCHAEOLOGY2 min read
Artifact
Being able to connect an archaeological artifact with a specific person mentioned in historical sources is relatively unusual—when the person was a woman, it is even more so. This recently discovered medieval seal stamp bears the name of Elisabeth Bu

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