Engraving detail: balustrade with a halberd and a head on a pike










Figurehead from the ship Henri IV, carved in wood around 1848 in the sculpture workshop of the Cherbourg arsenal. An exhibit of the National Navy Museum in Paris.
A celebrated Etruscan fresco of the late fourth century BC from the François Tomb at Vulci depicts a cruel ritual of the Trojan War. The central scene of the composition is the sacrifice of Trojan prisoners, which the Greek hero Achilles performs in honour of his fallen friend Patroclus. The
Alexandr Diachenko of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and Detlef Gronenborn of the Leibniz Centre for Archaeology in Mainz have built a mathematical model that links the diversity of pottery ornament to population size, the organisation of pottery production and the exchange of information. They compared the pottery
Some news on migration. At Schöningen in Lower Saxony, a milk tooth of a macaque some 310,000 years old has been found. The tooth was recovered as long ago as 2004, but has been studied only now. Scientists from Leiden University and the Senckenberg Centre at the University of