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Fet begged to “drive the living boat off with a single push”, to catch the fleeting before it vanishes. The monthly digest has a more modest task, though the same one: to hold on to what matters before the flood of news washes it away. Here is the main news
Archaeology · Science
Researchers from Trinity College Dublin have for the first time reconstructed and analysed genomes of the smallpox virus from remains found in the Americas. The material was obtained from two people who lived in the colonial era in the north of present-day Chile. The analysis showed that the viruses
Archaeology · Art · Books · Museums
The work illustrates the episode from the “Odyssey” in which the hero and his companions blind the Cyclops Polyphemus. Because of its stylistic closeness to the “Laocoön” sculpture, this Odysseus is sometimes linked with the work of the Rhodian masters Hagesander, Athenodoros and Polydorus. After many years of restoration, the
Archaeology · Architecture · Faith · The East · Heritage
Speaking of the Syro-Hittite Iron Age temple of Ain Dara in Syria, it is famous first and foremost not as the closest known architectural parallel to the biblical Temple of Solomon, though that is a fact, but for the gigantic footprints in its stone. The prints are a little
Archaeology · The East · Heritage · Society
Traditionally, looting at these places means pits dug by hand. But they are also plundered with bulldozers, destroyed by the building of dugouts and fortifications on their territory and, finally, by camps, including refugee tents, pitched directly on archaeological sites. Mechanised looting is considered the worst form of damage, and
Archaeology · Observations · Science · Nature
In an article on how the inhabitants of southern Norway could make wooden fish traps at least seven thousand years ago, I came upon a suggestion that at about the same time people carried commercially valuable salmonids, namely brown trout, into mountain lakes. The hunter-fisher-gatherers, according to the
Archaeology · Art · Science · Nature
That Magdalenian art is not a random jumble of animal figures but a specially ordered structure is, on the whole, not a new idea. André Leroi-Gourhan wrote about it in the 1960s. He arranged the Stone Age herd around the horse and the bison. The scheme was discussed from
Archaeology · Museums · Heritage · New York · Society
Art-crime specialist Erin Thompson has explained why dozens of American museums still hold antiquities bought from Ali Aboutaam, the Geneva dealer convicted of trafficking in cultural property. Aboutaam built a scheme of shell companies and forged provenances: a restorer scrubbed freshly excavated objects with a toothbrush in an old
Archaeology · The East · Heritage · Society
The vote will begin in Busan, South Korea, this Friday. The List of World Heritage in Danger is a separate status within the World Heritage register, to which are added sites threatened with destruction by war, natural disaster, development or neglect. The Director of the World Heritage Centre, Lazare Eloundou
Archaeology · Science · People
At the Guatemalan site of Xultun, archaeologists have for the first time deciphered the name of an ancient Maya mathematician-astronomer: Sak Tan Wash, "White-Breasted Fox". The inscription was found among more than fifty mathematical micro-texts on the wall of a small room that researchers regard
Archaeology · Archive · Faith
A well-preserved papal bulla, a fourteenth-century lead seal belonging to Pope Clement V, has been found during excavations in the centre of Tallinn. The find was made in a medieval cultural layer together with pottery and other artefacts. The archaeologist Mihkel Tammet believes that the seal may have
Archaeology · The East · Museums · Heritage · New York · People
An interesting man, to be sure, the Manhattan prosecutor Matthew Bogdanos, who since 2003, when he witnessed the mass looting in Baghdad with his own eyes, has devoted himself to fighting the trade in stolen antiquities. The unit of the New York police that he heads has seized thousands of