Archaeology · Observations · Science · Humour
I read a funny item in the newsletter of the Prehistoric Society of Great Britain: for forty years Ireland believed that the oldest bones of a domestic cow, dated to before 4000 BC, had been found at the Ferriter's Cove site in County Kerry, and that this was
Archaeology · Observations · Science · Humour
Read in a newspaper 19 years old how a British history teacher, Adrian Targett, learned that he shares mitochondrial DNA with Cheddar Man, found in Gough's Cave in 1903 and some 10,000 years old. What is more, Targett and his family had lived all their lives literally
Archaeology · Science
A burial of 79 adult men with shackled wrists, discovered in 2016 in the Phaleron necropolis near Athens. The burial has been named the Esplanade. To this day there is no unambiguous answer to who they were and why they died together. The burial is dated to the turn of
Archaeology · Archive · The East · Books
The Babylonian poem "The Poor Man of Nippur", composed around 701 BC and devoted to the duty of hospitality and to vengeance for an undeserved insult. A poor man from the city of Nippur gives up his last possession and brings a goat as a gift to the
Archaeology · Architecture · Faith · The East · Art · Moscow · Museums · Heritage · Science · Paris · Nature · Saint Petersburg
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
Head of Odysseus from the sculptural group “The Blinding of Polyphemus”, found in 1957 in the grotto of the villa of the Emperor Tiberius at Sperlonga. The work illustrates the episode from the “Odyssey” in which the hero and his companions blind the Cyclops Polyphemus. Because of its stylistic closeness
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
A survey of 200 archaeological sites in Syria has established that in 2015-2025 59% of them were looted, 118 out of 200, almost five times more than in 2011-2016, when 26 of the 200 sites suffered. Traditionally, looting at these places means pits dug by hand. But they
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