Features

The Next Best Thing to Being There

Can’t tell a mattock head from a plumb bob? After a few weeks volunteering on a dig, you’ll be a lot cannier about the tools of the archaeology trade—and having fun, too. Archaeology Odyssey’s fourth annual digs list presents you with opportunities to uncover some of the secrets of the ancient past that lie […]

Sailing the Open Seas
Recent deepwater archaeological finds disprove the conventional wisdom that ancient mariners were timid shore-huggers By Dan L. Davis

“The Mediterranean is a passionate collector,” writes European scholar Predrag Matvejevicá in Mediterranean: A Cultural Landscape (1999). Indeed, over the past half-century, essentially since the invention of the aqualung in the 1940s, divers have discovered the remains of well over 1,200 ancient shipwrecks.a Most of these wrecks date to Roman times (200 B.C.–300 […]

Exploring the Deep
New technologies transport us thousands of feet beneath the ocean’s surface—allowing archaeologists to survey ancient (and modern) shipwrecks By Aaron Brody, Anna Marguerite McCann

Oceans cover 71 percent of the earth, and a whopping 97 percent of these waters are beyond the reach of conventional scuba divers, who can reach only about 200 feet below the surface of the sea. The vast majority of the world’s shipwrecks, therefore, cannot be excavated or even found. Until recently, that is. […]

Naked and the Nude
Erotic images in the near eastern and Greco-Roman worlds By Larissa Bonfante

What is the difference between the Near Eastern focus on female nudity, almost to the point of vulgarity, and the ‘Pompeian style’ of vulgar male nudity? Why did one civilization produce nude representations of women (almost exclusively) and the other nude representations of men (almost exclusively)?” This question was put to me by […]

Departments

Editors’ Page: Is Silence Golden?
Some scholarly societies won’t discuss the James Ossuary By Hershel Shanks
Origins: History’s History
Learning to distinguish fact from fancy By Richard H. Beal
Past Perfect: In the Footsteps of Pausanias
A second-century baedecker takes us on a tour of ancient Greece
Ancient Life: “Come Down, Placenta!”
Childbirth in ancient Egypt
The Forum
Are Shapira’s fakes repulsive pornography or simply modern grotesques? And the Looting Forum: Round 3.
Briefly Noted
For budding archaeologists