Archaeology Odyssey, January/February 2003

Features
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 […]
“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 […]
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. […]
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 […]