Archaeology Odyssey, March/April 2003
Features
In the Neolithic period (c. 8000–4000 B.C.), Near Eastern peoples created a number of arresting images to represent (or influence) their world. They carved small female figurines immodestly presenting their breasts or pregnant stomachs, for instance, and they depicted animals being viciously stabbed with flints. Perhaps the most powerful and haunting of these Stone […]
In Sicily’s Villa Romana del Casale, the fourth-century A.D. Roman mansion decorated with the most extensive collection of mosaics to have survived the destruction of the empire, the Cyclops depicted on the floor of the Vestibule of Polyphemus has three eyes. Two regular eyes, normally set, and another, smack in the middle of his […]
“It lies outside; outside the circuit of civilisation.” That’s how D.H. Lawrence described Sardinia in Sea and Sardinia (1923), and until recently that’s what many thought about this island: During the third and second millennia B.C., Sardinia remained isolated from the vibrant cultures of the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean. Decades of archaeological research, […]