Archaeology Odyssey, May/June 2000
Features
Prepare to fall in love—with our friends the Yarmukians. Since they lived almost 8,000 years ago, about 3,000 years before people began communicating in writing, you can’t ask them who they were. And even if you could, it’s doubtful you would understand their answer; we don’t even know what language they spoke. But […]
European archaeologists were digging in the ancient Near East before the age of Napoleon. Americans, by contrast, were latecomers. The United States did not launch its first formal archaeological expedition in the Near East until the late 1880s, when an odd collection of scholars, soldiers of fortune, educational bureaucrats and financiers organized an excavation […]
Around 25 B.C. the Roman architect Vitruvius wrote this dedication to the emperor Augustus: I have drawn up definite rules so that by observing them you might understand what previous works were like and what future works will be like … In the following volumes I have disclosed all the principles of the discipline.1 […]
The field of archaeology is under a political cloud because of its allegedly racist and exploitative history. American Indians have protested the “desecration” of tribal burial grounds by archaeological digs. A longstanding argument rages about the legal ownership of antiquities acquired by museums through donation or purchase since the late 18th century. The brief […]