Archaeology Odyssey, May/June 2003
Features
In the summer of 1975 a Spanish gypsy named Virgilio Romero Moreno visited the museum in Jaén, 250 miles south of Madrid, and offered to sell several limestone sculptures. After some negotiation, the museum bought the pieces, which had recently been dug up near the village of Porcuna in the hilly countryside of Andalusia. […]
For about 5,000 years, Egypt’s Southwest Desert, west of Lake Nasser, has been a hellish, lifeless, hyper-arid region of barren rock and sand. But that wasn’t always so. Archaeologists surveying this part of the Sahara have found ancient remains of lakes, villages, cattle bones, burial tumuli and huge megaliths aligned with the heavens. […]
To escape the city’s hustle and bustle, wealthy Romans flocked every summer to the Bay of Naples. At the resort towns of Baiae, Puteoli and Pompeii, they lounged on beaches, shopped for souvenirs, visited tourist sites, wined and dined—and perhaps even engaged in a little hanky panky.