Features

The Etruscans
Mastering the delicate art of living By Ingrid D. Rowland

Do you wonder what happened to the ancient Etruscans, those civilized, seemingly mysterious people who revealed so many secrets of life and death to the Romans? Simply journey to the heart of Tuscany, to the bustling train station at Florence. Wait for one of the local trains from Chiusi, a town 90 miles […]

Grape Pips, Dog Bones and Acorn Missiles
Who destroyed the Etruscan Site of La Piana? By Jane K. Whitehead

The Etruscan settlement at La Piana came to a violent end. Every year excavations at the site, near the Italian city of Siena, turn up new evidence that La Piana was attacked and destroyed toward the end of the third century B.C. The invaders flung golfball-size missiles through the walls of the Etruscan […]

Welcome to the World of Magic!

In 92 and 1993, at Sepphoris (in Hebrew, Tzippori) in the lower Galilee, we uncovered two inscribed amulets designed to invoke magical powers.1 It’s not abracadabra; it’s WHYHAW and AWAAA. See if that will cure your fever!

Plundering the Sacred
German police recover thousands of artworks looted from Cyprus’s churches By Gabrielle DeFord

One of last year’s most important archaeological discoveries occurred not in the field but in some apartments in Germany. And it was not made by archaeologists but by police after an eight-month sting operation. Last fall, Munich police raided three apartments during a crackdown on an antiquities smuggling ring. Hidden in the floors and […]

Departments

Origins: A Cure for the Common Cold?
Not quite. But Arab scholars laid the foundations of modern medicine. By David W. Tschanz
Past Perfect: An Artist in an Antique Land
Francis Frith’s 19th-century photographs of Egypt inspired armchair travelers throughout the west
Destinations: Myra, Turkey
On the southern coast of Turkey, this ancient Lycian city boasts splendid rock-cut tombs. By Julie Skurdenis