Oh no! Not another Iraq

For the last five or six days, I’ve been searching the web for good, reliable news about what is happening to Egypt’s antiquities as the turmoil deepens in Cairo. Are Egyptian artifacts safe in the country’s many museums, protected by soldiers perched on tanks or by human chains of young Egyptians? Or are gangs of [...]

A Long Vanished Waterworld

A few years ago, a colleague and I hired a cab to journey across the Sahara Desert, from a tiny oasis town to Luxor in the Nile Valley. Before we could head out, however, the driver insisted that we anoint ourselves with perfume he brought for the occasion–a ritual cleansing to protect us from evil [...]

Spooks, Wikileaks and Archaeology

Like many other journalists, I’ve been following the reports this week about Julian Assange, editor-in-chief at Wikileaks. I like whistleblowers and others who shed light on dark places, and I hoped that Assange would find some way of slipping through the fingers of all those Interpol inspectors. Of course it wasn’t to be. As of [...]

Hogwarts for Archaeologists

When I first saw the magical, Harry-Potter-like images taken by the folks at the Nottingham Caves Survey in England, my jaw clunked on my desk. Archaeologists have enthused for some time now over the potential of laser scanning for recording ancient sites, but until now the results looked merely brisk and workmanlike. But these new [...]

Partying, Drinking Beer, and Siring Civilization

Did the prehistoric equivalent of a great big, beery, boozy party give rise to some of the world’s earliest civilizations? That sounds about as likely as Sarah Palin rolling up her sleeves and deciphering the Dead Sea Scrolls. And yet, that idea–beer as one of the original jet fuels of civilization–is gathering momentum among archaeologists, [...]

The Brothel, the Madam and the Doctor

In the summer of 1993, just weeks before bulldozers began rolling in for the largest transportation project in Boston’s history–the Central Artery/Third Harbor Tunnel–archaeologists discovered what appeared to be two 19th century privies and a cistern along the old waterfront. Unable to come up with funding to dig them, Boston archaeologist Martin Dudek and his [...]

The Immense Pleasure of Glass

Each week, I’m torn between two warring emotions as I bear a large blue box of empty wine bottles and other glass detritus into the back alley. As I set the bin out for pick-up, I feel a certain satisfaction in a civic duty well done, dispatching this jumble of glass to the recyclers. But [...]

What to Wear on an Ice-Age Sea Voyage?

Several superb posts on one of my favorite blogs, Elfshot, got me thinking recently about the attire of the earliest migrants to the Americas. Despite all the festering debate over exactly when these hardy travelers set foot in the New World, most evidence suggests that they landed here during the last Ice Age, somewhere between 20,000 [...]