Showing titles in Archaeology

Mudlarking enthusiast Ted Sandling takes us on a riveting journey along the Thames foreshore and back into the past.

Imagine you are a hunter-gatherer some 12,000 years ago. You've got a choice - carry on foraging or plant a few seeds and move to one of those new-fangled settlements down the valley. What you won't know is that urban life is short and riddled with dozens of new diseases; your children will be shorter and sicklier than you are; they'll be plagued with gum disease and stand a decent chance of violent death at the point of a spear. Why would anyone choose this? But choose they did.

In 1925, James Henry Breasted sent a team of archaeologists to the Holy Land to excavate the ancient site of Megiddo - Armageddon in the New Testament. Their excavations made headlines around the world and shed light on one of the most legendary cities of biblical times. Digging Up Armageddon brings to life one of the most important archaeological expeditions ever undertaken, describing the site and what was found there, and providing an up-close look at the internal workings of a dig in the early years of biblical archaeology.

Using the writings of Cosmas and a wealth of other historical and archaeological evidence from the period, eminent historian G. W. Bowersock carefully reconstructs this fascinating but overlooked chapter in pre-Islamic Arabian history. The flashpoint of the war, Bowersock tells us, occurred when Yusuf, the Jewish king of Himyar, massacred hundreds of Christians living in Najran. The Christian ruler of Ethiopia, Kaleb, urged on by the Byzantine emperor Justin, led a force of 120,000 men across the Red Sea to defeat Yusuf.

Marilyn Johnson's Lives in Ruins is an absorbing and entertaining look at the lives of contemporary archaeologists as they sweat under the sun for clues to the puzzle of our past. Johnson digs and drinks alongside archaeologists, and chases them through the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, and even Machu Picchu. Her subjects share stories about slaves and Ice Age hunters, ordinary soldiers of the American Revolution, Chinese woman warriors, sunken fleets, and mummies.

Stonehenge is just one of thousands of stone circles erected throughout Britain and Ireland for over three millennia from 3,000 BC on. How did this building tradition survive for so long, over such a large area and with such complexity and uniformity, when the people of the British Isles lived in separate, isolated communities? Graham Phillips argues that these stone circles are evidence of an astonishing system of healthcare and preservation of ancient medical knowledge that held together a society scattered across the British Isles.

It may be the most interesting and yet loneliest spot on Earth: a volcanic rock surrounded by a million square miles of ocean, named for the day Dutch explorers discovered it, Easter Sunday, April 5, 1722. Here, people created a complex society, sophisticated astronomy, exquisite wood sculpture, monumental stone architecture, roads, and a puzzling ideographic script. And then they went about sculpting amazing, giant human figures in stone.

Imagine you were transported back in time to Ancient Greece and you had to start a new life there. What would you see? How would the people around you think and believe? How would you fit in? Where would you live? What would you eat? What work would be available, and what help could you get if you got sick?

The Mystery of the Hanging Garden of Babylon is an exciting story of detection involving legends, expert decipherment of ancient texts, and a vivid description of a little-known civilization. Recognized in ancient times as one of the Seven Wonders of the World, the legendary Hanging Garden of Babylon and its location still remains a mystery steeped in shadow and puzzling myths. In this remarkable volume Stephanie Dalley, a world expert on ancient Babylonian language, gathers for the first time all the material on this enigmatic World Wonder.

This enthralling true story of maritime tragedy and visionary science begins with a disaster to rival the sinking of the Titanic.In September 1857, the S.S. Central America, a side-wheel steamer carrying passengers returning from the gold fields of California, went down during a hurricane off the Carolina coast. More than 400 men--and 21 tons of gold--were lost. In the 1980s, a maverick engineer named Tommy Thompson set out to find the wreck and salvage its treasure from the ocean floor.

On a cold, cloudy day in early February 1985, Shelley Wachsmann, then resident nautical archaeologist for the Israel Department of Antiquities and Museums, drove to Kibbutz Ginosar, an agricultural settlement near the shores of the Sea of Galilee. Two brothers, avid amateur archaeologists, had found a boat buried in the lake, its outlines revealed by receding lake waters. The boat was "possibly ancient," according to the handwritten note placed on Wachsmann's desk a day or two before.

In Craeft, archaeologist and medieval historian Alexander Langlands argues that our modern understanding of craft only skims the surface. His journeys from his home in Wales have taken him along the Atlantic seaboard of Europe, from Spain through France and England to Scotland and Iceland in search of the lost meaning of craft.

A hundred and fifty years ago, naval warfare entered a new phase with the introduction of ironclad vessels. On March 9, 1862, the USS Monitor, prototype of this new class of warships, fought the Confederate ironclad CSS Virginia at Hampton Roads, Virginia, after the Virginia had ravaged the Union fleet blockading the James River, sinking larger, seemingly more powerful wooden warships in a potent demonstration of the power of an armored, heavily-gunned, steam-powered warship.

In the tradition of Jared Diamond's million-copy-selling classic Guns, Germs, and Steel, a bold new synthesis of paleontology, archaeology, genetics, and anthropology that overturns misconceptions about race, war and peace, and human nature itself, answering an age-old question: What made humans so exceptional among all the species on Earth? Creativity. It is the secret of what makes humans special, hiding in plain sight.

When the Smithsonian’s Hall of Physical Anthropology opened in 1965 it featured 160 Andean skulls affixed to a wall to visualize how the world’s human population had exploded since the birth of Christ. Through a history of Inca mummies, a preHispanic surgery called trepanation, and Andean crania like these, Empires of the Dead explains how “ancient Peruvians” became the single largest population in the Smithsonian and many other museums in Peru, the Americas, and beyond.

Patrick E. McGovern takes us on a fascinating journey through time to the dawn of brewing, when our ancestors might well have made a paleo brew of wild fruits, honey, cereals, and botanicals. Early beverage makers must have marveled at the magical process of fermentation. Their amazement grew as they drank the mind-altering drinks, which were to become the medicines, religious symbols, and social lubricants of later cultures.

Soon after Billy Griffiths joins his first archaeological dig as camp manager and cook, he is hooked. Equipped with a historian’s inquiring mind, he embarks on a journey through time, seeking to understand the extraordinary deep history of the Australian continent. Deep Time Dreaming is the passionate product of that journey. It investigates a twin revolution: the reassertion of Aboriginal identity in the second half of the 20th century and the uncovering of the traces of ancient Australia.

Who were the first humans to inhabit North America? According to the now familiar story, mammal hunters entered the continent some 12,000 years ago via a land bridge that spanned the Bering Sea. The presence of these early New World people was established by distinctive stone tools belonging to the Clovis culture. But are the Clovis tools Asian in origin? Drawing from original archaeological analysis, paleoclimatic research, and genetic studies, noted archaeologists Dennis J. Stanford and Bruce A. Bradley challenge the old narrative.

In 1587, 115 men, women, and children arrived at Roanoke Island on the coast of North Carolina to establish the first English settlement in the New World. But when the new colony's leader returned to Roanoke from a resupply mission, his settlers had vanished, leaving behind only a single clue - a "secret token" etched into a tree. What happened to the Lost Colony of Roanoke? That question has consumed historians, archeologists, and amateur sleuths for 400 years. In The Secret Token, Andrew Lawler sets out on a quest to determine the fate of the settlers.

You scramble up over the dunes of an isolated beach. You climb to the summit of a lonely hill. You pick your way through the eerie hush of a forest. And then you find them. The traces of the past. Perhaps they are marked by a tiny symbol on your map, perhaps not. There are no plaques to explain their fading presence before you, nothing to account for what they once were—who made them, lived in them, or abandoned them. Now they are merged with the landscape. They are being reclaimed by nature. They are wild history.