archaeology

Bones, bridles and bits – but where’s the horse?

21 September 2024 9:00 am

Ancient equine remains provide fascinating clues to migration and warfare – but the animals themselves seem largely absent in William T. Taylor’s history of the horse

What became of Thomas Becket’s bones?

2 March 2024 9:00 am

Alice Roberts’s examinations of violent deaths in the past take her to the site of Becket’s murder in Canterbury cathedral and the later destruction of his shrine by Henry VIII

Is an unknown, extraordinarily ancient civilisation buried under eastern Turkey?

8 May 2022 6:00 pm

I am staring at about a dozen, stiff, eight-foot high, orange-red penises, carved from living bedrock, and semi-enclosed in an…

New light on the building of Stonehenge

12 March 2022 9:00 am

When it comes to Stonehenge, we are like children continually asking why and never getting a conclusive answer. There are…

The watery life of the capital

4 September 2021 9:00 am

To write about London and its rivers is to enter a crowded literary field. Many aspects of watery life in…

A pawn in the Great Game: the sad story of Charles Masson

22 May 2021 9:00 am

‘Everyone knows the Alexandria in Egypt,’ writes Edmund Richardson, ‘but there were over a dozen more Alexandrias scattered across Alexander…

Our love affair with the Anglo-Saxons

20 February 2021 9:00 am

Dan Hitchens on our love affair with the Anglo-Saxons

The scholars who solved the riddles in the sands

24 October 2020 9:00 am

In 1835 the first two Egyptian antiquities were registered in the British Museum: a pair of red granite lions from…

King Solomon’s lost city will remain lost forever

28 March 2020 9:00 am

Armageddon began as Har Megiddo, the Hill of Megiddo in northern Israel. The theological aspect is Christian. For Jews, ancient…

Kathleen Jamie’s luminous new essays brim with sense and sensibility

2 November 2019 9:00 am

There is a moment in one of the longer pieces in Surfacing, Kathleen Jamie’s luminous new collection of essays, when…

Norfolk may be flat, but it’s never boring

10 August 2019 9:00 am

Francis Pryor claims he would be a rich man if every person who told him that the Fens were ‘flat…

Is one of history’s most rousing speeches apocryphal?

15 June 2019 9:00 am

As rousing death-and-glory speeches go, it is one of the best. With a besieging Roman army only hours from storming…

A cold archaeological gaze: In the Garden of the Fugitives, by Ceridwen Dovey, reviewed

28 July 2018 9:00 am

Visiting Pompeii, it is hard to miss the garden of the fugitives. It is on every other postcard in the…

Roman mosaic from the Villa of the Nile, Leptis Magna, Libya (2nd century AD)

Holy mackerel! Civilisation begins with fishing

18 November 2017 9:00 am

Fish. Slippery, mysterious creatures. They are mysterious because of where they live, in vast waters, and because they elude the…

Our hero, homo erectus

Learning to talk

23 September 2017 9:00 am

One of the great achievements of science is that so many of its branches, from astronomy to zoology, have been…

It’s amazing how many different subjects Sir Thomas Browne’s latest biographer doesn’t care about

20 June 2015 9:00 am

On the evening of 10 March 1804, Samuel Taylor Coleridge settled at a desk in an effort to articulate what…

Latrines dating from the second century at Ostia Antica, outside Rome

How the Romans went about their business

18 April 2015 9:00 am

When Ovid was seeking ‘cures for love’, the most efficient remedy, he wrote, was for a young man to watch…

John Aubrey and his circle: those magnificent men and their flying machines

14 March 2015 9:00 am

John Aubrey investigated everything from the workings of the brain, the causation of winds and the origins of Stonehenge to…

Management consultancy! Sculpture park! Sports stadium! The many faces of the Delphic Oracle

22 March 2014 9:00 am

Sam Leith finds the most sacred site of Ancient Greece still a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma