Archaeology

The anti-government protests in Egypt earlier this year swept through Cairo and Alexandria before measures could be taken to protect antiquities in museums and archaeological sites in those cities and across the country. Yet, argues Jonathan Downs, the impact on Egyptian heritage and the repatriation debate has been a positive one.

Mark Rathbone looks at the Battle of the Widow McCormack’s Cabbage Garden and at what happened to those involved.

The Neanderthals failed to adapt to climate change and may have died out in as little as a thousand years. Are we making the same mistakes, asks Mike Williams.

The Bamburgh sword, a unique pattern-welded weapon found in Northumbria, has helped shed new light on a critical period of Anglo-Saxon. 

The economic crisis in Greece has drawn attention to the question of where best to display treasures such as the Elgin Marbles. Jonathan Downs offers some solutions to a historical tug of war.

In the 15th century, Cyriacus of Ancona journeyed in search of the Mediterranean’s Classical past. In so doing, he laid the groundwork for the 18th-century Grand Tour and today’s cultural holidays, as Marina Belozerskaya explains.

On the Mediterranean at the western edge of the Nile delta stands the most important and enduring of all the many cities founded by Alexander. Though much of its material past has been destroyed or lies underwater, Alexandria’s reputation as the intellectual powerhouse of the Classical world, fusing Greek, Egyptian and Roman culture, lives on, writes Paul Cartledge.

The emperor Hadrian presided over the Roman empire at its height, defined its borders and was one of the most cultured rulers of the ancient world. Neil Faulkner revisits his legacy, as the British Museum opens a major exhibition on his life and times.

Nigel Watson recalls a mysterious explosion that occurred in deepest Siberia in June 1908.

Anthony Aveni explains how the people planning great monuments and cities, many millennia and thousands of miles apart, so often sought the same inspiration – alignments with the heavens.

David Winter visits a land beset for millennia by the fantasies of outsiders.

Clive Gamble revisits the moment at which archaeologists realized that human prehistory was far longer than biblical scholars had imagined; and links this to today’s debates about the antiquity of the human mind with its capacity for self-aware thought.