By: Froelich Rainey

All of us who are interested in the story of the world’s many different civilizations must wonder at the ferment of ideas which created them. For those which have receded into the dim past it is not easy to recover a conception of the burgeoning ideas, theories, and motives that eventually flowered into distinct cultural […]

By: Alfred Kidder, II

In 1956, when the Museum undertook the tremendous task of making a thorough archaeological study of the ruins of Tikal, we had no idea of the extent of the work that would have to be done to provide a reasonable adequate picture of the site’s history, social organization, economy, and final abandonment. The first major […]

By: George F. Bass and Laurence T. Joline

Readers of recent numbers of Expedition and the National Geographic are aware already of the University Museum’s search for two specific shipwrecks off the Turkish coast. At the risk of repetition, the project previous to the summer of 1968 may be summarized briefly. Two bronze statues were netted during recent years by Turkish sponge draggers. One of the […]

By: Ward H. Goodenough

My first field work in the Pacific Islands was for seven months in the great complex atoll of Truk in 1947; and in 1964-65 I spent another ten months there. Truk remained isolated from direct European contact until the 19th century: and it was not until late in that century that any Europeans—a few missionaries […]

By: Rodney S. Young

After nearly twenty years of activity at Gordion it is perhaps well to look back, to recall the reasons for our choice of the site, to weigh results against expectations, and to assess what we have learned. In the fall of 1948 we had four sites in mind, all of them capital cities in ancient […]

By: James B. Pritchard

Since we began to excavate at Tell es-Sa’idiyeh in 1964 not a season has gone by without our gaining some vivid impression of how man had lived at some period within the 3000-year span that this tell was inhabited. There were tombs of both rich and poor from the 12th century B.C. that revealed details of […]

Archivos de Indias, Seville

By: Ruben E. Reina

After several decades of archaeological and ethnographic field work in the Maya area, the need to study, from an ethnographic viewpoint, the large collection of 16th and 17th century documents lodged in the Archivos de Indias has become apparent. During the first few centuries of Spanish conquest and colonization in America, millions of documents were […]

By: David O'Connor

The University Museum has at present three field expeditions active in Egypt, continuing a tradition of Egyptological research begun by the Museum in 1906. The current expeditions cover a wide range of interests: excavation, epigraphy, the cleaning and restoration of damaged monuments, and research into the application of computers to the storage and analysis of […]

By: William H. Davenport

Since 1964 field research in the British Solomon Islands has been primarily concerned with ethnographic studies. Last winter’s special exhibition “Sculpture from the Eastern Solomon Islands” (see Expedition, Vol. 10, No. 2) was one result of these. However, as the contemporary cultural picture in this part of Oceania has become much clearer in the past two […]

Archaeology in the Atigun Valley

By: Herbert L. Alexander

In 1966 the University Museum and the Society of the Sigma Xi supported a three-week survey of the Atigun Valley in the eastern part of Alaska’s Brooks Range. Aided by my wife, Annie, and one of my students, Victoria Grafstrom, I found over forty archaeological sites in this relatively unknown region. The eastern Brooks Range […]