By: Donald White

The rapid outward movement of the ancient Greeks from their mainland homes between the 10th and 6th centuries B.C., first to Asia Minor and later into the Black Sea region, to Egypt and the North African coast, and to the farther reaches of the western Mediterranean, comprises one of the great adventures in man’s past, […]

A Progress Report

By: Tamara Stech Wheeler and Robert Maddin and James D. Muhly

The last twenty years have seen an in­crease in scientific studies of archaeological materials resulting from the desire for greater precision in archaeological data. Research on ancient metal objects has contributed signifi­cantly to the data, due to a growing scientific interest in ancient materials and the applica­tion of new techniques of metallurgical anal­ysis to metal […]

By: David S. Reese

“There were giants in the earth in those days…” – Genesis 6:4 During the Pleistocene epoch of pre-history (three million to ten thousand years ago) many islands in the Mediterranean Sea provided the habitat of animals that developed in a unique fashion: they became either dwarfed or gigantic. For instance, there were dwarfed elephants (the […]

By: Alfred Friendly

In the past two years British archaeol­ogists have discovered and in some part de­ciphered more than 240 fragments of 1st cen­tury A.D. Roman cursive writing on thin slivers of wood in a far corner of the Impe­rium where the survival of such material would have been thought most unlikely: in a fort on Hadrian’s Wall. […]

By: Karen S. Rubinson

The Greek historian Herodotus (490/480-425 B.C.], in his History of the Persian Wars, included an excursus on the ethnography of the Scythians and other nomadic groups with whom the Greeks were familiar. Some of the information which Herodotus provided about these nomadic peoples he apparently had gathered during his own trip to the Black Sea […]