Archaeology

Michael Grant offers the tale of Rome's most infamous emperor from both his fans and detractors.

Anthony Rhodes introduces Diocletian, the first sovereign to voluntarily resign power, and how, at the opening of the fourth century, he spent his last years in a huge fortified seaside palace of his own construction.

No memorials of the past are more fantastic than the series of great statues—some of them as tall as a four-storey building—that greet the visitor to this lonely and storm-swept Pacific island. By C.A. Burland.

Between the years 1300 and 600 B.C. the virile kingdom of Ararat rose to be a large empire, which long held the Assyrians at bay.

James A. Boutilier profiles Dr Alfred Percival Maudslay, a world-wide traveller who inaugurated the study of Mayan civilization in Central America.

R.A.G. Carson investigates the fate of the polity established by rebel Roman general Carausius in the third century AD.

Cyme, near the modern Smyrna, was one of the ports that served the Phrygians during the centuries from 1000-700 B.C., when they dominated Asia Minor. Freya Stark studies the civilization of this ancient people, from whom the Greeks derived one of the three modes of classical music.

Shakespeare’s enormous influence in shaping subsequent concepts of 15th-century England is nowhere better illustrated than in the case of the character of Richard III. 

The discovery of 13 bodies in a London plague pit has helped to illuminate the murkier aspects of life in the 14th century, writes Alexander Lee.

Exhuming historical characters makes for dramatic headlines and can seem a great way to get easy answers, but we should think twice before disturbing the remains of dead monarchs, says Justin Pollard.