Archaeology

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.

Alexandria’s reputation as the intellectual powerhouse of the Classical world, fusing Greek, Egyptian and Roman culture, lives on, writes Paul Cartledge.

The building of Istanbul’s new underground railway has uncovered thousands of years of history, including the first complete Byzantine naval craft ever found. Pinar Sevinclidir investigates.

Why do we have history and archaeology? In the light of our understanding of ‘deep time’ Daniel Lord Smail argues that it is high time that the two disciplines were reunited.

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.

Nigel Watson recalls a mysterious explosion that occurred in deepest Siberia on 30 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.   

Anthea Gerrie explores a remarkable excavation, a Roman surgeon’s house in Rimini.