Archaeology Odyssey, January/February 2002
Special Section
Dig & Delve
Why spend your summer vacation on your hands and knees or crawling up ladders and down into trenches when you could be lounging by the pool, sipping piña coladas? Well, many archaeology enthusiasts imagine unearthing a tarnished coin last touched by an ancient Athenian as he bought...Read more ›
Features
Nawamis of Sinai
Exploring 5,000-year-old desert tombs
They look like flattened igloos—mysterious ancient round burial tombs, called nawamis, in southern Sinai. To Canadian archaeologist Charles Currelly, who studied them in 1904 as part of British archaeologist Flinders Petrie’s expedition to Sinai, these 6-foot-high sandstone structures resembled beehives scattered across the desert...Read more ›
Italy’s Top Antiquities Cops Fight Back
It’s a problem acknowledged by all. There is no room to store them—the piles of antiquities recovered in both legal and illegal excavations in Italy. There is simply too much. “We ought to dump the excess,” said Angelo Bottini, superintendent of antiquities for the...Read more ›
Warriors of Hatti
The rise and fall of the Hittites, Turkey’s splendid Bronze Age civilization
Just who were the Hittites? When this question began to be asked a little more than a century ago, our only knowledge of the Hittites came from the Hebrew Bible.1 Abraham buys a burial plot for his wife Sarah from “Ephron the Hittite” (...Read more ›