November/December 2022

ARCHAEOLOGY

ARCHAEOLOGY magazine brings the ancient world to life.

ARCHAEOLOGY2 min read
Archaeology
Editor in Chief Jarrett A. Lobell Deputy Editor Eric A. Powell Executive Editor Daniel Weiss Senior Editors Benjamin Leonard Marley Brown Editorial Assistant Malin Grunberg Banyasz Creative Director Richard Bleiweiss Maps Ken Feisel Contributing Edit
ARCHAEOLOGY11 min read
DIGS & DISCOVERIES
Starting from a base in Mesopotamia, the Neo-Assyrian Empire (883–609 B.C.) expanded to control territory that stretched from western Iran to the Mediterranean and from Anatolia to Egypt. In the course of establishing the largest empire in the histor
ARCHAEOLOGY2 min read
Helping Archaeologists At Risk
Archaeological Institute of America (AIA) members and readers of this magazine are well aware of the various risks to which archaeological sites are exposed, be it in conflict zones abroad, from commercial development here at home, or by lawsuits int
ARCHAEOLOGY3 min read
Around The World
NEW JERSEY: Archaeologists surveying land newly acquired by Red Bank Battlefield Park found hundreds of Revolutionary War–era artifacts, including a rare 1776 King George III gold guinea, as well as a mass grave containing 12 Hessian soldiers. In 177
ARCHAEOLOGY13 min read
A Tale of Two Abbeys
EVERYWHERE PEACE, every-where serenity, and a marvelous freedom from the tumult of the world,” wrote the twelfth-century saint Aelred, describing Rievaulx Abbey in the English county of North Yorkshire. Aelred had been born in 1110 in Hexham, Northum
ARCHAEOLOGY1 min readForeign Language Studies
Silent Speech
Alongside manual labor, one of the requirements of Cistercian monasticism was that the monks be silent during meals—they went so far as to all sit on the same side of the table to discourage conversation. How then to get someone to pass the bread? “I
ARCHAEOLOGY1 min read
Small But Mighty
Not all European Cistercian abbeys were the size of Rievaulx and Fountains. What was surely one of the smallest was located on the 1.5-square-mile Norwegian island of Hovedøya, off Oslo. There, on May 18, 1147, a dozen monks and a few lay brothers fr
ARCHAEOLOGY12 min read
Priestess, Poet, Politician
The name of the world’s first known author appears on the back of a 4,000-year-old white alabaster disk that resembles the moon. Uncovered in a temple in the ancient Sumerian city of Ur by archaeologist Leonard Woolley in 1927, the disk is decorated
ARCHAEOLOGY2 min read
Lembah Bujang, Malaysia
Malaysia’s Lembah Bujang, or Bujang Valley, is one of the earliest archaeologically documented crossroads for trade goods and religious ideas in Southeast Asia. The valley, which is located south of Mount Jerai in Kedah State near the coast of the St
ARCHAEOLOGY6 min read
Mexico’s Butterfly Warriors
OVERNIGHT TEMPERATURES IN the fir forests of central Mexico hover just above freezing in January. It’s the ideal temperature for the enormous colonies of monarch butterflies that, in late August, begin their 3,000-mile migration south to this small m
ARCHAEOLOGY3 min read
From Our Readers
The last page of the article “A Ticket to the World’s Fair” (July/August 2022) describes various surviving artifacts of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. There’s at least one more. Part of the Kansas exhibit was the “Panorama of North American Mammals,”
ARCHAEOLOGY10 min read
Bronze Age Urban Experiment
RISING FROM THE FLOODPLAINS of Pakistan’s Sindh Province is a 750-acre testament to Bronze Age labor and ingenuity. This almost impossibly orderly city, now known as Mohenjo-Daro, is set on mudbrick platforms that were built up over the years to miti
ARCHAEOLOGY6 min read
Magical Mystery Door
WHILE A POSTDOCTORAL researcher at the University of Cambridge, Melanie Pitkin became interested in a particular Egyptian limestone stela held by the university’s Fitzwilliam Museum. She had been working with the Fitzwilliam Egyptian Coffns Project,
ARCHAEOLOGY12 min read
Murder Islands
Treeless, almost uninhabited, buffeted by winds and ocean swells, the 100 islands and coral reefs known as the Houtman Abrolhos, off Australia’s west coast, is a hazard that sailors have tried to avoid for four centuries. The islands teem with sea li
ARCHAEOLOGY2 min read
Who Was The Priest-king?
The seven-inch-tall top part of a steatite figure of a solemn bearded man has personified the Indus civilization ever since it was first discovered in Mohenjo-Daro in 1926. Dubbed the Priest-King by archaeologist Mortimer Wheeler, who supervised its
ARCHAEOLOGY2 min read
Artifact
For the residents of ancient Maresha in southern Israel, animal bones that may seem like useless leftovers destined for the trash heap were used to play games and as a way to contact the gods. Archaeologists working in a series of man-made caves in t
ARCHAEOLOGY2 min read
To Rule And Be Ruled
One of the fundamental questions archaeologists ask about ancient cultures is how people governed themselves. In this issue, you’ll find stories that explore many different ways in which people have ruled and been ruled. The city dwellers of the Indu

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