Largest ever hoard of Anglo-Saxon gold found in Staffordshire

A harvest of Anglo-Saxon gold and silver so beautiful it brought tears to the eyes of one expert, has poured out of a Staffordshire field - the largest hoard of gold from the period ever found . . .

BBC Report 1999: First farmers discovered

A preview of Moctezuma: Aztec Ruler

The story of Moctezuma, last king of the Aztecs, is one of absolute power – and abject surrender. And now it is the subject of a haunting new exhibition at the British Museum.

The British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara

Turkey stands at the crossroads of Europe and Asia. The lands within its borders and the surrounding Black Sea region have seen centuries of fascinating history and pre-history. Their legacy: knowledge and lessons of potentially vital importance for all our futures. The British Institute at Ankara (BIAA) is internationally renowned for over 60 years’ work supporting, enabling and encouraging world-class research in Turkey and the Black Sea region in the fields of history, archaeology and related social sciences . . .

Çatalhöyük

This Web site is designed for those interested in the ongoing excavations at Çatalhöyük, Turkey. Its aim is to provide information about the activities of the Project and of the different aspects of the research being conducted at Çatalhöyük.

Museum of Altamira

Lascaux Official Site

Frozen in time at Britain's new Ice Age centre

Britain's National Ice Age Centre in the news . . .

Find a very well designed Art History site here

. . . with some excellent resources, including podcasts, for Ancient Studies.

"Smarthistory.org is a free multi-media web-book designed as a dynamic enhancement (or even substitute) for the traditional art history textbook. Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker began smARThistory in 2005 by creating a blog featuring free audio guides in the form of podcasts for use in The Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Soon after, we embedded the audio files in our online survey courses. The response from our students was so positive that we decided to create a multi-media survey of art history web-book. We created audios and videos about works of art found in standard art history survey texts, organized the files stylistically and chronologically, and added text and still images . . ."

Free Podcast of Plato's Republic

Boris likes Horace. So what?

The study of Ancient History and Literature has long suffered from its defenders and the ideological assumptions with which bourgeois culture is most comfortable . . .

Latin and Greek are the keys to a breathtaking intellectual playground whether you come from Eton or a state school

opines Charlotte Higgins in the Guardian . . .

Cannes film festival falls in love with Ancient mathematician

Democritus's atomic theory and Aristarchus's heliocentric model of the universe are not subjects that can often be said to delight audiences at the Cannes film festival.
But Alejandro Amenabar's Agora did just that

Ancient Technology: Was the Antikythera Mechanism the world’s first computer?

In October, 2005, a truck pulled up outside the National Archeological Museum in Athens, and workers began unloading an eight-ton X-ray machine that its designer, X-Tek Systems of Great Britain, had dubbed the Bladerunner. Standing just inside the National Museum’s basement was Tony Freeth, a sixty-year-old British mathematician and filmmaker, watching as workers in white T-shirts wrestled the Range Rover-size machine through the door and up the ramp into the museum. Freeth was a member of the Antikythera Mechanism Research Project—a multidisciplinary investigation into some fragments of an ancient mechanical device that were found at the turn of the last century after two thousand years in the Aegean Sea, and have long been one of the great mysteries of science . . .

A Chimp throwing stones demonstrates human behaviour . . .

Earliest Human Footprints Found

Sanskrit Primer Audio Files

Learn Sanskrit through self study

The myths of 'ancient Greece' dispelled

Paul Cartledge, the first ever professor of Greek culture at the University of Cambridge, aims to promote the public understanding of the Greek world . . .

Scientists unravel Neanderthal genome

Scientists have unravelled the genetic make-up of the Neanderthal, the long-faced, barrel-chested relative of modern humans.
Anthropologists analysed more than a billion fragments of ancient DNA plucked from three Croatian fossils to reconstruct a first draft of the Neanderthal genome.
The extraordinary feat gives scientists an unprecedented opportunity to clarify the evolutionary relationship between humans and Neanderthals that may ultimately shed light on the great mystery of how we became the most formidable species on the planet . . .

SCANS REVEAL EGYPTIAN SECRETS

Noisy, smelly, excavated Pompeii

A Roman Town and Mary Beard's historical balancing act . . . (see a link to Mary Beard's in the column on the right of this page)

Watch a working model of the ancient clockwork device that some call the world's first computer

Antikythera: A 2,000-year-old Greek computer comes back to life

Watch a working model of the ancient clockwork device that some call the world's first computer

The language of Venice is older, less artificial and more influential than Italian itself . . .

The new Cicero- Barack Obama's speeches are much admired and endlessly analysed, but, says Charlotte Higgins, one of their most interesting aspects...