Sublime

In the mid-nineteenth century, the then director of the Hallstatt salt mines in Austria developed an interest in archaeology and embarked on the excavation of a huge cemetery near the mine. Between 1846 and 1863, Johann Georg Ramsauer and his team unearthed nearly a thousand graves, containing not only the bones of the individuals who had been buri

Subjected to many programmes of piecemeal excavation over the last two centuries – a sort of death by a thousand cuts – Castor has nevertheless produced evidence of a huge complex, far grander than a mere villa. Its status as a possible administrative centre for imperial estates in the Fens, perhaps as a successor to the imposing establishment at S

Kilian had long argued that an earthquake destroyed Tiryns and also affected several other sites in the Argolid, such as Mycenae. As he noted, “The evidence consists of building remains with tilted and curved walls and foundations, as well as skeletons of people killed and buried by the collapsed walls of houses.” Although many other archaeologists

Many artefacts were recovered without their provenance being recorded; we cannot say how grave goods were disposed about the bodies except by analogy from other sites of the period; but they included a handful of Roman coins (four of them perforated for use as pendants); more than fifty brooches, various bracelets and finger rings; two swords; comb

“a town partly destroyed by fire and deserted in haste.” Here, sometime around or after 1200 BC, “loose objects were left abandoned in the courtyards and valuables were hidden in the ground. Bronze arrowheads—one of them found stuck in the side of a wall of a building—and numerous lead sling bullets scattered all over the place are eloquent proof o

Earlier scholars occasionally pointed to mentions in the Linear B tablets found at the site which suggest that there were “watchers of the sea” in place during the final year(s) of the site’s occupation, and have hypothesized that they were waiting and watching for the Sea Peoples. However, it is not clear what these tablets are documenting, and, e