検索キーワード： 考古学

Hadrian's Wall is the largest and one of the most enigmatic historical monuments in Britain. Nothing else approaches its vast scale: a land wall running seventy-three miles from east to west and a sea wall stretching at least twenty-six miles down the Cumbrian coast. Many of its forts are as large as Britain's most formidable medieval castles, and the wide ditch dug to the south of the Wall, the vallum, is larger than any surviving prehistoric earthwork.

New marine archaeological evidence has revealed the remains of a large land mass to the north of Britain that hosted an advanced civilization 1,000 years before the recognized “first” civilizations of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, or India. Remembered in Celtic legends as Tu-lay, and referred to by geologists as Doggerland or Fairland, this civilization began at least as early as 4000 BC but was ultimately destroyed by rising sea levels, huge tsunamis, and a terrible viral epidemic released from melting permafrost during a cataclysmic period of global warming.

Antike Fallen und uralte Flüche – oder doch eher steinzeitliche Versammlungsstätten und bronzezeitliche Waffen? Jens Notroff war an Ausgrabungen von Skandinavien bis zum Nahen Osten beteiligt. Längst findet archäologische Forschung aber nicht nur in bröckelnden Ruinen statt, sondern in musealen Sammlungen, Laboren – und im digitalen Raum. Wie lebten unsere Vorfahren, wie gestalteten sie ihre Umwelt? Mit welchen Problemen sahen sie sich konfrontiert – und welche Lösungen konnten sie dafür finden? Die Archäologie erlaubt es uns, Jahrtausende Revue passieren zu lassen.

In 1642, William Waller and his Parliamentarian army came to Winchester with destruction on their minds. They forced entry to the magnificent cathedral that had stood on the site for over 600 years and began to smash things. In the cathedral’s holiest place, ten beautiful mortuary chests rested as they’d done since the 7th century. In search for treasure, the soldiers ripped open the lids and when all they found were bones they flung them at the great West Window, destroying the 14th-century stained glass with its sacred images of the Virgin Mary and St Peter.

«Creía que los arqueólogos eran unos graciosos hombrecillos que buscaban momios». Así describe Willie la profesión de su compañero de aventuras Indiana Jones en la película Indiana Jones y el templo maldito. El cine de aventuras siempre fue muy popular y exitoso, basado en un voluntario afán por el entretenimiento más que por la refl exión profunda sobre la condición humana. Dentro de este género, existe un conjunto de filmes cuyo eje central es la búsqueda de un tesoro y que forma un subgénero muy específico que es el cine de Arqueología. Indiana Jones, Lara Croft, Tadeo Jones...

All too often we think of the past as static, 'frozen in time', and indeed movement is not always easy to decipher from the archaeological record. With Jim Leary's expert eye we explore the tangible remains, from fossilized footprint tracks to prehistoric wooden trackways, ridgeways, holloways, droveways, green ways, corpse roads, and Roman roads. Isotope studies and archaeogenetics now allow us see the arduous journeys that people made across continents and oceans, proving that migration has been continuous throughout our past, an endless ebb and flow of populations.

For over a century we saw Neanderthals as inferior to Homo Sapiens. After new discoveries, the pendulum swung the other way and they are generally seen as our relatives: not quite human, but similar enough, and still not equal. Now, thanks to an ongoing revolution in palaeoanthropology in which he has played a key part, Ludovic Slimak shows us that they are something altogether different - and they should be understood on their own terms rather than by comparing them to ourselves. As he reveals in this stunning book, the Neanderthals had their own history, their own rituals, their own customs.

In her previous two bestsellers, Professor Alice Roberts has powerfully and evocatively revived people of the past through examining their burial rites, bringing a fresh perspective on how they lived. In Crypt, Professor Roberts tells the story of modern Britain from 1066 to the present day - by exploring changing methods of honouring the dead.

Douglas Preston's journalistic explorations have taken him from the haunted country of Italy to the jungles of Honduras. The Lost Tomb brings together an astonishing and compelling collection of true stories about buried treasure, enigmatic murders, lost tombs, bizarre crimes, and other fascinating tales of the past and present.

This groundbreaking study is based on the author's systematic comparative analysis of the vast textile collections in Iceland, Greenland, Denmark, Scotland, and the Faroe Islands, materials that are largely unknown even to archaeologists and span 1,000 years. Through these garments and fragments, Hayeur Smith provides new insights into how the women of these island nations influenced international trade by producing cloth (vaðmál); how they shaped the development of national identities by creating clothing; and how they helped their communities survive climate change.

When the Smithsonian’s Hall of Physical Anthropology opened in 1965 it featured 160 Andean skulls affixed to a wall to visualize how the world’s human population had exploded since the birth of Christ. Through a history of Inca mummies, a preHispanic surgery called trepanation, and Andean crania like these, Empires of the Dead explains how “ancient Peruvians” became the single largest population in the Smithsonian and many other museums in Peru, the Americas, and beyond.

Com base na arqueogenética, cientistas como Johannes Krause traçaram a rota das ondas migratórias que povoaram o mundo, lançando luz sobre aspectos do passado que até então permaneciam um mistério. Krause e o jornalista Thomas Trappe reescrevem um dos capítulos mais interessantes desse percurso: o povoamento da Europa. Além disso, detalham a cultura dos povos que viviam lá no período pré-histórico, formados por hábeis artesãos, por pessoas que enterravam os mortos com joias de ouro muito antes dos faraós do Egito e por caçadores de grandes animais que pereceram na Era do Gelo.

In 2000, archaeologist Paul Gething rediscovered a sword. An unprepossessing length of rusty metal, it had been left in a suitcase for thirty years. But Paul had a suspicion that the sword had more to tell than appeared, so he sent it for specialist tests. When the results came back, he realized that what he had in his possession was possibly the finest, and certainly the most complex, sword ever made, which had been forged in seventh-century Northumberland by an anonymous swordsmith.