In 2005 while working with Cultural Heritage Imaging and monastery chanoine Jean-Pierre Voutaz, Archiviste for the Order of the Grand-St-Bernard at the Simplon Hospice in Switzerland’s Simplon Pass, Marlin Lum took these photographs of the local landscape and its environs. Electrum Magazine is proud to feature stunning photographs of our […]
Other News
Edges of Empire – the new excavations at Binchester Roman town, UK
by Gary Devore and Michael Shanks The new excavations of Binchester Roman town in the north of England, running since 2009, are seeking new answers to old questions about the Roman empire and its administration, about the character of military occupation, the life and experiences of locals and the soldiers […]
Cultural Heritage Imaging: Digital Pioneers in Archaeological Preservation
by Patrick Hunt While photography of archaeological artifacts for recording stretches back over a century plus, the needs to visually preserve a record of materials has only multiplied exponentially since the mid-19th century. In fact, archaeology was one of the first disciplines to employ the nascent medium of photography for […]
Thinking in planetary time scales: How modern technology helps us understand ancient episodes of climate change
by James Geary When did human beings start changing the environment? It’s a difficult question, since the further back in time you go the less reliable the evidence becomes. But thanks to new technologies and a new breed of innovative archeologist, the answers are becoming a little clearer. The emerging […]
Shakespeare and the Classics: Plutarch, Ovid and Inspiration
by Andrew Phillips and Patrick Hunt The authors of this article are amusingly inspired by the coincidence that in 1572 one of the Masters of Shakespeare’s Stratford Grammar School (King’s New School) was Simon Hunt and that the will of a fellow actor named Augustine Phillips bequeathed the Bard thirty […]
Electrum: from Ancient to Modern Meanings
by Patrick Hunt Historical linguistics often surprises us about how old are some of the words we use today, especially when we might expect they were coined only within the last century or so. While some of these old words, either commonplace like “star†and “mythâ€, or not so common […]
Following The Art Thief
by Melissa Guertin Edvard Munch may not now be screaming over his work’s repeated purloinings (1995, 2004) from several museums, since they’ve been returned, but Isabella Stewart Gardner should be turning over in her grave because the 1990 heist of twelve masterpieces from her lovely Boston palazzo museum is still […]
Soft countries make soft men: Q&A with Mike Newell, director of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time
By James Geary Mike Newell, acclaimed director of hits including Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire and Four Weddings and A Funeral, spoke to James Geary about the making of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and about his lifelong fascination with archeology. Electrum: What kind of research […]
Food for Thought Ancient to Modern: Truffles and Mushrooms, Trufflemania and Mycophily
By Patrick Hunt Truffles can drive people to do funny things. Moliere’s 1664 Tartuffe, a farce about fraud, may not actually explain an iota of trufflemania. The word ‘truffle’ is an esteemed word, uttered almost religiously except to those who are suspicious of its devotees and only see the earthy […]
The New Alexandrian Library
By Andrew Herkovic The ancient Library of Alexandria, real as it once was, is essentially the stuff of myth. What we usually understand as libraries, even the most ambitious of libraries, don’t much resemble the myth or the reality of the original at the shore of the Mediterranean. Though it […]