By Timothy Demy – You can’t help but look up. The ceiling is covered with decades-old graffiti. It is not the profanity or pop art so often seen today on buildings, fences, and other public and private places. It’s not even the famous “Kilroy was here.” It is the names […]
By Patrick Hunt – Olaf Tryggvason Olaf I Tryggvason (ca. 960-1000 CE) was the Viking king who forcibly began to Christianize the people of Norway at the end of the 10th century, a change suggested at times by his detractors as conversion forced at swordpoint. If depicted as a bloody […]
By Jess Taylor – In late summer 2007 we decided to drive due south from Istanbul to Antalya. On day three, driving deep into central Turkey from Iznik – the modern name for ancient Nicaea but later famous for its Iznik ware porcelain in the Ottoman period – we detoured […]
By Patrick Hunt – Vikings continue to be a magnetic topic, especially in light of new discoveries of ships, burials and sites that enable us to concentrate more on their far-flung commercial savvy and technology than the weary and skewed caricature of merely violent rapacity. Anyone who has been to […]
By P. F. Sommerfeldt – I’ve always found the Homeric sorceress Circe in the Odyssey to be fascinating in her power that transcends the feminism of any era. Having looked at many artists over five hundred years in their attempts to depict Circe, I was generally frustrated with nearly all […]
By Leanne Ogasawara – 1. A glance at Hobson-Jobson, the historical dictionary of Anglo-Indian words in use during the British rule in India, will show that the word “loot” comes into English from Hindi, ultimately deriving from Sanskrit. It entered the English language around the time of the Opium Wars, when the […]
By Garth C. Hall – This paper addresses the African stone age somewhat myopically, focusing on artifacts and not much on the hominins who made and used them. It also focuses geographically on South Africa, yet, at least in the Early and Middle Stone Ages, the literature indicates that the […]
By P. F. Sommerfeldt – The Morgan Library and Museum – formerly known as Pierpont Morgan Library – on Madison Avenue has to be one of my favorite visits in New York City. A world-class collection of medieval manuscripts and related medieval relics is certainly known and appreciated, but there’s […]
By Patrick Hunt – In the Engadine Valley of Switzerland’s Graubunden Canton below the Alps, the town of St. Moritz and villages like Sils alongside Lake Silvaplana and Lake Sils are justifiably renowned since Celtic and Roman times for Roman stone roads sloping down the mountains to mineral springs, and […]
By Jess Taylor – Mapping the Greek Polis (Poleis in plural) Where were the ancient Greek cities located? What was their sphere of influence? And what did it mean to be a polis? A pioneering body of work analyzed 1,035 ancient Greek settlements from the archaic and classical periods (c. […]