At Petra, the “Rose red city half as old as time”,  the highlight is the ‘Treasury’  dramatically sited at the end of a long winding  cleft in the rocks But how did it actually work?  The answer is being revealed in an excavation at a site known as the Soldiers Tomb, hidden away down a [...]

The magical city of Butrint Visiting the city of Butrint is sheer magic.  Today it is easily accessible from Corfu, but in Greek and Roman times it was  a major port along the Adriatic coast, where Aeneas called in on his way to Rome. It was extensively excavated in the 1930s but then Albania became [...]

Perhaps surprisingly, Pompeii still continues to be at the centre of modern work. Traditionally,  work at Pompeii has been devoted to elucidating the city that was destroyed by Vesuvius in 79 AD,  but by that time it was already over five centuries old, and there is a splendid opportunity to excavate down beneath the destruction [...]

The idols of Malta The great neolithic temples on Malta, are among the oldest temples in the world.  Many of them were erected before even the pyramids were built.  Yet, what were their purpose, and how were they used? The temples are sometimes accompanied by underground burial places and one of these, at the Brockdorff [...]

It is rare that archaeology can combine both written accounts and pictorial evidence with an archaeological excavation. But dramatic excavations on the Greek island of Paros did just that.This wonderfully simple geometric style vase (left) shows a battle in process, with arrows flying hither and thither, slingers whirling their slings above their heads, a dead [...]

Sodom and Gomorrah were two of the wickedest cities in the world. God therefore decided to destroy them both, but  there was just one good family in the city, so God decided to save them. Lot and his family were told to flee the city, but not to look back. Unfortunately his wife looked back [...]

The very first issue looked at one of the largest town in the Roman empire- Ephesus, in Asia Minor, modern Turkey. Here the Austrian Archaeological Institute has been conducting a major campaign of reconstruction. Their first  success was the reconstruction of the Library of Celsus (right) but  more recently they have just completed their excavation [...]