Flying the Aegean: Kaunos

The Aegean coast of Turkey is awash with Classical sites. Yet many are unknown even to the informed visitor. Here, David Kennedy powers up a microlight plane to take us for a heavenly view of just one such site: Kaunos.

On the Aegean coast of Turkey you are seldom far from the remains of some great Classical city. Many are familiar names - Pergamum, Priene, Ephesus, Halicarnassus, Mytilene, Miletos... However there are dozens more that, while relatively unknown to most, have much to offer the archaeologist. Ancient Kaunos (modern Dalyan) is one such site.

TE Lawrence’s Arabia: Dig. Sift. Discover.

Current World Archaeology’s dig - the Great Arab Revolt Project - is now in its third season. A team of specialists and volunteers has been working in Jordan to reveal the archaeology of TE Lawrence, co-directed by Current Archaeology’s Neil Faulkner. Julian Evan-Hart and Roger Ward report back.

Jordan offers breathtaking desert scenery and one of the richest concentrations of first-rate archaeological sites in the world. The work of the Great Arab Revolt Project (or GARP) takes us to remote locations on traditional desert routeways used by nomads, pilgrims, and traders for thousands of years. Though we focus on events just 90 years ago, the Hijaz Railway and the Great Arab Revolt are part of a much older story inscribed across the landscape by material remains – by scatters of ancient pottery and medieval coins, and by prehistoric stone circles, Nabataean temples and tombs, and Mamluk forts and cisterns. Some of this rich heritage we encounter during fieldwork, but there are also two days off to give volunteers a chance to sample some of the sites, including, of course, the jewel of Jordanian archaeology, the rose-red city of Petra.

A Postcard from Kastoria

Richard Hodges writes his postcard from the idyllic setting of Byzantine Kastoria in Greece.

The Byzantine emperors, it is said, regularly exiled dissident members of their court to Kastoria. Like Ochrid to the north, half-way across the breadth of the Balkans on an artery reaching from Constantinople to the Adriatic Sea, evidently exile in this little Greek lakeside resort was meant to be a chastening punishment. Today, such punishment is a rare pleasure. Kastoria boasts a Byzantine heritage that seems second to Constantinople. But, unlike Istanbul, this little town in summertime enjoys a captivating serenity. In wintertime, I should add, it is entirely different, so they say. For this is the fur capital of Greece, a status it owes to its ancient heritage of trapping beaver (beaver in Greek being kastori, with the plural being kastoria) in Lake Orestiadha. An inexplicable number of shops fit out Greece’s best-dressed women in bulky coats as well as tight leather, risking political incorrectness in most other European countries.

Through the gates of the museum

 The founding of the University of Pennsylvania Museum in the 1880s was part of the great wave of institution-building that took place in the United States after the American Civil War.  The new wealth created after the Civil War gave incentive to philanthropy as a means of earning social recognition, and many wealthy and civic minded Americans thus turned their attention to cultural life and institutions.

Egypt's Ancient Glass

Egyptian glass is among the finest of the ancient world. Yet how did the ancient Egyptians make it? New work, at the world’s earliest-excavated glass making factory in Tell el-Amarna, is unravelling the mysteries. Here Paul Nicholson delves into the archives of the late great Egyptologist, Flinders Petrie, who excavated at Tell el-Amarna in the 1890s; and then takes us to his own excavations, a century later, as field director of the Egypt Exploration Society’s Amarna Glass Project. Here he tells of his excavations, how he undertook a host of fiery experiments, and why his team has shattered a raft of old interpretations.

Jerablus and the land of Carchemish

Biblical sites were highly sought after by some of our earliest and greatest archaeologists. One such site, Carchemish, was the famed city of the Hittite Empire. It attracted the attention of T.E. Lawrence and Woolley, pioneers of British Near Eastern Archaeology, who excavated there just before the First World War. Then came the crashing calamity of the Great War, and after it came new political borders...

The Enigma of the Red Snake

It is longer than Hadrian's Wall and the Antonine Wall taken together. It is over a thousand years older than the Great Wall of China as we know it today. It is of more solid construction than its ancient Chinese counterparts. It is the greatest monument of its kind between central Europe and China and it may be the longest brick, or stone, wall ever built in the ancient world. This wall is known as ‘The Great Wall of Gorgan’ or ‘the Red Snake’. An international team of archaeologists has been at work on the snakelike monument and here they report on their findings.

Keros: Sanctuary of the Cycladic figurines

The enigmatic Cycladic figurines, the abstract figures found in the Cyclades islands, have had enormous influence on modern art. They first came to notice at the same time as modern art was beginning to go abstract, and their stark abbreviated geometric forms persuaded modern artists to do likewise. But when exactly did they flourish and what were the settlements that produced the figurines?