Sometimes archaeology has to get visual. Here's a collection of wphoto essays of recent investigations and artifact studies.
Antikythera Mechanism: Ancient Greek Computer
©2008 Tony Freeth
The Antikythera Mechanism is a curious mass of corroded metal, thin flat round bronze plates and gears with triangular teeth, marked with Greek letters and symbols, essentially a computer made 2100 years ago.
Art of the Ancient Americas
John Weinstein © The Field Museum
A photo essay of artifacts from an exhibition at the Field Museum in Chicago.
Benjamin Franklin's Mastodon Tooth
A tooth from the ancient extinct elephant known as a mastodon was recovered from beneath the floor of a building that at one time belonged to Benjamin Franklin. This artifact undoubtedly belonged to Franklin, and it represents Franklin's role in the scientific understanding of the process of evolution.
Butabu: West African Adobe Mud Architecture
Black and white photograph, James Morris
For centuries, complex adobe structures, many of them quite massive, have been built in the Sahel region of western Africa, including the countries of Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Togo, Benin, Ghana, and Burkina Faso. Made of earth mixed with water, these ephemeral buildings display a remarkable diversity of form, human ingenuity, and originality. British photographer James Morris offers a stunning visual survey of these structures.
Clovis at the Gault Site
Image courtesy of the Center for the Study of the First Americans, Texas A&M University
A slide gallery of photographs from the Gault Site, Texas, of excavations in progress as well as a selection of Clovis points recovered from various sites in North America.
Death and Commemoration
An illustrated abstract, about the kinds of research that archaeologists do in cemeteries, without turning a spade.
Early Modern Human Projectile Points
Lucinda Backwell (c) 2008
Sibudu Cave is an extremely important Middle Stone Age archaeological site located in South Africa, with 61,000 year-old arrow points. Here's what they look like.
Elite Burials at Sipan
Sipan Archaeological Project
Sipán is one of the Moche capital cities, where in 1987 Peruvian archaeologist Walter Alva discovered 13 elite burials mirroring rituals seen on ceramics and low relief sculptures. The burials had hundreds of exotic and precious objects in copper, bronze, and gold. This essay describes the new elite burial discovered in May 2007.
Great Churches of the World
Friedemann Vogel / Getty Images
Archaeologists are fascinated with the scientific pieces of religious belief, this fascination taking many different flavors and investigating most of the religions of the world. This photo gallery is an examination of a few of the more interesting churches in the world ('churches' including synagogues, mosques, temples, and shrines) and why archaeologists are interested in them.
Ileret Footprints
Image courtesy Professor Matthew Bennett, Bournemouth University.
Two new sets of ancient hominid footprints were discovered at a site near the modern town of Ileret in Kenya. The footprints, which date to about 1.5 million years ago, belong to those of Homo erectus or Homo ergaster, one of our human ancestors.
