Archaeological Photo Essays

Lustreware is a sophisticated decorative technique developed by Islamic potters beginning in the 8th century AD and used on pottery up until the last century. Ceramic vessels successfully treated with the lustre process radiate with a metallic shine.

Although much is known of the ancient history of the eastern fringes of the great Sahara desert in Africa, where the Egyptian civilization rose and flourished, there are vast tracts of archaeologically unexplored regions of the Sahara itself. Gobero is a site in the Tenere Desert of Niger, where archaeologists discovered evidence of a settlement when that part of the world was livable.

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.

A photo essay of artifacts from an exhibition at the Field Museum in Chicago.

The Royal Cemetery at the ancient city of Ur in Mesopotamia was excavated by Charles Leonard Woolley between 1926-1932. The Royal Cemetery excavations were part of a 12-year expedition at Tell el Muqayyar, located on an abandoned channel of the Euphrates River in far southern Iraq. The excavations were jointly funded by the British Museum and the University of Pennsylvania's Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, and so many of the artifacts that Woolley recovered ended up in the Penn Museum. This photo essay features images of some of the artifacts which are currently on exhibit at the museum, in an exhibition entitled "Iraq's Ancient Past: Rediscovering Ur's Royal Cemetery" which opened October 25, 2009.

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.

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.

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.

An illustrated abstract, about the kinds of research that archaeologists do in cemeteries, without turning a spade.