Walking Tours and Photo Essays
Streets of Pompeii Walking Tour
The streets of the Roman city of Pompeii have a fascinating story to tell about Roman engineering and life in the ancient doomed city.
Walking Tours of Archaeological Sites
This collection of walking tours of archaeological sites are photo essays of site highlights, describing the latest information understood by scholars for some of the most important archaeological sites in the world. Walking tours are perfect for people who are planning on visiting a site, just returned and have some questions, or can't go but...
Islamic Lustreware - A Photo Essay
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.
An Illustrated History of Glass Making
Glass is that mysterious translucent substance of what is essentially super-heated silica sand. Here's how making glass got started.
A Photo Essay of Monte Verde
Monte Verde is the ruins of a small settlement of 20-30 people who built tents and huts, lived in one place year-round and had a very broad hunter-gatherer-fisher subsistence base, in Chile, about 12,000 years ago.
Spectacles and Spectators: A Photo Essay on the Maya Plaza
Recent investigations by Takeshi Inomata studying the role of plazas in Maya festivals led me to put together this photo essay of the plazas of some of the more famous Maya sites. Photos include those of Tulum, Tikal, Copan, Bonampak, Uxmal, and Calakmul.
Dead Sea Scrolls: A Photo Essay
A photo essay of the Dead Sea Scrolls and artifacts from Qumran, with photos from the Israeli Antiquities Authority from an exhibit by the Pacific Science Museum and text by your guide to Archaeology at About.
Early Modern Human Projectile Points
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.
Antikythera Mechanism
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.
Dugouts and Dugout Dwellings
Dugouts and Dugout Dwellings: The Archaeology of Pioneer Housing
Giza Plateau Pyramids
Giza Plateau Pyramids; a photo essay of the four main buildings on the Giza Plateau: Khufu's Pyramid, Khafre's Pyramid, Menkares' Pyramid, and the Sphinx.
Cascajal Block
High resolution images of the Cascajal Block, an important artifact with examples of possibly Olmec writing from the Early Formative period.
Chichen Itza - A Walking Tour
A walking tour of one of the best known Maya civilization sites, and one with a split personality of both Puuc Maya and Toltec architecture. Photographs for the project were contributed by five different Flickr fellows, and they include all of the major buildings at Chichen Itza.
Ban Non Wat Excavations: A Photo Gallery
Ban Non Wat is a cemetery in Thailand, used between about 2100 tp 400 BC, and excavated by Charles Higham beginning in 2002. This photo essay shows several of the interments dated to the Neolithic, Bronze and Iron Age.
A Walking Tour of Hattusha
Hattusha, the capital city of the Hittite empire, was an ancient city when the Hittite king Anitta conquered it and made it his capital in the mid-18th century BC; the emperor Hattusili III expanded the city between 1265 and 1235 BC, before it was destroyed at the end of the Hittite era about 1200 BC.
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.
Walking Tour: Machu Picchu, Peru
The residential palace of the Inca king Pachacuti has drawn tourists from all over the world because of its lovely impossible location at the edge of the world. Gina Carey was at Machu Picchu during the Summer of 2004, and shares her photographs with us.
Walking Tour: Olympia, Greece
Photographer Aschwin Prein provides a walking tour of the ancient Greek classical site of Olympia, the original location of the Olympic Games. Excavations at the site were the direct impetus for the reinstitution of the games, 1700 years after the games were banned.
Photo Essay: Jewish Roman Mosaics from Tunisia
A selection of images from the Brooklyn Museum's planned exhibition of Roman mosaics from a Jewish synagogue in Tunisia in the latter days of the Roman empire.
Walking Tour: Qin's Terracotta Army
This photo essay examines some of the discoveries from Shi Huangdi's tomb, a third century BC ruler in China, renowned for uniting China, and for taking nearly 8,000 ceramic sculptures with him into his tomb.