This page has been printed from the Archaeology Travel website at www.archaeology-travel.com.
Archaeology Travel is expanding; at the end of March we will be adding our directories of archaeological sites and museums in Italy and Ireland. Currently, as our regular visitors will know, France, England, Wales, and Scotland are available on our website. In preparation for launching the Italy section we have just recently added what we feel is a useful feature to our site pages. Some archaeological sites are single entities that are easy to pin-point … Continue reading
The smelting of copper and tin ore to create bronze has for a long time indicated the beginning of what archaeologists call the Bronze Age – the second of the so-called three-Age system, following the Stone Age, preceding the Iron Age. There is now much debate about the character of the shift from stone to bronze, but what is generally accepted is that this shift, however it happened when and where in Europe, was not … Continue reading
“A museum without a mummy,” according to Antoine Vivenel, “is not a museum.” Along with a couple of other apparent ‘must haves’, an ancient Greek pot or a Roman statue or two, mummies and/or other ancient Egyptian funerary objects do seem to be everywhere. A project under the auspices of the International Committee for Egyptology, an UNESCO committee, estimates that there are over two million ancient Egyptian artefacts in some 850 public collections in at … Continue reading
Of all the world’s iconic archaeological sites, I consider myself extremely privileged to have been inside the cave of Lascaux, the original and the facsimile. Sadly, given the increasingly fragile state of the 17,000 year-old paintings and engravings, entering the cave of Lascaux grows ever more unlikely for most of us. Since 1983 visitors to the Dordogne region of France have had to be content with Lascaux II – an extraordinary replica of only part … Continue reading
This morning I woke to the news that Christopher Hitchens had just died of complications resulting from his cancer. It is a mark of the man’s standing that this sad news should feature so immediately on the BBC, Facebook and Twitter. The timing of his death, the day after Britain laments loosing a manuscript by a teenage Charlotte Bronte to France, has a touch of irony, and if it were not for the fact that … Continue reading
A guest post by Jessie Voigts, about a recent trip to Ireland with her family. After dodging buses and stone walls to the left and right of us on the Ring of Kerry, it was a relief to escape the main road and head down a narrow, one-car lane for a few miles. Occasionally, we’d come upon another car and both vehicles would hug the overgrown fuschia bushes crowding the road and try to pass … Continue reading
One of my earliest memories starting out as a first year archaeology student at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) in Johannesburg is of rooms and corridors piled high with small wooden boxes, many of which were heavily laden with so-called acheulean handaxes. They just seemed to be everywhere; there were even a few knocking about in the students’ coffee, I mean study, room. These distinctive stone tools were named after an archaeological site in … Continue reading
A guest post by Vera Marie Badertscher. I could not help but think about this old gag when I read the new reprint of D. H. Lawrence’s Etruscan Places: Travels through Forgotten Italy. “And what does this ink blot remind you of?” asked the psychologist. “Sex.” “Hmmm, and this one?” “Sex.” And so it went, until the psychologist said, “You certainly think about sex a lot.” And the patient replied, “Who? Me? You’re the one … Continue reading
The in situ archaeology of Paris may very well be restricted to the Roman and more recent Medieval periods; the Roman baths beneath the Hôtel de Cluny, said to be one of the most outstanding examples of Medieval civic architecture, immediately spring to mind. But, Paris stands above all other European cities in one respect that makes the French capital an archaeo-phile’s dream destination all year round. Long after most of the archaeological sites have … Continue reading
Last week and just in time for this weekend’s Journées du Patrimoine (heritage days) the French Minister of Culture and Communication, Frédéric Mitterrand, announced a new label for historic houses in France, Maisons des Illustres – quite literally, houses of the illustrious. The houses that have been awarded this new badge of honour were not only singled for their historical value but also because of who lived in them; in fact the historical significance of … Continue reading
