Many of the fundamental cultural features of modern western societies have their origins in the civilizations of Mesopotamia, which flourished from 3000 to 323 BCE in the land between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, now modern Iraq. This exploration will highlight aspects of this lasting legacy, with special reference to the collections on display in the […]

ZOOM lecture by by Dr. David Domenici in the Department of History and Cultures at the Universita di Bologna.

Tree-ring dating burst into Southwestern archaeology on June 22, 1929, when Andrew Ellicott Douglass of the University of Arizona and his colleagues discovered specimen HH-39, the piece of charcoal that “bridged the gap” in his tree-ring chronology and allowed him to date, for the first time in history, archaeological sites at Mesa Verde, Chaco Canyon, […]

Pick up any book on early Greek history or archaeology, and you will read about Bronze Age people called Minoans and Mycenaeans. Who were the Minoans, and who were the Mycenaeans? It’s become increasingly clear that these questions aren’t as easy to answer as we might think. These classifications aren’t simply empirical ‘facts’ about the […]

In 2017, the Republic of Turkey filed a lawsuit in federal court against auction house Christie’s and billionaire philanthropist Michael Steinhardt for the return of an allegedly looted female figurine dating to the Chalcolithic era. The female idol is distinctive of works produced in the ceramic workshops of Kiliya in Western Anatolia between 3000 and […]