Two-thousand years ago, forts were constructed by the Roman Empire across the northern Fertile Crescent, spanning from what is now western Syria to northwestern Iraq. In the 1920s, 116 forts were documented in the region by Father Antoine Poidebard, who conducted one of the world’s first aerial surveys using a WWI-era biplane. Poidebard reported that...
History
Of Speech and Spatial Identity
Style and Polity in conversation with Benjamin A. Bross, an Assistant Professor of architecture and an urban historian at the University of Illinois, at Urbana-Champaign, discusses “Mexico City’s Zócalo: A History of a Constructed Spatial Identity,” San Martin de Hidalgo tequila’s featured title for the brand’s Fall 2022 Tequila Book Club. In his recently published...
Migrants from South Carrying Maize Were Early Maya Ancestors
New research published this week by University of New Mexico archaeologist Keith Prufer shows that a site in Belize was critical in studying the origins of the ancient Maya people and the spread of maize as a staple food. According to the paper South-to-north migration preceded the advent of intensive farming in the Maya region, published...
Ancient Mexican City Endured for Centuries Without Extremes in Wealth and Power
Location, location, location—it’s the first rule of real estate. For a long time, it’s been widely assumed that being close to resources drives settlement patterns, with cities generally founded near water and fertile land for growing crops. But a new paper by a husband-and-wife archaeological team questions that idea, using the example of an ancient...
Why Ukrainian Americans Are Committed to Preserving Ukrainian Culture – and National Sovereignty
As a child, I would wait with anticipation for my parents to return from trips to the Soviet Union. Often they brought gifts like a few loaves of hearty brown bread, or a wheel of briny, homemade cheese. Sometimes they also brought back notebooks, or bits of paper with verses scribbled in Ukrainian. These were...
Centuries-Old Capture Documents Now Online
Centuries-old documents related to the capture of ships by the British are accessible online from today, for the use of international researchers. The “Prize Papers” Project of the Academy of Sciences and Humanities Göttingen is, as a first stage, making available online via the website www.prizepapers.de documents from court processes linked to approximately 1,500 ship...
Identifying the Portable Toilets of the Ancient Roman World
New research published in the Journal of Archaeological Science Reports reveals how archaeologists can determine when a pot was used by Romans as a portable toilet, known as a chamber pot. “Conical pots of this type have been recognized quite widely in the Roman Empire and in the absence of other evidence they have often been...
Living Descendant of Sitting Bull Confirmed by Analysis of DNA from the Legendary Leader’s Hair
A man’s claim to be the great-grandson of legendary Native American leader Sitting Bull has been confirmed using DNA extracted from Sitting Bull’s scalp lock. This is the first time ancient DNA has been used to confirm a familial relationship between living and historical individuals. The confirmation was made possible using a new method to...
Italian Sailors Knew of America 150 Years Before Christopher Columbus, New Analysis of Ancient Documents Suggests
New analysis of ancient writings suggests that sailors from the Italian hometown of Christopher Columbus knew of America 150 years before its renowned ‘discovery’. Transcribing and detailing a, circa, 1345 document by a Milanese friar, Galvaneus Flamma, Medieval Latin literature expert Professor Paolo Chiesa has made an “astonishing” discovery of an “exceptional” passage referring to...
New York City’s Hidden Old-Growth Forests
In the popular imagination, New York City is a mass of soaring steel-frame skyscrapers. But many of the city’s 1 million buildings are not that modern. Behind their brick-and-mortar facades, its numerous 19th- and early 20th-century warehouses, commercial buildings and row homes are framed with massive wooden joists and beams. These structures probably harbor at...