ARCHAEOLOGY

The offices of ARCHAEOLOGY magazine are in New York City, a place defined by the rivers that surround it. In 1624, the Dutch West India Company founded the settlement of New Amsterdam at the southern tip of the island of Manhattan, where the East and

Some say that the world is divided into dog people and cat people. Having grown up with cats, I belong to the latter category. I recently learned that cats were domesticated relatively late in human history, probably in the ancient Near East. They we

A shipwreck designated archaeological site 1Ba704 should, say archaeologists, also be called Clotilda, one of the most notorious vessels in U.S. history. The path to identifying the wreck as the last ship to carry enslaved Africans to the United Stat

VIRGINIA: Divers exploring the York River identified burned wooden timbers and cannons that may belong to a British ship that sank during the Siege of Yorktown. In this, the Revolutionary War’s decisive battle, George Washington’s army attacked the B

Along the rocky shoreline of Hopedale, in Labrador’s autonomous Inuit region of Nunatsiavut, a community is working to document and preserve more than 500 years of its past. Hopedale, which is home to a population of roughly 600, is celebrated for it

THE AGE OF HOMER WAS an age of heroes—Agamemnon, the king of Mycenae, Odysseus, the king of Ithaca, and Nestor, the king of Pylos, among others—whose deeds are chronicled in the Iliad and the Odyssey. Many archaeologists believe that Homer’s tales, d

In the remote province of Ghur in western Afghanistan, the Hari and Jam Rivers meet in a narrow valley where mountains tower 7,000 feet high over a seemingly impassable landscape. Far from any urban center, this valley is home to one of the world’s g

FOLLOW THE WINDING ROAD from Durham Cathedral, a 900-year-old architectural masterpiece that dominates the skyline of this historic city in northeast England, and you’ll eventually reach a narrow, cobbled twelfth-century stone bridge. Known as Elvet

IN LATE 1815 IN LONDON, Thomas Smith, then about 16 years old, signed up as an apprentice on Norfolk, a 650-ton former warship that had passed into private hands. Smith had heard that the vessel was bound for Africa in search of gold and ivory, an im

RECORDS OF VOYAGES TO South Georgia, and other islands in the South Seas, make clear that millions of fur-seal pelts were exported from these remote locations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. What became of these pelts once they were sold

On a bluff above the southern shore of the picturesque Lake George stands a small granite memorial. A bronze plaque commemorates the burial of four soldiers who died nearby during the 1755 Battle of Lake George, an early skirmish in the French and In