Archive by category | Archaeology

Raising Horizons: women in science reframed

Raising Horizons: women in science reframed

Women in geoscience today can be struck by the paucity of their predecessors in the scientific record. This month, an exhibition helps to redress the balance: portraits celebrating 200 years of pioneering work by women archaeologists, palaeontologists and geologists, on display at London’s Geological Society library.  Read more

Beyond the Antikythera mechanism

'The Wrestler', a marble sculpture from the Antikythera shipwreck showing wear on the side not buried in sand.

The sea has great destructive power, but it can also preserve. A new exhibition of 2,000-year-old artefacts retrieved in 1900 from a shipwreck near the Greek island of Antikythera includes some breathtakingly pristine treasures — such as a bowl made of delicate coils of turquoise, yellow and purple glass, and a miniature golden figure of Eros hanging from an earring set with garnets, an emerald and 20 tiny pearls.  Read more

Tracing the hum

Amy Shelton's lightbox installation Florilegium: Honey Flow.

Consider the honeybee. Not as an automaton in a honey factory, but as a remarkable social insect and pollinator indissolubly tied to food security — and to the artistic imagination. So asks the poet John Burnside in his incisive essay on the bee in culture in this week’s Books and Arts.  Read more