Here are the posts I enjoyed this week:
This article about season results from two digs on Cyprus illustrates why so much archaeology is carried out on the island—layers and layers of history are packed into this one small place. One dig at the foot of the Trodos mountains looks at rural life early in the Bronze Age with copper smelting going on in households (i.e. small scale), so this village dig demonstrates the details of life outside the successful urban centers of the time on the island. The second dig summarized the finds of Hellenistic fortifications no one knew existed. When I explored Cyprus, several times we’d ask at a village coffeeshop in the square where to find some particular ruins, and the first thing we’d have to clarify with our helpful local was whether we were in search of Neolithic, Bronze Age, Roman, etc etc. You know you’re in the land of many layers when the villagers know by the rock cuts whether a ruin is Neolithic or Late Bronze Age and can direct you to the properly aged dig J Now that’s my kind of place! Click here for Archaeology News Network “Important finds at Politiko-Troullia and Pyla-Koutsopetria excavations on Cyprus island”
Found in Olympia, Greece, a Roman-era plaque with 13 lines of the Odyssey. The lines are from the conversation between Odysseus and Eumaeus. I’m trying to imagine what “best-seller” would be quoted and found at a sporting center today? Click here for Archaeology Magazine “Odyssey Excerpt Uncovered in Greece”
History of steel in Popular Mechanics—including when and where iron started to appear in human history. Some of the ancient history here isn’t quite right (Ignore the part about the people called Chalybes, for example, and just read, people in Anatolia) and a bit out of date (they cite a 1956 book as source for part of it), but overall it’s an enjoyable overview, including Pharaoh’s dagger made of a meteorite and the Hittites’ early development of iron weapons (that I tend to ignore in my fiction because in the Bronze Age it sounds like an anachronism, even though it isn’t). I like the way the Romans got duped into buying from, not conquering, their steel producers, according to this article. I suspect it’s an apocryphal story, though. Click here for Popular Mechanics “The History of Steel”