Evidence-led history, clearly told.
The Erie Canal connected inland communities with wider markets and changed routes for goods and people. Its nineteenth-century history links infrastructure with trade, migration and everyday travel.
When Yale University announced the Vinland Map in 1965, the object seemed to place a European depiction of part of North America before Columbus. Its appeal came from the apparent…
The Lindisfarne Gospels are usually dated to the early eighth century and associated with the monastery on Lindisfarne, the tidal island off Northumberland. The manuscript is Cotton MS Nero D…
The gold funerary mask found at Mycenae in 1876 is conventionally called the ‘Mask of Agamemnon.’ That label is memorable but not a secure identification. The National Archaeological Museum places…
The Phaistos Disc is a fired-clay object from the Minoan palace at Phaistos on Crete. Luigi Pernier found it during excavation on 3 July 1908. The Heraklion Archaeological Museum dates…
Two crowns, a raised weapon and a pair of intertwined animals make the Narmer Palette an unusually persuasive image of royal power. They also make it easy to ask the…
The Oxyrhynchus Papyri are powerful evidence precisely because they were not collected as a modern library. They came from ancient rubbish mounds in a dry Egyptian environment, where scraps of…
Follow the sequence from the GDR travel announcement and televised press conference to crowds and decisions at Berlin border crossings.
The Dead Sea Scrolls are often introduced as a spectacular archaeological discovery, but their historical value is easier to understand when the evidence is separated into layers. The manuscripts are…
The Herculaneum papyri are often described as a lost library waiting to be opened. That image captures their promise but hides the evidence problem. More than 1,800 papyrus scrolls were…
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