Volume 17 : Articles

By: Donald White

The rapid outward movement of the ancient Greeks from their mainland homes between the 10th and 6th centuries B.C., first to Asia Minor and later into the Black Sea region, to Egypt and the North African coast, and to the farther reaches of the western Mediterranean, comprises one of the great adventures in man’s past, […]

A Progress Report

By: Tamara Stech Wheeler and Robert Maddin and James D. Muhly

The last twenty years have seen an in­crease in scientific studies of archaeological materials resulting from the desire for greater precision in archaeological data. Research on ancient metal objects has contributed signifi­cantly to the data, due to a growing scientific interest in ancient materials and the applica­tion of new techniques of metallurgical anal­ysis to metal […]

By: David S. Reese

“There were giants in the earth in those days…” Genesis 6:4 During the Pleistocene epoch of pre-history (three million to ten thousand years ago) many islands in the Mediterranean Sea provided the habitat of animals that developed in a unique fashion: they became either dwarfed or gigantic. For instance, there were dwarfed elephants (the smallest […]

By: Alfred Friendly

In the past two years British archaeol­ogists have discovered and in some part de­ciphered more than 240 fragments of 1st cen­tury A.D. Roman cursive writing on thin slivers of wood in a far corner of the Impe­rium where the survival of such material would have been thought most unlikely: in a fort on Hadrian’s Wall. […]

By: Karen S. Rubinson

The Greek historian Herodotus (490/480-425 B.C.], in his History of the Persian Wars, included an excursus on the ethnography of the Scythians and other nomadic groups with whom the Greeks were familiar. Some of the information which Herodotus provided about these nomadic peoples he apparently had gathered during his own trip to the Black Sea […]

A New Guinea Highlands Group

By: Harold G. Levine

From his ship off the southwest coast of Papua, the Dutch navigator Jan Carstensz observed and noted in his journal in 1623 the presence of high mountain ranges, in parts covered with snow, in the interior of the island. The peaks he saw are part of the central cordillera that traverses most of the length […]

Pidgin English in the New Hebrides

By: Elizabeth Reed Dickie

New Hebrides is an area in the throes of rapid culture change. Being propelled into articulation with the Western world by the Age of Exploration, being exploited by both the blackbirders and the early settlers, and being a major stage for the Pacific Theater in the Second World War, have all had profound effects upon […]

By: John D. Hedrick and Karen Goodrich Hedrick

Melanesia—literally the black islands—stretches from New Guinea more than 4,000 kilometers southeastwards to Fiji. Some of the smaller islands in this massive archipelago are raised coral reefs and atolls, but the majority are “high islands”—the result of violent volcanic and tectonic activity con­stantly taking place on the sea floor. In the dense tropical rain forest […]

By: Gregory L. Possehl

By far the greater parts of Pakistan and western India are semi-arid climatic zones. Mean annual precipitation for virtually all of Pakistan is less than 20 inches per year and falls below five inches in the central part of the Indus Valley. Precipitation values in­crease slightly to the east where the effects of the southwest […]

A Harappan Metropolis Beyond the Indus Valley

By: B.K. Thapar

Kalibangan, literally black bangles, from the sight of the countless fragments of weather-stained terracotta bangles strewn over the surface of the site, lies some 310 kilometers northwest of Delhi, along the left bank of the now-dry river Ghaggar in the northern part of Rajasthan. Anciently, the river, often identified with Sarasvati, reached to its Hakra […]