Walk through the bustling streets of modern Rome, and you will witness a profound architectural paradox. On one side of the street, a modern reinforced concrete retaining wall—poured barely three decades ago—is already spider-webbed with cracks, crumbling under the assault of weather, exhaust, and time. On the other side stands the Pantheon. Its massive unreinforced…
In 1994, a German archaeologist named Klaus Schmidt drove out to a dusty hill in southeastern Turkey that everyone else had already given up on. American and Turkish surveyors had passed over the same spot back in the 1960s, noted some broken limestone slabs, assumed it was a medieval cemetery, and moved on. For thirty…
In the spring of 1900, a group of Greek sponge divers sheltering from a storm dropped anchor near a tiny, barren island called Antikythera, halfway between Crete and mainland Greece. When the weather cleared, they dove — and instead of sponges, they found a 2,000-year-old shipwreck packed with bronze statues, marble figures, jewelry, and glassware,…
In 1963, a man in central Turkey took a sledgehammer to a wall in his basement. He wasn’t looking for archaeology — by most accounts, he was chasing his missing chickens, which kept vanishing through a crack in the floor. What he found on the other side of that wall wasn’t a chicken coop. It…
Thanksgiving is a national holiday celebrated on various dates in the United States, Canada, Grenada, Saint Lucia, and Liberia. It began as a day of thanksgiving and sacrifice for the harvest and blessings of the previous year. Similarly named festival holidays are in Germany and Japan. Thanksgiving is on the second Monday of October in…
