21 April 2006 | Ancient, Journals, Theory
In the latest issue of Antiquity, R. Alexander Bentley writes: “There is now a proliferation of new journals on almost every conceivable topic (e.g. Journal of Happiness Studies, Queueing Systems, Wear, World Pumps, with titles for archaeologists such as Anthropoetics, Archaeological Dialogues and Archaeoastronomy & Ethnoastronomy News), so that an author can publish almost any [...]
17 April 2006 | Ancient
The Chronicle also reports additional details surrounding the recent $200 million Leon Levy Foundation gift to NYU to create an institute for the study of antiquity: “The controversy, first reported in Science magazine, extends beyond NYU. The University of Cincinnati and Bryn Mawr College now have policies against accepting gifts from the Leon Levy Foundation [...]
From the L.A. Times: “In a surprise search Wednesday, Greek authorities seized 17 unregistered artifacts and a Byzantine icon from the vacation house of Marion True, the former J. Paul Getty Museum antiquities curator on trial in Rome on charges she trafficked in looted art.” From the N.Y. Times: “one of the largest donations New [...]
29 March 2006 | Ancient, Architecture
The Göbekli Tepe stone temple in southeast Anatolia makes the pyramids and even nearby Çatal Hüyük look rather young, reports archaeologist Klaus Schmidt. It’s now thought to be 12,000 years old. Its massive stone pillars, decorated with enigmatic animal-script ideograms (cranes, foxes, snakes, boars, gazelles) of a hunter-gatherer people, suggest that temples predated settlements in [...]
22 March 2006 | Ancient
As was widely reported today, Leon Levy, long a benefactor of NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts, announced that he will donate about $200 million to NYU for the creation of an Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. In the words of Jossip.com, “The new center … will focus on research and teaching of [...]
8 March 2006 | Ancient, Museums
From the Chicago Tribune: “The increasingly fractious dispute between [Yale] and Peru, involving at least 250 artifacts, is one among many in a recent upsurge of ownership controversies between U.S. museums and foreign governments.” As a result, museums are “devoting more staff and money to researching the objects in their collections with uncertain provenance, or [...]
“There was no plan to protect the Iraq Museum” during the 2003 siege of Baghdad, said Matthew Bogdanos last night at a Cooper Union lecture sponsored by Saving Antiquities for Everyone (S.A.F.E.). As a result, thousands of Mesopotamian artifacts were stolen. Bogdanos, who holds a master’s degree in classical studies, assembled a multi-agency team while [...]
28 February 2006 | Ancient, Museums
From today’s New York Times, Philippe de Montebello on the Euphronios Krater: “How much more would you learn from knowing which particular hole in — supposedly Cerveteri — it came out of? … Everything is on the vase.” On illicit antiquities: “The truth is — unattractive as it may be — the black market, to [...]
