July/August 2025 Issue

Museum of the Viking Age, University of Oslo

Features From the Issue

  • Features

    Italy’s Garden of  Monsters

    Why did a Renaissance duke fill his wooded park with gargantuan stone sculptures?

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    Courtesy Cosimo Monteleone, Rachele Bernardello, and Paolo Borin
  • Features

    Setting Sail for Valhalla

    Vikings staged elaborate spectacles to usher their rulers into the afterlife

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    Museum of the Viking Age, University of Oslo
  • Features

    The Home of the Weather God

    In northern Anatolia, archaeologists have discovered the source of Hittite royal power

    Tolga İldun
  • Features

    In Search of Lost Pharaohs

    Anubis Mountain conceals the tombs of an obscure Egyptian dynasty

    Photos by Josef W. Wegner for the Penn Museum
  • Features

    Birds of a Feather

    Intriguing rock art in the Four Corners reveals how the Basketmaker people drew inspiration from ducks 1,500 years ago

    Courtesy John Pitts

Letter from Williamsburg

Letter from Williamsburg

A New Look at an Old City

Archaeologists are reconstructing the complicated 400-year history of Virginia’s colonial capital

Photograph by Carol M. Highsmith/The Library of Congress

Artifact

Artifacts

Maya Ceramic Figurine

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Courtesy Ken Seligson

Digs & Discoveries

  • Digs & Discoveries

    Legend of the Crystal Brain

    jul14ka/AdobeStock
  • Digs & Discoveries

    Bound for Heaven

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    Yoli Schwartz, Israel Antiquities Authority
  • Digs & Discoveries

    Saints Alive

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    Berlin State Monument Office, Julia-Marlen Schiefelbein
  • Digs & Discoveries

    Soldiers of Ill Fortune

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    Bavarian State Office for Monument Protection
  • Digs & Discoveries

    Ancestral Rings

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    Photo: Near Map 2024, prepared by Zara Lasky-Davison, Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung Cultural Heritage Aboriginal Corporation
  • Digs & Discoveries

    Neolithic Neophytes

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    C. Jarrige, MAI
  • Digs & Discoveries

    The Bone Toolkit

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    Spanish National Research Council
  • Digs & Discoveries

    Under the Skin

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    Tattooed arm of a Chancay individual shown under laser-stimulated fluorescence
    © Michael Pittman
  • Digs & Discoveries

    Miners' Misfortune

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    Bérangère Redon/French Archaeological Mission at the Eastern Desert, Antiquity Publications Ltd.
  • Digs & Discoveries

    Wax On, Wax Off

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    © The Trustees of the British Museum
  • Digs & Discoveries

    Scent of a Statue

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    Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek/Photo: O. Haupt

Off the Grid

Off the Grid July/August 2025

Vichama, Peru

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Lisa Trever

Around the World

Explore

  • SUDAN

    Pyramids, Tombos, Sudan
  • SICILY

    Excavated Greek classroom, Agrigento, Sicily
  • CAMBODIA

    Buddha statue, Ta Prohm, Cambodia

Slideshow: Ducks of the Four Corners

Rock art made by the Basketmaker people in the Four Corners region in the first millennium A.D. often features ducks. In many cases, the birds are shown sitting on peoples’ heads, creating what are known as duck-head figures. Many of these depictions are found in Bears Ears National Monument in southeastern Utah. They vary from complex panels featuring a number of human and animal figures to examples in which only a few individuals interact in scenes of much smaller scale.

Slideshow: Garden of the Grotesque

The Sacro Bosco, or Sacred Wood, was the creation of Pier Francesco Orsini, the duke of Bomarzo, who lived from 1523 to 1583. Orsini left little written record of his intentions in the design of the park and its several dozen highly imaginative sculptures, but his inspirations appear to have included mythology, literature, the ancient history of the Bomarzo region, and even his own biography. However scholars choose to interpret Orsini’s eccentric concoction, all agree that it is one of the most unusual and beguiling spaces of the Italian Renaissance.