Features From the Issue
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Features
Italy’s Garden of Monsters
Why did a Renaissance duke fill his wooded park with gargantuan stone sculptures?
Courtesy Cosimo Monteleone, Rachele Bernardello, and Paolo Borin -
Features
Setting Sail for Valhalla
Vikings staged elaborate spectacles to usher their rulers into the afterlife
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

Artifact
Artifacts
Maya Ceramic Figurine

Digs & Discoveries
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Digs & Discoveries
Legend of the Crystal Brain
jul14ka/AdobeStock -
Digs & Discoveries
Bound for Heaven
Yoli Schwartz, Israel Antiquities Authority -
Digs & Discoveries
Saints Alive
Berlin State Monument Office, Julia-Marlen Schiefelbein -
Digs & Discoveries
Soldiers of Ill Fortune
Bavarian State Office for Monument Protection -
Digs & Discoveries
Ancestral Rings
Photo: Near Map 2024, prepared by Zara Lasky-Davison, Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung Cultural Heritage Aboriginal Corporation -
Digs & Discoveries
Neolithic Neophytes
C. Jarrige, MAI -
Digs & Discoveries
The Bone Toolkit
Spanish National Research Council -
Digs & Discoveries
Under the Skin
© Michael Pittman -
Digs & Discoveries
Miners' Misfortune
Bérangère Redon/French Archaeological Mission at the Eastern Desert, Antiquity Publications Ltd. -
Digs & Discoveries
Wax On, Wax Off
© The Trustees of the British Museum -
Digs & Discoveries
Scent of a Statue
Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek/Photo: O. Haupt
Off the Grid
Off the Grid July/August 2025
Vichama, Peru

Around the World

SUDAN
Ancient Egyptians built hundreds of pyramids over the millennia. These monumental structures were exclusively reserved for royal burials—or so scholars have long believed. Recent excavations in the pyramids at the site of Tombos, an Egyptian colony in ancient Nubia, revealed several skeletons interred between 1400 and 650 b.c. The remains of some individuals showed signs of wear and tear likely caused by a lifetime of manual labor. This is hardly a sign of noble birth, suggesting that the Tombos pyramids had a less restrictive entrance policy than previously thought.
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SICILY
Mental gymnastics were emphasized just as much as physical exercise in the ancient Greek colony of Agrigento. The 1st-century b.c. gymnasium at the site contains ample space for workouts, training, and other athletic activities. Recent excavations uncovered a semicircular roofed classroom, the 1st of its kind ever found in a gymnasium complex. Teachers and students would have used this space to hold classes, practice rhetoric, and stage plays as well as intellectual competitions.
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CAMBODIA
The torso of a rare type of Buddha statue was unearthed at Ta Prohm, a monastery built by the Khmer king Jayavarman VII in the late 12th to early 13th century. The sculpture stands about 4 feet tall, is heavily adorned with jewelry, and wears a robe and a veil. The Buddha is depicted with his left arm placed across his chest, a previously unknown position in Khmer statuary. Archaeologists were able to reunite the figure with its head, which was found in 1927.
Related Content
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.











