Discoveries (1)

I have been perusing a new coffee table book edited by Brian Fagan, Discoveries: Unearthing the New Treasures of Archaeology. This is a lovely thing, with great pictures of archaeological discoveries from the past 20 years and short articles by the discoverers. I spent a lot of time with such books in my youth, and I long ago fixed in my mind the images of the iconic archaeological discoveries from the century before I graduated from high school in 1980. But many of the discoveries in this book are new to me, or else I know them only from news items. Some of these images will one day be as famous as the ones I grew up with, like the ruins of Machu Pichu or the bull's head lyre from the royal tombs of Ur. I am going to post a few of them here, from time to time, just for fun, and to show that amazing archaeology is still being done around the world. Above, a ceramic effigy vessel from a Moche tomb in Peru; below, a collection of bronze objects from a Celtic ritual deposit at Tintagnac, France, including a swan-shaped helmet and many musical horns, and two stone statues from the tombs of bronze age queens in Syria.