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With a few exceptions, the distant past is an anonymous land occupied by people who made things and left behind a cryptic record of broken pieces. Even when the written word comes into play in human history and we can read the hieroglyphs naming an Egyptian pharaoh and describing royal achievements, the majority of human experience remains unknown and unrecoverable. Archaeologists usually excav...

Written words probably developed independently at least in three places: Egypt, Mesopotamia and Harappa. In these densely populated areas, signs, icons and symbols were eventually used to create a writing system. It is interesting to see how sometimes remote populations are using the same icons and symbols. Here, we discuss examples and some results obtained by researchers investigating the sig...

By the time it had reached its zenith during the second-century of the Common Era, the Roman Empire had developed into one of the greatest civilizations the ancient world had ever known. Cities scattered across an imperial region that stretched from the North Sea to the Red Sea had flourished under a well-ordered governing body housed in Rome. These regional centers stood unfortified in the cou...

The Mexica Empire reached an outstanding social, economic and politic organization among Mesoamerican civilizations. Even though archaeology and history provide substantial information about their past, their biological origin and the demographic consequences of their settlement in the Central Valley of Mexico remain unsolved. Two main hypotheses compete to explain the Mexica origin: a social r...

INTRODUCTION CIVILIZATION rose to two great heights in ancient Greece, namely in the Bronze age and in the later Classical period. In the latter medicine advanced considerably and culminated in the work of Hippocrates. Knowledge of medicine in the Greek Bronze age depended on the study of Homer until this century, when work in the fields of archaeology and philology provided more facts. This wo...

Cereal grains play a pivotal role in the rise and character of the Indus civilization. Archaeologists have traditionally focused their attention on the large-grained crops of wheat and barley while often minimizing the importance of the smaller-grainedmillets. Both environmental and cultural variables influence crop selection in the past as well as today. This paper explores the role and signif...

Historical collapse of ancient states or civilizations has raised new awareness about its possible relevance to current issues of sustainability, in the context of global change. This Special Feature examines 12 case studies of societies under stress, of which seven suffered severe transformation. Outcomes were complex and unpredictable. Five others overcame breakdown through environmental, pol...

Analysis of the Greenland ice core covering the period from 3000 to 500 years ago-the Greek, Roman, Medieval and Renaissance times-shows that lead is present at concentrations four times as great as natural values from about 2500 to 1700 years ago (500 B.C. to 300 A.D.). These results show that Greek and Roman lead and silver mining and smelting activities polluted the middle troposphere of the...

I think it is a sad reflection on our civilization that while we can and do measure the temperature in the atmosphere of Venus we do not know what goes on inside our soufflés.