Through much of its history, Italy was Europe's heart of the arts, an artistic playground for foreign elites and powers who bought, sold, and sometimes plundered countless artworks and antiquities. This loss of artifacts looted by other nations once...

Since its foundation in 1860, the Oxford University Museum of Natural History's world-renowned collections have become a key centre for scientific study and its much-loved building an important icon for visitors from around the world. The museum now...

As in many other areas in south Scandinavia, the region surrounding the city of Simrishamn in south-east Scania has a great many Bronze Age mounds that are still visible in the landscape, and records from the museums demonstrate that the area is rich...

Although fossils have provided some of the most important evidence for evolution, the discipline of paleontology has not always had a central place in evolutionary biology. Beginning in Darwin's day, and for much of the twentieth century, paleontolog...

Examining and interpreting recent spectacular fossil discoveries in China, paleontologists have arrived at a prevailing view: there is now incontrovertible evidence that birds represent the last living dinosaur. But is this conclusion beyond dispute?...

The ancient Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 C.E., drew international attention when excavations commenced in the 1730s. As a result, the nearby city of Naples became a nexus of scholarship, cult...

While the ancient Romans were not the first society to construct a system of great roads, they did introduce important technical advancements and develop a highly organized and pervasive network that joined their territories in a gigantic web. Spanni...

The "Wu Family Shrines", one of the most important cultural monuments of early China, comprise approximately fifty stone slabs from the so-called Wu cemetery in Shandong province. Depicting emperors and kings, heroic women, filial sons, and mythologi...