Age of Discovery: Did you mean...?

In 1845 CE, the archaeologist Austen Henry Layard began excavations at the ruins of the city of Nimrud in the region which is northern Iraq in the present day. Layard's expedition was part of a larger movement at the time to uncover ancient...

Clove, nutmeg, and mace are native to only a handful of tiny islands in the middle of the vast Indonesian archipelago – cloves on five Maluku Islands (the Moluccas) about 1250 km (778 mi) west of New Guinea, and nutmeg on the ten Banda Islands...

The Bronze Age (c. 3000-1000 BCE) is the period when cultures were either using, producing, or trading bronze. Several cultures flourished around the Aegean Sea during this period: the Minoan civilization on Crete, the Mycenaean civilization...

Discovery of the Mississippi by De Soto, painting by William Henry Powell, 1853. Capitol Rotunda, Washington D.C.

From the dawn of our species to the present day, stone-made artefacts are the dominant form of material remains that have survived to today concerning human technology. The term “Stone Age” was coined in the late 19th century CE by the Danish...

The Greek Dark Age (c. 1200 to c. 800 BCE, overlapping with the Iron Age, c. 1200-550 BCE) is the modern-day term for the period in Greek history following the Bronze Age Collapse when the Mycenaean Civilization fell and the Linear B writing...

The Bronze Age Collapse (also known as Late Bronze Age Collapse) is a modern-day term referring to the decline and fall of major Mediterranean civilizations during the 13th-12th centuries BCE. The precise cause of the Bronze Age Collapse...

For the first time, Italian archaeologists have uncovered an intact Etruscan house complete with sources of material culture. Researchers hope this find sheds light on other potential excavation sites and the mysteries of Etruscan daily life...

An illustration from 1906 showing the discovery of Guy Fawkes beneath Westminster Palace and the 1605 Gunpowder Plot when he and his Catholic co-conspirators intended to blow up the English Parliament and James I of England (r. 1603-1625...

The triclinium (dining room) of the Villa Arianna in Stabiae (southern Italy) was richly decorated in the Fourth Pompeian Style with a large mythological scene depicting Dionysus’ discovery of Ariadne on the island of Naxos. The villa was...