Mining: Did you mean...?

West Africa was one of the world's greatest producers of gold in the Middle Ages. Trade in the metal went back to antiquity but when the camel caravans of the Sahara linked North Africa to the savannah interior, the trade really took off...

Elves and dwarves represent minor divine figures in Norse mythology. Elves (álfar) and dwarves (dvergar) have in common their talent for creating precious objects, skill, agility, and moral ambiguity. Dwarves appear in several important stories...

Freeborn Roman children, ingenuiae, born of Roman citizen parents lived a life that was dictated by the level of society into which they were born; a day in the life of a child from the lower level of society and one from the more affluent...

Jade (nephrite) was regarded as the most precious stone in ancient China, and it symbolised purity and moral integrity. Prized for its durability and magical qualities, the stone was laboriously carved and polished into all manner of objects...

Soviets, often called Soviets of Workers' Deputies, were worker councils first formed during the Russian Revolution of 1905 when a general strike was called against the Tsarist regime. Factory and other types of workers across the newly industrialised...

Sometime around 330 BCE, Pytheas, a little-known Greek merchant, embarked on an astonishing voyage. It was a voyage that would take him far beyond the known boundaries of the Mediterranean, into lands thought to exist only in myth and legend...

The social organisation of the ancient Etruscans, a civilization which flourished in central Italy between the 8th and 3rd century BCE, can only be pieced together from a collection of rather unsatisfactory sources which, unfortunately, do...

Philip II of Macedon (359-336 BCE) envisaged a broad Macedonian kingdom and his colonial expansion resulted in the forging of an empire that his son Alexander the Great (r. 336-323 BCE) would use as a springboard for even greater things...

The Siege of Petersburg (June 1864 to April 1865), or the Richmond-Petersburg Campaign, was among the last military operations of the American Civil War (1861-1865). It was not a siege in the traditional sense, but rather a period of static...

In November 1532 CE, Francisco Pizarro led a group of about 160 conquistadors into the Inca city of Cajamarca. The illiterate and illegitimate son of an Extremaduran nobleman and an impoverished woman, Pizarro had spent his entire life on...