Current Features

Just about everyone is familiar with the ancient Olympic Games because of their revival in modern times. Less well known are the other three “crown” festivals of ancient Greece, those held at Delphi, Isthmia, and Nemea, not to mention local festivals that included athletic, equestrian, and musical contests. As expectation builds for the 2004 Athens Olympics, the American School of Classical Studies has published a timely new guide to The Games at Athens written by Jennifer Neils and Stephen V Tracy. Read on for more about this book and other publications archaeologically-oriented visitors to the 2004 games may want to have at hand during the more boring heats …

Previous Features

There is one aspect of English history that continues to fascinate readers and scholars alike, not just in the UK but far further afield - the British monarchy. However, this is not entirely because of the central role that the sovereign has played in national politics through the centuries. More often than not, it appears to the interested reader and filmgoer that royals have not always behaved as they should.

From his small office in the Oriental Institute, Tony Wilkinson masterminds projects that include space scientists, cutting edge computer modelers, geologists and climatologists. In the last few months his teams have discovered vast networks of 5000 year old roads, linking the civilizations of the ancient Near East and have started to model real Sim Cities, manipulating the variables which shaped the great civilizations of Ur and Babylon. In October his first major book in almost three decades will be published … a volume founded on unrivalled dirt-archaeology expertise that will stimulate and surprise anybody interested in the development of the earliest urban civilizations, the world of the ancient Near East, and landscape archaeology throughout the world.

Lots of people love stained glass ... stained glass windows, stained glass lamps, stained glass cats sitting on the windowsill. But the history of stained glass art remains a rather specialised field of research. We have just received a beautiful book on stained glass by the famous Spanish stained glass artist Pere Valldepérez, which is a great book for the beginner. And for stained glass connoisseurs, the past few months have seen the publication of several important new reference works, from museum collections to regional studies.

The editor of OXeN always asks us to include a wide range of books in our features to broaden the subject and provide something for everyone. Well, this month I said 'To hell with that'! To surround After the Ice: A Global Human History 20,000-5000 BC with other books on the subject would be to diminish its standing and, besides which, I can’t think of anything else that measures up. This is what I think of Steven Mithen’s new book – it’s good ... it’s very good!

In the period between the end of WWII and the fall of the Berlin Wall, the British government was obsessed with the threat of atomic weapons and tried to confront the unthinkable with a variety of imaginative structures. The Cold War: Building for Nuclear Confrontation is a new book from English Heritage, which investigates a secret world constructed behind barbed-wire fences and deep beneath our cities