Bøger i Cambridge Library Collection - Archaeology serien

In 1863, the English architect John Turtle Wood (1821-90) resigned from a railway development project in western Turkey to begin his search at Ephesus for the Temple of Artemis, lost from view since the middle ages. In the first part of this well-illustrated 1877 publication, Wood describes the city and the initial excavations carried out with support from the British Museum. This survey of various structures concludes with Wood's work at the great theatre, where he found the Greek inscription that helped direct him to the correct location of the temple in 1869. Part II focuses on the exhausting four years that Wood spent excavating the temple, which was buried under many layers of sand. The appendix presents Greek and Latin inscriptions, with facing-page translations, from various Ephesian sites. Also reissued in this series, Edward Falkener's Ephesus (1862) includes a review of references to the temple in ancient writings.

Combining a very active career as a prosperous paper manufacturer with the pursuit of various antiquarian interests, Sir John Evans (1823-1908) began the study of geology in the context of a court case over water rights for his paper mills, but extended his interests to the artefacts found in gravel beds in Britain, and in the Somme valley in France. This work was published in 1872, and was translated into French soon afterwards. Heavily illustrated, it describes stone implements from the Palaeolithic and Neolithic periods, including weapons, tools and ornaments, from cave and river-bed deposits as well as settlement sites. Evans also continued to research fossils, and was highly respected as a numismatist. He was a fellow of the Royal Society, the Geological Society, and the Society of Antiquaries. His son Arthur Evans (1851-1941) discovered the Minoan civilisation of Crete.

Charles Roach Smith (1806-90), born on the Isle of Wight and educated in Hampshire, was apprenticed to a lawyer at fifteen, but a year later transferred to a chemist, where he prospered, moving to London and becoming wealthy from a firm of wholesale druggists and his own chemist's shop in Lothbury, in the City of London. Sewerage and other works in the City meant that Roman and medieval artefacts were regularly coming to light, and Smith's collection eventually numbered more than 5,000 pieces. He eventually sold it to the British Museum, at far less than its market value, so that it could remain intact. This book, published in 1859, describes the excavations, and uses the finds he and others acquired to illustrate 'the institutions, the habits, the customs, and the arts of our forefathers'. It remains an invaluable record of finds arising from the Victorian redevelopment of London.