Corals. Stunningly beautiful, in all shapes and colors, alive or petrified they have much impact on our planet and our imagination...

Sea salt: a commodity with so many attributes.  Precious and common, life giving but also corroding and destructive, ordinary and mundane...

In May 968 a diplomat from the Kingdom of Pavia in northern Italy, Liutprand of Cremona, arrived in Constantinople to meet Emperor...

In a class on Indian Ocean commodities, economy, and materiality, every year my students and I come across this scribe’s desk at the...

Roxani and I have often reflected on the nature of our fascination with marine creatures and the people of the sea...

Ένας κωμικός χαρακτήρας στο έργο του Άλεξι «Ελληνίς» στα τέλη του 4ου αι. π.Χ. το λέει ξεκάθαρα: «Ζωντανά ή νεκρά, τα ψάρια πολεμούν μαζί...

My first encounter with detached sharks’ fins was at a fishing village near Ra’s al-Khaymah in the homonymous emirate on the Persian Gulf...

This post is about a fish with a funny scientific name: Boops boops.  In English it is known as bogue, a name that embodies lots of...

In a nightmarish scene from Saudi director Shahad Ameen’s remarkable short film Eye and Mermaid, a group of fishermen have entrapped...

As the 19th century was coming to a close, Christos Tsountas, a charismatic and dynamic curator of antiquities in Athens, excavated the...

Many years ago, as an archaeology student in the early 1990s, I had the amazing luck and privilege of participating in a project entitled...

In the past, when people snorkeled in the Mediterranean, in its shallow protected coves, chances were that they would see colonies of...

here was much rejoicing last November in Atlanta, the great city of the new American South. The Atlanta Braves won the Super Bowl!!...

This post was born out of awe at a piece of kirie art, by Japanese artist Masayo Fukuda. Fukuda created a magnificent paper-cut octopus...

Fish hold a fascination for people!  They are part of all kinds of stories. We find them in fables, in mythology, in dream lore...

They are not fish, they are not humans either… they are not of the land, but neither are they unequivocally creatures of the sea...

“When they catch sight of one [a dead whale filled with ambergris], they haul it ashore with iron grapnels attached to stout ropes...

Abalone is a name for the many members of a large family of marine molluscs, the Haliotidae. Haliotidae translates into “the ears of the...

We can’t travel far these days, but there’s still the travel shows, past and present (well, mostly past!) reminding us of the opportuniti...