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Even after his death in 323 B.C., Alexander the Great remained an international superstar. Anointed with honey and sealed in a gold sarcophagus, his body became a political treasure as soon as it was cold, conferring political and religious power on everyone associated with it. His remains lay in at least four different tombs in three different cities before finally disappearing in A.D. 391. All of this postmortem attention is the subject of Nicholas J. Saunders Alexander's Tomb: The Two-Thousand Year Obsession to Find the Lost Conqueror (Basic Books, $26.00). According to Saunders, during the early days of the Christian church, Alexander's legend was so great that he became associated with Jesus to the point where they almost became a hybrid deity.
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Hidden away in the University of Virginia Library website is the Plymouth Colony Archive Project--etext.lib.virginia.edu/users/deetz/. The site is more than an archive of official documents from England's first permanent colony in the United States. The archaeology at Plymouth is detailed in photographs, articles, and book excerpts, and provides some interesting insight on the colonists. Among them is John Howland, one of the original pilgrims whose house foundation is undergoing excavation. Another is Cato Howe, a black man who earned his freedom from slavery by fighting in the Revolutionary War. Granted a strip of land by the town of Plymouth after the war, Howe lived there as a farmer for the rest of his life. The site also offers the mandatory debunking of Thanksgiving myths, and a collection of popular and scholarly articles about the colony.
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