Ancient Greece

de Marni McGee

The civilization of ancient Greece centered around the Aegean Sea, the area that today includes Greece and the western part of Turkey. The region has long beckoned to archeologists, who have uncovered traces of the past on land and, most recently, under the sea. From Pompeii to Troy to Athens, scientists have worked to uncover the secrets of Greece's past. Ancient treasures were unearthed during the building of Athens? subway system, begun in 1992. And at least one historian wonders if what the ancient Greeks thought were the bones of giants might really have been the fossil bones of an extinct giant mammal---the southern mammoth.