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TORONTO, ON – Archaeologists leading the University of Toronto's Tayinat Archaeological Project in southeastern Turkey have unearthed the remains of a monumental gate complex adorned with stone sculptures, including a magnificently carved lion. The gate complex provided access to the citadel of Kunulua, capital of the Neo-Hittite Kingdom of Patina (ca. 950-725 BCE), and is reminiscent of the citadel gate excavated by British archaeologist Sir Leonard Woolley in 1911 at the royal Hittite city of Carchemish. The Tayinat find provides valuable new insight into the innovative character and cultural sophistication of the diminutive Iron Age states that emerged in the...

LITTLE ROCK, Ark., Nov. 19 - With its sleek horizontal form hovering at the edge of the Arkansas River, the new William J. Clinton Presidential Center has been called by promoters a "bridge to the 21st century," a trite allusion to one of the former president's favorite themes. Locals snicker that it looks like an enormous double-wide trailer. Actually, its best elements fall somewhere between those two extremes. Designed by James Polshek and Richard Olcott of the New York-based firm Polshek Partnership, the library has moments of genuine architectural power. Its sleek cantilevered form thrusts out aggressively toward the river,...

Temple tablet or forger's art? Patina fits, words don't Joseph Brean and Simcha Jacobovici National Post Friday, January 31, 2003 Rarely do politics and carbon-dating mix, but when an ancient stone plaque was sent from Jerusalem to a Florida laboratory for analysis a little over a year ago, a nation's identity literally hung in the balance. The tablet, with its ancient Hebrew inscription, is believed by some to have once hung in the long-lost First Temple of Judaism, built by King Solomon to house the Ten Commandments and burned to the ground by the Babylonians in 586 B.C. The plaque's...