Adrienne Mayor

“The real Amazons were long believed to be purely imaginary. They were the mythical warrior women who were the archenemies of the ancient Greeks. Every Greek hero or champion, from Hercules t...”

“In the non-Greek stories, Persia, Egypt, even China, Central Asia, in oral traditions and written literature, anyone who fights Amazons admires their courage and beauty, and they want to be...”

“I write in two very different places: my desk in Palo Alto, California, is piled high with myriad jumbled books and papers whose stratigraphy is a challenge. Summers in Bozeman, Montana, I w...”

“The Greeks first identified the Amazons ethnographically, as a nation of men and women distinguished by something outstanding in their gender relations. Later, any ambivalence or anxiety tha...”

“Male buerkitshi are certainly more common than females today, although eagle hunting has always been open to interested girls. Archaeology suggests that eagle huntresses were probably more c...”

“From about 700 B.C. to A.D. 500, the vast territory of Scythia, stretching from the Black Sea to China, was home to diverse but culturally related nomads. Known as Scythians to Greeks, Saka...”

“Unlike settled, patriarchal societies such as classical Greece and Rome, where women stayed home to weave and mind children, the lives of nomadic steppe tribes centered on horses and archery...”

“Archaeologists have been digging up thousands of graves of people called Scythians by the Greeks. They turn out to be people whose women fought, hunted, rode horses, used bows and arrows, ju...”

“Evidence pointing to eagle hunting's antiquity comes from Scythian and other burial mounds of nomads who roamed the steppes 3,000 years ago and whose artifacts abound in eagle imagery.”

“The tasks of paleontologists and classical historians and archaeologists are remarkably similar - to excavate, decipher and bring to life the tantalizing remnants of a time we will never see...”

“The cultural center of Asia Minor, Pergamon boasted a vast library of 200,000 scrolls, a spectacular 10,000-seat theater, and a monumental Great Altar decorated with sculptures of the Olympi...”

“Many scholars are not used to perceiving natural knowledge expressed in mythological language. If the study of fossils was not mentioned by Aristotle or Thucydides, and it wasn't, then it ju...”

“I have discovered that if you take all the places of Greek myths, those specific locales turn out to be abundant fossil sites, but there is also a lot of natural knowledge embedded in those...”

“Pergamon, a prosperous city in western Anatolia, was fabled to have been founded by Hercules' son. Like many Hellenistic cities populated by Greeks who intermarried with indigenous people, P...”

“I just had a hunch that there might be kernels of truth or reality - scientific or historical reality - in stories about nature that are perpetuated in oral myths. That's how I got intereste...”

“The 'Iliad' covered only two months of the great ten-year war with Troy. At least six other epic poems preceded or continued the events in the 'Iliad', but they survive only as fragments.”

“Before I began concentrating on writing, in my free time I was an artist, making and selling etchings illustrating stories based on my readings in classical literature.”

“As early as 1681-82, a group of Abenakis had accompanied the French explorer La Salle on his historic voyage down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico. By 1700, many Abenaki and Iroquois In...”

“In April 2001, I visited Big Bone Lick State Park in Kentucky. The heaps of mastodon and other large skeletons that used to loom out of the brackish backwaters along the Ohio River here are...”

“Historical records show that Abenakis and other Natives encountered European explorers and traders in Canada looking for sources of ivory to compete with the Russian trade in Siberian fossil...”