Ancient

Three artists working in various natural and synthetic materials but with a common ground in recollections of ancient ritual constitute the exhibit opening Wednesday at the Main Street Gallery in Annapolis. Ron Artman's stoneware vessels with textured surfaces recall ancient warrior rituals and bear Asian, African and Middle Eastern titles. Ann Congdon incorporates building artifacts and high-tech materials in her "Archifacts," combining references to the ancient and modern. Sheila Miller's works combine clay with antique beads and metals to suggest the mythical past.

BLAST OFF FOR WOODSTOCK ELEMENTARY SCHOOL Congratulations to Woodstock Elementary School, Woodstock, Ky., www.4Kids.org's Cool School of the Month. Join the Woodstock Wildcats at their virtual school at www.pulaski.net / wes. The site is maintained by fifth-grade teacher and technology coordinator, Mr. Joey Simmons. You'll find excellent class pages highlighting the work of these talented students. Also, the school's entire library collection is cataloged online. Woodstock features a Student Technology Leadership Program in which students can become certified to be peer technology tutors.

The Clinton-Lazio debate was about what you expect when Wellesley plays Vassar. Archeologist claim to have discovered an ancient flood site, but Noah got there first. One theory is you improve the schools by closing them, which is open to dispute. If Europe came to halt, so would the Gulf oil fields. Cheer up. You don't have to watch the Olympics live before dawn.

Since it opened nearly four months ago, some 72,000 people have purchased tickets to the exhibition Eternal Egypt: Masterworks of Ancient Art from the British Museum, making it the third most popular show ever presented by the Walters Art Museum. Now, as the show approaches its final day on Sunday, the museum has announced it is extending its normal visiting hours tonight and Saturday to 8 p.m. in order to allow as many people as possible to view the exhibition before it closes. The extended hours will be in effect despite the possibility of a snow emergency this weekend.

MUCH CONTROVERSY has surrounded the attempt of Baltimore and other school districts to infuse African material in a curriculum designed historically by and for whites. Books that might help you make up your own mind about the so-called "Afrocentric curriculum" are as close as your library or bookstore. These two might be of interest:* THE AFRICAN ORIGIN OF CIVILIZATION: MYTH OR REALITY? by Cheikh Anta Diop. The late Professor Diop was a Senegalese historian and physicist. This book is a compilation of two -- "Black Nations and Culture," published in 1955, and "Ancient Black Civilizations: Myth or Reality," published in 1967.

Speak the name of Egypt, and myriad associations come to mind: the pyramids, the pharaohs, the sphinx, the hieroglyphics, the gold. Speak the name of ancient Nubia, Egypt's neighbor, and chances are nothing comes to mind.That nothing reflects a major gap in our education, for between 3,000 B.C. and the first centuries A.D., precisely the period of Egypt's greatness, Nubia was an important presence in the ancient world. It had a well-developed civilization and an art which, though influenced by Egypt's, was independent and in some ways more creative.

Broadway, Virginia. -- As human numbers and human activities erupt toward a collision with biospheric limits, our ancient spiritual traditions appear to offer us uncertain guidance. The U.N. Conference on Population and Development in Cairo offered us an alarming spectacle: representatives of two of the ,, world's largest religious groups -- Islam and Roman Catholicism -- fighting in God's name to block the work of the conference.While scriptures and dogmas are used to hold our understanding in place, history can bring radically new challenges.

VALLEY OF THE KINGS, Egypt -- Archaeologist Kent Weeks crawled on his belly to a doorway at the back of a huge and dark chamber. His lantern beam stabbed into air undisturbed for 3,000 years."

In Guatemala City, I asked the upper-class teen-ager if sheknew any Maya people."No," she answered in English. "I don't think I've ever even seen any."She was, of course, mistaken: At every bus stop in the capital, Mayan men and women stand waiting for their rides to work. Yet the teen-ager's ignorance somehow was logical. Her ancestors, the Spanish conquistadors, had wiped out nine of every 10 Mayan Indians they had found in Guatemala in the 16th century. Four hundred years later, her people, called "Ladinos," run a government that does little more than the minimum to improve the lot of the surviving indigenes, whom they call simply "Indios" and who constitute more than 40 percent of the population.

He doesn't much look like it now, at 85, what with the thinning hair, stooped shoulders and sweat pants hitched up nearly chest-high beneath his British prep school blazer. And, safari suit notwithstanding, Basil Saffer didn't much look like it then, either: bespectacled, slight Englishman that he was, three cameras dangling from his neck as he roamed ancient lands in a 20-year quest for treasure - or at least what he viewed as such. "The Indiana Jones of Brick" they called him, and some still do - a testament not to Harrison Ford-like looks, not to particularly swashbuckling adventures, but to Saffer's determined and meticulous efforts to research, seek out, obtain and preserve ancient brick.