Museum of Prehistoric Thera

This guide to the Museum of Prehistoric Thera in Santorini opens with archaeologist Spyridon Marinatos's death on the site he had spent seven years excavating, and traces the Bronze Age eruption that buried a town beneath ash sometime between 1627 and 1600 BC. It follows Marinatos's hunch, published in 1939, that the disaster inspired Plato's Atlantis, and the objects unearthed from beneath the ash: a gold ibex figurine folded away in cloth, and frescoes of blue monkeys and women dressed for ritual, their colors still vivid after roughly three and a half thousand years underground.