the tallest mounds outside of the acropolis surround a central courtyard. the largest mounds date to the time following the death of 18 rabbit. surrounding the large mounds are smaller ones. they are almost unnoticeable. digging into the small mounds, the team discovers low stone foundations once covered with pole and thatched houses. david webster. webster: there's a lot of this cobbled masonry with stuff taken right out of the river. the rooms are small. there's a whole string of these that go around the entire group here. apparently there was a concentric circle of them around the entire elite compound. these things have sleeping benches just like domestic residences usually do at copan. they have plenty of occupational debris, all sorts of trash -- broken pots, obsidian, grinding stones. there are burials associated with these buildings. in other words, these look just like domestic habitations. keach: they were houses, and if copan were still a chiefdom, no one could have lived in houses much bigger than these, not even the chiefs. there would have bee

pericles used the resources or, some contemporaries argued, abused them to rebuild the acropolis andrown it with the parthenon. the bold simplicity of the building, with its strictly harmonized repetition of the most basic geometric shapes, has had an unparalleled influence on the world's architecture. the creators of the parthenon, including the sculptor phidias and the architect ictinus, adapted the traditional temple form, but refined it. they created an impression of subtlety and lightness, despite the building's scale and the massiveness of its marble surface. the sculptural decorations employed the skills of hundreds of craftsmen, setting a new standard in art. it took less than a decade to erect this monument to athenian pride. it was built on the ruins of a temple destroyed by the persians, partly glorifying the greeks' victory over their greatest enemy. to their subsequent cost, the athenians took more than their share of the benefits of persian defeat. they may have been democratic, but to fellow greeks like the corinthians and spartans, they appeared arrogant and domineeri

for a public square was very precious to us, going back to the address in athens below the acropolis. it was awful physical place, the forum in rome, capitol hill, westminster and so on but senate shifted from being a physical place to being a metaphor, op-ed pages in the new york times, that was the public square, but now, take things like the responses to the danish cartoon, reagan's book. in the age of the internet, went on speaking to the world, we can be heard by the world and the world can organize its response so the idea of public squares become more urgent than ever and will lead to the gatt deal oppression in countries like china or the sectarian violence we see in the middle east war in nigeria or pakistan, this issue is global the urgent, not a pollyanna. as i see it you have the united states, which for 2-1/3 centuries, the true remedy. however as a european i am still european it is the most nearly perfect solution in history so the framers got raise badly wrong at the beginning, religious liberty almost nearly right from the beginning, america's record is better than al