Adrienne Mayor

Adrienne Mayor is a research scholar in classics and the history of science at Stanford, working on what she calls folk science: how pre-scientific cultures read the natural world, and how those readings hardened into myth. The First Fossil Hunters argued that griffins and giants began as encounters with dinosaur bones, effectively founding the field of geomythology. Greek Fire, Poison Arrows, and Scorpion Bombs traced chemical and biological warfare back to antiquity, and The Poison King, on Rome’s enemy Mithradates, was a National Book Award finalist. She treats ancient sources as evidence rather than ornament.