Why the Camp Grant Massacre Matters Today
In 2015, members of the Apache Nation and their allies protested actions by the U.S. Congress that granted parts of Oak Flat to Resolution Copper Mining. Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty…
Tag: history
A West African Window Into Human Evolution
This article was originally published at The Conversation and has been republished under Creative Commons. Our species, Homo sapiens, rose in Africa some 300,000 years ago. The objects that…
Mental Health in Guyana’s Prisons: a direct legacy of the country’s colonial history?
This oped was written by our research team from the University of Leicester and University of Guyana. The mental health of those who live and work in Guyana’s…
Archaeology in the Ashes of Notre Dame
The Notre Dame fire was devastating but has opened the door to research on building materials now available for study. Aurélia Azéma/Laboratoire de Recherche des Monuments Historiques The…
Waste and Recycling in Cold War Eastern Europe
This short study analyzes the professional and political discussions of post-industrial and post-consumer waste, discards and recycling in state-socialist Hungary and connects these discourses with th…
Why Are Black People’s Remains in Museums?
Many U.S. museums, including those housed at Harvard University, collected and currently still store human remains. Smith Collection/Gado/Archive Photos via Getty Images This article was …
Black and Indigenous Futures
In this final webinar of the series, archaeologists, artists, and cultural theorists turn to questions of what’s next in the struggle for the recognition and promotion of Indigenous…
How Scientific Taxonomy Constructed the Myth of Race
[no-caption] Hiroshi Watanabe/Getty Images As a graduate assistant in biological anthropology at the University at Buffalo, I was tasked with curating the primate skeletal collection. The…
Preserving the Voices of the Antioch Colony
[no-caption] Maria Franklin The chronicles of ordinary Black Americans who lived and labored in Texas in the late 19th and early 20th centuries are largely unheralded. That’s especially…
Sutton Hoo’s Story Goes Deeper Than The Dig
The Sutton Hoo archaeological site revealed a treasure trove of Anglo-Saxon artifacts, including this iron helmet featuring a flying bird with dragon heads. Gary Todd/Flickr I first saw…
Academic Fictions: Lettre à France
English Version Paris, le 22 Décembre 2020 Chère France, Comme tu[i] le sais, j’ai assisté, sur tes recommandations, au Congrès International des Capitales du monde. Je dois admettre…
Stop Destroying African American Cemeteries
A gravestone in the Morningstar Tabernacle No. 88 Cemetery in Cabin John, Maryland. Craig G/Flickr In the late 19th century, a group of once-enslaved, free African Americans in…
How Imperialism Gave Us 2020
Violence and disease have long been intertwined in the Americas. Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images The world is caught in the grip of a deadly pandemic and yet another wave…
Time to Rethink Teeth
Tooth enamel growth starts before birth and continues until adult teeth are fully formed. Ksenia Chernaya/Pexels Four years ago, I found myself cataloguing some dusty containers of about…
Unsettling the Past: Radically Reimagining Archaeological Knowledge
For decades, Black and Indigenous archaeologists have rightfully called for a radical reimagining of how archaeology interprets and understands the past. The formulation of archaeologies by, for, and…
What Did the Stone Age Sound Like?
Archaeologists Joshua Kumbani (left) and Sarah Wurz (right) work at a site near the Klasies River in South Africa. Joshua Kumbani On South Africa’s southern coast, above the…
The Silence before the Silent Spring: Narratives of Modernity and the Silences around the Toxicity of Pesticide Use
Pesticide-use and the control of pest populations with synthetic chemicals are a subset of the history of the “modernization” of agricultural practices. This narrative positions pesticides as an…
“For the Welfare of the Whole People”: Heritage Stewardship in Indigenous and Black Communities
Local descendant communities and Indigenous nations continue to be at the center of heritage preservation efforts. While their methods are not always recognized by academic or governmental organizatio…
What Human Hair Reveals About Death’s Seasonality
A lock of hair from Edith Cook, a girl who died in 1876, offers a window into her death. Jelmer Eerkens Each wave of Edith Howard Cook’s reddish-blonde…
Ancient Beer Is Craft’s New Frontier
Ancient artwork, such as this relief in the Israel Beer Breweries museum in Ashkelon, Israel, offers clues to past beer production. Alamy One morning in May 2019, a…
A Journey of Interspecies Surprises
[no-caption] Karen Carr/National Park Service This article was originally published at The Conversation and has been repub lished under Creative Commons. Every parent knows the feeling….
When at Home, Bake as the Romans Baked
[no-caption] Angus Greig SAPIENS host Chip Colwell talks with experimental archaeologist Farrell Monaco about her work re-creating ancient Roman bread and what it means to reconnect with …
Fiona Murphy: Irish State to seal records of Mother and Baby Homes for 30 years: Urgent call for action
Tiny bodies, the remains of little children entombed without name or mercy, are uncovered in Tuam, a small Irish town in Co. Galway in the west of Ireland,…
An Archaeology of Marijuana
In June, the recreational and medical marijuana industry in my home state of Colorado reached US$199 million in monthly sales, a new record. The growth of this industry…