What Really Happened on Easter Island?
The famous statues of Easter Island have long been a source of awe and wonder. John Elk III/Alamy Photos This article was originally published at The Conversation and has been…
Tag: history
Book forum — Alondra Nelson’s The Social Life of DNA by Eugene Raikhel
In The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation After the Genome, Alondra Nelson traces the multiple ways in which genetic testing and related technologies have become…
#Review: The Force of Custom: Law and the Ordering of Everyday Life in Kyrgyzstan
The Force of Custom presents a strongly grounded ethnographic argument for the rethinking of ‘customary law’ as a category in the anthropology of law. How does an understanding…
Call for Proposals: #MeToo
As stories of sexual assault and misconduct continue to make news headlines, Anthropology News invites anthropologists to reflect on the #MeToo movement and this particular moment in sexual…
The Politics of Explaining Taiwan
Mail to Taiwan often gets sent to Thailand Imagine if, when writing a paper on Donald Trump, you had to start your paper by saying the following:1 The…
Encounters Unforeseen: A Bicultural Retelling of 1492 with Andrew Rowen
From Press Release: After 525 years, the traditional literature recounting the history of Columbus’s epic voyage and first encounters with Native Americans remains Eurocentric, focused principally—whe…
After Bukhara: Central Asian trading networks in Afghanistan and Beyond
By Magnus Marsden Several tombs of Afghanistan’s historic figures have been restored in recent years. In the Bagh-e Babur park – elegantly restored by the Aga Khan Foundation…
Sea Level Rise Threatens Archaeological Sites
Graves that are more than 400 years old in Jamestown, Virginia, lie near the first Protestant church in what later became the United States. Jamestown is just one…
American Mythic Origins, Thanksgiving, Mascots and the Oregon Trail
Over the last week I have taped at least two shows for the radio about my thoughts about Thanksgiving. Suddenly everyone wants to know what “Natives” think about…
How Archaeologists Uncover History With Trees
In the fall of 1282, a young carpenter went to his favorite stand of juniper trees in southwestern Colorado. That stand contained a large number of tall trees…
Digging Into the Myth of Timbuktu
Sometime around 1 o’clock in the afternoon on April 19, 1828, René Caillié emerged from the dark hull of the slave ship that he had boarded weeks before.…
The Untold Story of Japan’s First People
The Ainu, the Indigenous people of Japan, have fought Japanese domination for centuries. As this century unfolds, their efforts are finally paying off. Chris Willson/Alamy Stock Photo Thi…
Shifting Perspectives: The Man in Africa Hall at the American Museum of Natural History at 50
The American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in NY circa 2000. Photo from Wikimedia Commons, the free media repository. The “Man in Africa Hall” at the American Museum…
Toxicity by Danny Hoffman
1. Toxicity names forces for which there is no remediation. Ibrahim is a tour guide in the Senegalese capital, Dakar. His carefully crafted tour takes you around the…
Benzene, PCBs, and industrial chemistry: A narrative bibliography
How the Benzene Tree Polluted the World in The Atlantic by Rebecca Altman, is a narrative exploration of the rise of organic chemistry, and the industrialization of the branch of chemistry…
The Restitution of the Dead
On the 7th of September 2017, Syrian national Mouaz Al-Nass, a singer and drummer, recorded and then uploaded a video of himself reciting the adhan, the Islamic call…
Were Peace Medals the Price of Loyalty?
Gift-giving is common to all human societies; it’s one of the behaviors that makes us human. We give gifts to celebrate holidays, birthdays, and weddings, not to mention…
#Humanitarianism(s) in socialist Red Cross societies
The international Red Cross family built up a network of humanitarian aiders that one cannot pass over when thinking about 20th century humanitarianism. This article will cover a…
Review of Richard S. Newman’s “Love Canal: A Toxic History from Colonial Times to the Present”
Newman’s activists press for environmental change imbedded with critiques of capitalism and industrialization, racial injustice, and its global implications. This view distorts the complexity of histo…
Critical Histories, Activist Futures: Science, Medicine and Racial Violence by Sarah Pickman
A Reframed (and Reflexive) Conference Report Organized and Edited by Tess Lanzarotta and Sarah M. Pickman After a conference ends – after the last paper coffee cup…
The forgotten story of how a toxic spill and a book launched Britain’s environmental movement
When in 1963 some farm animals in the parish of Smarden in Kent became sick and died, suspicions fell on a nearby pesticide factory run by a division…
How the Folsom Point Became an Archaeological Icon
The Folsom spear point, which was excavated in 1927 near the small town of Folsom, New Mexico, is one of the most famous artifacts in North American archaeology,…