Stone Points to a Connected World
I was sitting in the brightly lit workroom at the Pitt Rivers Museum on a frigid day in November 2010, when I opened one of the bags that…
Tag: history
Reconciliation’s Waste: heritage and waste in post-apartheid South Africa
Portable toilets and urine on colonial era statues are reconciliations ruins, the things leftover that heritage helps to frame but yet cannot fully explain. As matter that remains…
Thompson on Sills, ‘Toxic War: The Story of Agent Orange’
The use of the defoliant Agent Orange by the United States is one of the most controversial actions of the Vietnam War. InToxic War: The Story of Agent…
Environmental historians get wasted: ASEH conference report
What’s my take on this torrent of waste at ASEH? I think it really signals a maturation of a second generation of waste scholarship in environmental history that…
The state of indigenous language and culture in Canada
The Canadian government’s program of cultural genocide in residential schools included the erasure of aboriginal languages. In Undoing Linguicide (an hour long audio documentary for CBC Radio’s Ideas…
Skeleton Sex Pots
The Moche, one of the world’s great ancient civilizations, occupied the northern coast of Peru from roughly A.D. 100 to A.D. 800. They produced beautiful ceramic vessels; hundreds…
The Great Chocolate Migration
Last fall, I was sipping Mexican chocolate at a chic little Singapore café. It was a local branch of a New York–based chain, which was started in Israel…
The Mystery of the Corpse in the Burlap Sack
On July 28, 1889, a couple drove a carriage down a remote road about a dozen miles south of Lyon, France. Michel Eyraud, a middle-aged conman, and his…
Ladders to Other Worlds
As a symbol of cultural continuity, the wooden pueblo ladder connects its users to their ancestors, the universe, their spiritual beliefs, and one another. Pueblo Indian communities in…
History Lost to Sea
On a bright and buggy day in July 2014, Max Friesen, whiskered and encased in denim and Gore-Tex, inched across a stretch of tundra overlooking the East Channel…
Cold Enough for Ya?
Every winter, on either the first or second cold snap, I hear the question “Cold enough for ya?” as I get on the bus, exit the Metro, or…
Parting Words
I was fascinated to learn from an October 2015 article in the Independent newspaper the little-known fact that British “prime ministers leave secret instructions for nuclear missile submarine…
Tim Hannigan’s ‘A Brief History of Indonesia’
I’m in two minds about Tim Hannigan’s A Brief History of Indonesia (2015). Part of my brain is cruelly happy that Hannigan’s book is so deficient in covering…
Tim Hannigan’s ‘A Brief History of Indonesia’
I’m in two minds about Tim Hannigan’s A Brief History of Indonesia (2015). Part of my brain is cruelly happy that Hannigan’s book is so deficient in covering…
Tim Hannigan’s ‘A Brief History of Indonesia’
I’m in two minds about Tim Hannigan’s A Brief History of Indonesia (2015). Part of my brain is cruelly happy that Hannigan’s book is so deficient in covering…
Why We Must Talk About Race
I grew up a black woman in urban Los Angeles during the age of the civil rights movement. “Race” was all around me, woven into the fabric of…
Making Love—and Nations
Staunchly opposed to marriages outside his nation, John Ross, the principal chief of the Cherokee from the late 1820s until his death in 1866, helped introduce restrictive laws…
The Darkest Truths
In 2007, Caroline Sturdy Colls—then a 21-year-old University of Birmingham graduate student—made her first visit to the Nazi death camp at Treblinka, Poland. As a prospective forensic-archaeology scho…
Past Imperfect
Let’s start with some old dirt. Who were the first people to arrive in North America more than 12,000 years ago? Did these intrepid explorers originate in Siberia…
Conflict on the Plains
The images in this series represent my interpretation of the struggle of Native Americans throughout the Plains Indian Wars between 1855 and 1890. During this period, the U.S.…
Southern Provisions
Ellen Messer Tufts University Shields, David S. (2015) Southern Provisions. The Creation and Revival of a Cuisine. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Did you ever wonder where Carolina…
Joe Trapido: Epochs and continents: Potlatch, articulation, and violence in the Congo
This post is part of the Modes of Production feature moderated and edited by Patrick Neveling and Joe Trapido. From the sixteenth century onward, European trading networks grew…
Anthropologist in the Cane
A great of Caribbean anthropology, Professor Sidney Mintz has passed away… Last week one of the greats of North American anthropology, Prof Sidney Mintz, passed away. Mintz was…
Anthropologist in the Cane
A great of Caribbean anthropology, Professor Sidney Mintz has passed away… Last week one of the greats of North American anthropology, Prof Sidney Mintz, passed away. Mintz was…