What a “Safe and Dignified” Burial Means During a Pandemic
Bamileke community members typically mourn the deaths of loved ones through drumming, singing, and other collective rituals. Bobyphoto/Wikimedia Commons A few months into the pandemic, a …
Tag: Science
Partnering with Nonhumans for Climate Action
Arctic sea ice is breaking up and melting as the world’s atmosphere and waters warm. Julianne Yip Arctic sea ice is dying: Its extent, volume, and thickness have…
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…
Shadows, Ambiguity, and More-Than-Human Politics
My first glimpse of a peccary/javelina at one of my fieldsites. I am currently working on a manuscript exploring the ways that both literal and metaphorical shadows produce…
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…
When You Can’t Look Away: Seeing and Difference in American Medicine
Juliet When I interviewed her, Juliet was a third-year medical student and a dedicated member of her medical school’s interest groups on social justice. I interviewed her because…
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…
What If There Is Life on Venus?
In the throes of a pandemic that has underscored the fragility of human life on Earth, news has come of possible life on another planet, with the detection…
Early Humans Controlled Fire to Make Stone Tools
Researchers found these ancient flint blades in Israel’s Qesem Cave. Filipe Natalio Humanity’s creation and mastery of fire likely came in stages. Being able to reliably kindle this…
How to Write an Essay: A Guide for Anthropologists
[no-caption] FilippoBacci/GettyImages For academics used to the idea of “publish or perish,” writing may seem to be a well-practiced and even perfected skill. But trying out a new…
A Mammoth Find Near Mexico City
Archaeologists, restorers, and laborers have worked together to uncover thousands of late Pleistocene animal remains. Melitón Tapia, National Institute of Anthropology and History, Mexico …
When Colorblind Parenting Meets Anti-racism
Author Zeray Alemseged and his daughter attend a Black Lives Matter protest in Chicago. Peter Stamos I watched the uniformed White policeman kneel on the Black man’s neck…
Imagining the Neanderthal’s World
[no-caption] Denis Pobytov Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death, and Art by Rebecca Wragg Sykes. Bloomsbury Sigma, August (U.K.) & October (U.S.) 2020. Archaeology and genomics k…
Pain-Free Mouse, being ‘human,’ and more-than-human ethics
The Voigt-Kampff test as seen in Blade Runner (1982). All copyrights to film held by Warner Bros. In the opening scene of Blade Runner, a fictional diagnostic called…
Adventures with Peccaries: pt. 1
I am currently in the early stages of designing a multispecies project working with the Cofán, an Indigenous people of Amazonian Ecuador, and two species of peccaries (white-lipped…
Wildfire Archaeology and the Burning American West
As I type, the American West is ablaze with more than 100 devastating wildfires. Many of these are record-setting in both size and intensity. Several, including one in…
Pandemic Bakers Bring the Past to Life
Experimental archaeologist Farrell Monaco re-creates the baking techniques of ancient Romans to produce classic breads such as the panis quadratus. Farrell Monaco Around 2000 B.C., a bake…
Who Gets to Study Whom?
[no-caption] recep-bg/Getty Images About a decade ago, Chisomo Kalinga was in a bind. The medical humanities scholar, then a graduate student at King’s College London, was looking for…
The Problem With Abstract Threats
[no-caption] Angus Greig Everyone seems to have a story about the moment when the novel coronavirus pandemic stopped being an abstract problem “somewhere out there” and started being…
Upcoming Pilot Research
As of today I have submitted all of the required paperwork (IACUC, Occupational Health, Special Use Permit Application) . I will be collecting data on behavior and the…
Can an “Invasive Species” Earn the Right to Stay?
Macaques sit near Florida’s Silver River. Rachel Simmons/Flickr Steve Johnson never thought he’d have to worry about death threats, not in his line of work. Johnson is a…
What Is Anthropology?
The “study of humanity” applies to many fields, but anthropology looks at people in a unique way. Orbon Alija/Getty Images What is anthropology? The word “anthropology” literally means…
Destination Anthropocene: An Interview with Amelia Moore
Destination Anthropocene: Science and Tourism in The Bahamas By Amelia Moore, University of Rhode Island 216pp. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press § Colin Hoag spoke with Prof.…