Above our heads, the lights are going out. Instead of thousands of stars in the heavens, artificial light pollution means that in today’s cities we see only a few dozen. A recent…

In the summer of 1977, on a field trip in northern Patagonia, the American archaeologist Tom Dillehay made a stunning discovery. Digging by a creek in a nondescript scrubland called…

An underreported aspect of the climate crisis is that archaeological sites, cultural landscapes, biodiversity, and distributions of flora and fauna—much of which modern people will…

In some sense, Lee Rogers Berger found himself and the drowning woman at the same time. The Georgia native had just returned home after dropping out of Vanderbilt University, where…

In November 2016, a swastika was painted on an elementary school in my Denver, Colorado, neighborhood of Stapleton. As an archaeologist who specializes in identifying the remains of…

Some 48 kilometers north of Mexico City, in the Basin of Mexico, towers the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacán. This massive 71-meter high structure makes you feel like a speck of…

When I started learning about the Ice Age, the oldest known cave art dated to about 35,000 years ago—now it’s closer to 41,000 years. And while they seemed like a fairly intelligent…

In some sense, Lee Rogers Berger found himself and the drowning woman at the same time. The Georgia native had just returned home after dropping out of Vanderbilt University, where…

Who will say ‘corpse’ to his vivid cast?
 Who will say ‘body’ to his opaque repose? —Seamus Heaney, “Grauballe Man” (1975) One Saturday in the spring of 1950, brothers…

In August 1856, limestone quarry workers blasting out the entrance to the Feldhofer grotto in the Neander Valley of west-central Germany found a set of skeletal remains. Assuming the…