Current Issue

Fall 2018 Sneak Peek By Tamara Jager Stewart. 15,000 Year-Old Pre-Clovis Sites Cluster at Wakulla Springs, Florida         Are These Evidence of Mastodon Kill Sites? Great to see old friend and Paleo-Indian archaeologist Dr. Andy Hemmings as I...

The most recent issue of American Archaeology Magazine, SUMMER 2018, is now available! COVER: Kin Kletso is one of Chaco Canyon’s great houses. Evidence indicates that gambling could have played an important role in...

Summer 2018: By Alexandra Witze. Navajo oral histories tell of a Great Gambler who had a profound effect on Chaco Canyon, the Ancestral Puebloan capital located in what is now northwestern New Mexico. His name...

Summer 2018: By David Malakoff In the fall of 2005, Hurricane Wilma, a powerful storm packing 120-mile-an-hour winds, smashed into the Ten Thousand Islands, a fifty-mile-long maze of mangrove-ringed islets on the Florida’s southwestern coast....

Summer 2018: By Andrea Cooper. We rounded a corner in the Rankin Museum of American Heritage in Ellerbe, North Carolina (population 986), when my husband burst out laughing with delight.  Behind glass cases is a...

Summer 2018: By Wayne Curtis. In the first half of the first millennium A.D., Teotihuacan in central Mexico was the largest city in the western hemisphere. At its peak, it had about 125,000 residents and...

Summer 2018: By Linda Vaccariello. Arlen Chase’s recent field season at Caracol, the large Maya site in western Belize that he and his wife, archaeologist Diane Zaino Chase, have been investigating for more than thirty...

The most recent issue of American Archaeology Magazine, SPRING 2018, is now available! COVER: Researchers carefully position a 3-D scanner on the fragile steps of Copán’s Hieroglyphic Stairway. The scans are used to reproduce...

Spring 2018: By Gayle Keck. In old Western movies, Indians were invariably depicted galloping into the scene whooping and streaked with war paint. At least one aspect of that cliché is true. Native Americans did...

Spring 2018: By Elizabeth Lunday. In 1885, when British scholar Alfred Percival Maudslay and his wife Anne Cary Morris Maudslay first explored the ruins of the Maya city Copán, Morris Maudslay described the unexcavated site...

Spring 2018: By Alexandra Witze. From the Olmec to the Maya to the Aztec, ballgames were one of the defining activities of Mesoamerican cultures. Beginning some time before 1200 B.C., competitors kicked and whacked rubber...

Spring 2018: By David Malakoff. When Russian fur traders began exploring southwestern Alaska in the early 1800s, they met native Yup’ik people who told horrific tales of violence and revenge. In one common but unverified...

Spring 2018: By Julian Smith. In 2016, Bonnie Clark of the University of Denver was running an archaeology field school at the Granada War Relocation Center, a Japanese American internment camp in southeast Colorado, when a...

As editor, I chose these amazing archaeology stories from the pages of American Archaeology magazine because each of them stood out for 2017 in some way—from the highly-disputed contention that humans occupied southern California...

The most recent issue of American Archaeology Magazine, WINTER 2017, is now available! COVER: Shumla researchers Jerod Roberts (on ladder) and Karen Steelman use a portable x-ray fluorescence instrument to identify the elemental composition...