Current Issue

Current Issue

Shedding Light on the Pleistocene Epoch: Hoyo Negro project adds new layers of information...

By Paula Neely In 2007, in a jungle north of the city and Maya Center of Tulum in Quintana Roo, Mexico, a team of cave divers entered a sinkhole, or cenote, and began exploring a...

Engineered by Ancestors: New research shows extensive networks of terraces, drainage ditches, and ceremonial...

By David Malakoff It helps to carry a machete — and an umbrella — if you are doing archaeology in Sāmoa. The South Pacific archipelago, which includes six islands that comprise the United States territory...

Protecting a Ritual Landscape: Avi Kwa Ame National Monument preserves half a million acres

By Tamara Jager Stewart Standing in the shadow of the jagged Avi Kwa Ame peaks looking west, the vast, complex desert landscape holds deep canyons with natural springs and petroglyphs, rare grassland habitats, ancient Joshua...

Modern technology helps preserve the ancient past with 3D modeling, printing

By Julian Smith In May, a film production company and deep-sea mapping company announced that they had completed the first full-scale scan of the wreck of the Titanic. The 3D digital model of the wreck...

Project Archaeology program helps students discover the past and shape the future

By Elizabeth Lunday Leah Guenther had a problem. After several years teaching English in a Chicago high school, she took a new position in 2019 teaching American history and civics to seventh and eighth graders....

Podcasting is a Digital Outreach, Educational Tool for Archaeologists

By Gayle Keck For millennia, tales have been told around the fire – a tradition archaeologists likely reflect on as they sift through ancient fire pits. But these days, the new campfires are our smartphones,...

Read Highlights from the Fall 2022 edition of American Archaeology Magazine

Cover Photo from the article "Understanding The Lead Rush" - Syracuse University student wearing mosquito netting to ward off gnats takes notes. | Credit: Joshua Ives. The latest edition of American Archaeology Magazine will be...

Counterintuiitive Preservation

By David Malakoff Archaeologists routinely raise shipwrecks from their watery graves. But on a sparkling spring day in Alexandria, Virginia, a team that included two scuba divers was working in reverse: carefully sinking pieces of...

Meadowcroft Revisited

By Julian Smith In June of this year, James Adovasio of the Heinz History Center in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, returned to a site he has been investigating since the end of the Vietnam War. The Meadowcroft...

A Pioneering Researcher

By Tamara Jager Stewart The late Wendy Ashmore was one of the leading theoreticians in Maya archaeological research. She was born in Los Angles in 1948, and she earned her B.A. in anthropology in 1969...

Many Unhappy Returns

By Mike Toner The admonition to “leave nothing but footprints, take nothing but pictures” is as familiar to national parks’ visitors as admission fees. So, it seems, is the urge to take more than pictures—a...

Understanding The Lead Rush

By Elizabeth Lunday In 1830, a woman named Susan Gratiot received a letter from her father. Gratiot (pronounced GRASH-it) lived in a two-room log cabin with her husband and several young children in a mining...

Previous Issues

Getting ready for the final photos of the excavation pit at the Paleo through Archaic period Wakulla Springs Lodge site.

Sneak Peak: 15,000 Year-Old Pre-Clovis at Wakulla Springs

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 the lives of Chacoans. CREDIT: James Q. Jacobs

American Archaeology Summer 2018 is Here!

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...
Gambling artifacts have been found at Chetro Ketl, a great house in Chaco Canyon. Credit: ANDREW KEARNS

When The Gambler Came To Chaco

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...
This illustration of numerous shell mounds at the Turner River Shellworks site in Ten Thousand Islands, Florida, is based on archaeological evidence.Credit: MARTIN PATE, COURTESY MARGO SCHWADRON, NPS

Rethinking Shell Middens

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....
Cherokee lifestyles and history are on display at Oconaluftee Indian Village. Credit: EBCI DESTINATION MARKETING

A Tour Of Western North Carolina’s Rich Archaeology & History

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...

Rich Man, Poor Man

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...
This LiDAR image of the center of Caracol reveals pyramids, plazas, agricultural terraces, roadways, and other features. Credit: COURTESY OF ARLEN AND DIANE CHASE, CARACOL ARCHAEOLOGICAL PROJECT, UNIVERSITY OF NEVADA, LAS VEGAS.

A Revolutionary Technology

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 the stairway. Credit: Barbara Fash

American Archaeology Magazine Spring 2018 is Here!

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...
This portrait painted in 1710 shows the extensively tattooed Mohawk leader Sa Ga Yeath Qua Pleth Tow. Credit: Mezzotint by John Simon, after painting by John Verlest

Discovering The Archaeology Of Tattooing

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...
COVER: Researchers carefully position a 3-D scanner on the fragile steps of Copán’s Hieroglyphic Stairway. The scans are used to reproduce the stairway. Credit: Barbara Fash

The 3D Past Reproduced

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...
An artist’s depiction of the Hohokam gathered at one of their ballcourts. Credit: Artwork by Rob Ciaccio, Courtesy Archaeology Southwest.

The Mystery Of Hohokam Ballcourts

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...
This aerial photo of the Nunalleq site was taken by a drone in 2017. Credit: Sven Haakanson

The Story Of Nunalleq

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...
Tooru Nakahira (left) and Anna Shishido (center), two former internees at Amache, point to a diagram of the barracks where they were once confined. The barracks have been reconstructed (background) based on historical and archaeological evidence. Credit: Nancy Ukai

A Case For Collaboration

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...

American Archaeology’s Ten Most Interesting Articles Of 2017

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...
American Archaeology Magazine winter 2017 is Here!

American Archaeology Magazine Winter 2017 is Here!

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...