Current Issue
Current Issue
SUMMER 2019 | Spirituality And Big Data
The following is an article excerpt from the Summer 2019 Issue of American Archaeology Magazine. Become a member to subscribe and read the full issue!
By Gayle Keck
Cover Photo: This small ceramic jar from Cahokia is...
SUMMER 2019 | Glen Canyon Then and Now
The following is an article excerpt from the Summer 2019 Issue of American Archaeology Magazine. Become a member to subscribe and read the full issue!
By David Malakoff
Cover Photo: Erik Stanfield of the National Park...
SUMMER 2019 | Touring Ancient Art Museums
The following is an article excerpt from the Summer 2019 Issue of American Archaeology Magazine. Become a member to subscribe and read the full issue!
By Tamara Jager Stewart
The Southwest is world-renowned for its abundance...
SUMMER 2019 | Friends, Followers, And Retweets
The following is an article excerpt from the Summer 2019 Issue of American Archaeology Magazine. Become a member to subscribe and read the full issue!
By Elizabeth Lunday
More than a thousand years ago, women living...
SUMMER 2019 | Gone Missing
The following is an article from the Summer 2019 Issue of American Archaeology Magazine. Become a member to subscribe and read the full issue!
By Wayne Curtis
COVER IMAGE: 1978 Moundville excavation | Credit: Vin Steponaitis
In...
SPRING 2019 PREVIEW | Harvard’s History Lesson
The following is an excerpt from the Spring 2019 Issue of American Archaeology Magazine.
By Elaine K. Howley
COVER IMAGE: The excavators have recovered numerous pipes. This white clay pipe with a partially broken stem dates to...
SPRING 2019 PREVIEW | Righting Wrongs At Effigy Mounds
The following is an excerpt from the Spring 2019 Issue of American Archaeology Magazine.
By Julian Smith
COVER IMAGE: Effigy Mounds’ officials bought so many new pieces of construction equipment that a shed was built to hold...
SPRING 2019 PREVIEW | Disappearing Digital Data
The following is an excerpt from the Spring 2019 Issue of American Archaeology Magazine.
By Alexandra Witze
COVER IMAGE: Archaeologists with Far Western Anthropological Research Group, Inc. collect data from a Paleo-Indian site in Cave Valley, Nevada ...
SPRING 2019 PREVIEW | A Glimpse Of The First Americans
The following is an excerpt from the Spring 2019 Issue of American Archaeology Magazine.
By David Malakoff
COVER IMAGE: A researcher works at Trail Creek Cave 2 in Alaska, where DNA was extracted from the tooth of...
SPRING 2019 PREVIEW | His Life As A Field Archaeologist
The following is an excerpt from the Spring 2019 Issue of American Archaeology Magazine.
By Tamara Jager Stewart
COVER IMAGE: Wendorf poses in front of an excavation trench at a salvage project in New Mexico in...
Dealing with the Funding Crisis
Winter 2018-19: By David Malakoff
In the summer of 1894, archaeologist Ernest Volk of Harvard University was excavating a promising prehistoric site in New Jersey’s Delaware River Valley when he hit an unyielding obstacle: money....
The Other Bonaparte
Winter 2018-19: By Gayle Keck
Napoleon should have listened to his brother. Joseph Bonaparte, the defeated emperor's older sibling, had offered to trade places as the English closed in on them in 1815, hoping their...
Previous Issues
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...
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...
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...
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....
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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!
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...