Current Issue
Current Issue
New Insights Into Mississippian Iconography | American Archaeology
By Gayle Keck |
The twenty-first century is awash in symbols, from religious images to branding; from road signs to emojis. Now, imagine that we had no written language to add context or meaning to...
Remembering The Battle Of Blair Mountain | American Archaeology
By James Stout |
On the morning of August 30th, 1921, John Wilburn set off up Blair Mountain, in West Virginia, with two of his sons and a group of seventy or so miners. Earlier...
The Search For Sarabay | American Archaeology
By Stephenie Livingston |
The sparsely populated barrier island of Big Talbot looks much like it did when Europeans first met the local Mocama-speaking Timucua people nearly 450 years ago. Keith Ashley, a University of...
A New Take On Maryland’s Oldest City | American Archaeology
By David Malakoff |
The nearly 400-year-old silver coin was, Stephanie Stevens recalled, “the most memorable artifact I’ve ever found.” Last fall, the young archaeologist was scooping dirt at a dig in St. Mary’s City, Maryland’s...
The Purpose Of Archaeology | American Archaeology
By Elizabeth Lunday |
Archaeologists study the past, but they live in the present—and 2021 is a particularly tumultuous present. Americans have endured political conflict, violence, protests, and a global pandemic. Multiple social justice movements...
Changing Times | American Archaeology
By Julian Smith |
When European explorers and missionaries began arriving in the Great Lakes region in the sixteenth century, they found groups including the Huron (also known as the Wendat) and Iroquois (also known...
Google Maps for Travelers | American Archaeology
By David Malakoff |
For more than a century, archaeologists have debated why ancient Native Americans built the stout stone towers that sit high above the floor of Nine Mile Canyon, a serpentine gulch in...
A Tour Of The Effigy Mounds Of The Upper Midwest | American Archaeology
By Sara Millhouse |
Native Americans built earthen mounds across much of the Eastern half of the United States, but effigy mounds are largely found in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, and Illinois. On this tour, you’ll...
Life After Dark | American Archaeology
By Zach Zorich |
At sunset, when the light drains from a landscape, it forces a change in perspective that archaeologists have not often considered. How would the places and people they study have been...
A Proponent of Provocative Ideas | American Archaeology
By Tamara Jager Stewart
| Cover Image: Stanford examines a bison bone found on the surface of Late Pleistocene-age peat deposits in southern Colorado in June, 2000. Credit: Pegi Jodry |
Since the renowned Paleo-Indian archaeologist...
The Tale Of The Textiles | American Archaeology
By Tamara Jager Stewart
This is an article excerpt from the Spring 2021 edition of American Archaeology Magazine. Become a member of The Archaeological Conservancy for your complimentary subscription.
Perched above Beaver Creek and the fertile...
Rediscovering Tenochtitlan | American Archaeology
By Rodrigo Pérez Ortega
This is an article excerpt from the Spring 2021 edition of American Archaeology Magazine. Become a member of The Archaeological Conservancy for your complimentary subscription.
Raúl Barrera Rodríguez and his team had...
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...