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...
Horses And People
By Julian Smith
One of the most enduring icons of the American West is a Native American rider on horseback, galloping into battle or chasing down a herd of buffalo. For all of its cultural...
The Maya Collapse Revisited
By Mike Toner
Ever since explorers John Stephens and Frederick Catherwood stumbled out of the Yucatán Peninsula’s jungles two centuries ago with headline-making tales of crumbling stone ruins, scholars have struggled to explain what happened...
Sacred Objects From The Heavens
By Tamara Jager Stewart
The Bloody Basin meteorite was in the Red Creek Ruin in the Tonto National Forest when it burned down around 1385. It’s not known if the ruin’s occupants venerated the meteorite....
Racing For A Purpose
By David Malakoff
Conducting field research on Arizona’s Perry Mesa, a rugged wedge of desert some forty miles north of Phoenix known for its dazzling rock art and ancient ruins perched atop spectacular cliffs, can...