Visiting California’s Historic Missions
Summer 2015:
By Gayle Keck
It was 1782, and an earthquake had ripped through Alta California. "In Santa Clara, it broke a bottle of brandy," Father Junípero Serra noted, "which the poor Fathers there were jealously...
Finding The Pilgrims
Fall 2017: By Rachael Moeller Gorman.
On a sticky day last June, archaeologist David Landon peered into a rectangular, three-foot-deep excavation unit on the edge of an old cemetery. “That layer they’re coming down on,...
Rock Art Revelations?
Summer 2014: When Larry Loendorf decided to hunt for ancient rock art on the southern Great Plains, he went about it methodically. Loendorf, an archaeologist with Sacred Sites Research in Albuquerque, New Mexico, made...
Did The Clovis People Have Neighbors?
2015: By Marcia Hill Gossard.
Loren Davis was standing with a historic photo in his hand looking at the south side of a canyon along the Salmon River in western Idaho. He was trying to...
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...
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....
A Tale Of Two Cities: Religion In Ancient Mexico
Fall 2016: By Kristin Ohlson.
During the dry season, when they weren’t tending their crops, thousands of people left their villages in what is now the Río Verde Valley in the Mexican state of Oaxaca...
Life On The Frontier
Fall 2017: By Linda Vaccariello.
A few miles east of the narrow gap in the Cumberland Mountains where Daniel Boone and his companions blazed a trail into Kentucky, Maureen Meyers is puzzling over another group...
Book Review- Lives in Ruins: Archaeologists and the Seductive Lure of Human Rubble
Lives in Ruins: Archaeologists and the Seductive Lure of Human Rubble
By Marilyn Johnson
(Harper Collins, 2014; 288 pgs., illus., $26 cloth, $10 ebook; www.harpercollins.com)
Author Marilyn Johnson assumes that everyone in the sandbox wanted to grow...
Colonial Williamsburg Uncovered
Fall 2018: By Paula Neely.
Peering down into the corner of a dig site in Williamsburg, the eighteenth-century capital of Virginia, archaeologist Mark Kostro watched a field school student scrape away dark gray soil from...