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...

A Snapshot of Subsistence and Rebellion

By Kelley Berliner VERMONT | The Egg Mountain site consists of a hillside settlement that was likely occupied from the late 1700s until approximately 1820. At least a dozen cellar holes, combined with stone walls...

See what’s coming in the Summer Issue of American Archaeology

Get a preview of the summer issue of American Archaeology Magazine HERE!  Read article excerpts, book reviews, and more!  TAC Members should receive a copy in the mail soon!  Non-members can find a copy on...

Identifying Good Government

By Michael Bawaya In August of 1970, the renowned anthropologist Robert Carneiro published a paper titled “A Theory of the Origin of the State” in the journal Science. The paper explored the theories that had...

The Altered States Of America

By Gayle Keck The present is catching up to the past. For millennia, Native Americans have entered altered states of consciousness for social, ceremonial, recreational, and medicinal reasons. Now, in modern times, substances that induce...