Archaeology

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Ancient Maya Inequality – Compact Section

How unequal were ancient Maya societies and what lessons can we learn from them about our own unequal world? Modern inequality metrics often focus on monetary wealth and financial statements, but other methods exist and inequality can manifest itself in multiple forms.…

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Greyhounds of Late Iron Age Sweden

In Late Iron Age Scandinavia, roughly 500-1100 CE, increasing numbers of people started going to the grave with animal companions. As a general rule, the higher a person’s station in society, the more animals they were likely to take with them, and in a higher diversity of species.…

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Looking Forward to the End of ‘Digital Archaeology’

Part of a series of blog posts celebrating the 10th anniversary of the journal Advances in Archaeological Practice. It may come as somewhat of a surprise that the Digital Reviews Editor for Advances in Archaeological Practice is calling for an end to the concept of ‘Digital Archaeology’.…

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Monico Origins, a Bayesian Story

The acknowledgments section of the Monico Bayesian paper expresses gratitude to “Deb Nichols, John Watanabe, Sophie Nichols-Watanabe, Robert (Bob) L. Kelly, and the Dartmouth Coach for inspiring and facilitating the development of some concepts in this paper.”

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Teaching Data Reuse

In the spring semester of 2020, I developed and taught a class on archaeological data reuse and digital literacy at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee.…

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The “other side” of history: archaeological heritage and memory processes

“I found my identity because of pottery,” says Amalia, who runs an Indigenous pottery workshop in General Paz, a city in Buenos Aires province, Argentina. Amalia and her family found archaeological pottery fragments by chance. These findings encouraged them to experiment and learn based on their observations of the techniques and designs of the ancient pottery.

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Public Education and Outreach in Archaeology

Archaeology in K-12 and undergraduate classrooms can be used to promote cultural awareness and sensitivity, provide a means of critical thinking, promote cultural awareness and sensitivity, create an awareness of archaeological research, as well as promoting the stewardship of the past.…

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Lidar in Mesoamerica since 2016: Acquisition, Ownership, and Accessibility

In 2016, we were privileged to edit a special section in Advances in Archaeological Practices on lidar in Mesoamerica and are delighted that the editors of AAP have invited us to provide an update to that special section in this blog. At that time, lidar acquisition was still uncommon, with only a handful of projects being fortunate enough to acquire the data that was revolutionizing settlement studies in tropical areas like Mesoamerica.

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A Complicated History of Collaboration with Collectors of Spirit Eye Cave, Texas

Research at Spirit Eye Cave did not take the course I envisioned. In the 1950s and 1960s, this cave, located on a private ranch in West Texas, was a pay-to-dig site. It was extensively dug, all too common with the vast tracts of private land that typify Texas. Initially, the goal of my research was to salvage any information about when the cave was occupied, and to examine the perishable collections.

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Digital Methods for Archaeological Currents

Archaeology has long contributed new perspectives to past events, transcending written records through the interpretation of material culture. Applied to the present, archaeology has the potential to disrupt and nuance the memorialization of contemporary occurrences as they are inscribed.…

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Plague in Medieval Cambridgeshire

Sometimes archaeologists are forced to study what they can identify, even when they recognize that it is not representative. One instance of this concerns burials of people who died of plague during the Black Death in the mid-14th century and later outbreaks.

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Sculpted stone from Stanwick Roman villa

It was an amazing moment in 1990 in the course of the Historic England (HE) excavations at Stanwick Roman villa, when David Neal uncovered the first piece of sculpted stone, reused as a quoin in the north-eastern corner of the fourth-century villa building.…

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Pots and cultural diversity in the Roman north – the case of Severan York

Questions on the extent of multiculturalism in Britain’s (Roman) past have never been more relevant. Thanks to the evidence of inscriptions and the recent scientific analysis of human skeletal remains we know that Romano-British cities were home to significant minorities of people with foreign origins from across the Roman empire and beyond, but what can the more everyday evidence of pottery tell us?…

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Understanding the Mexica

Articles in Ancient Mesoamerica offer insights about the Mexican highlands before, during, and after the Mexica took control of it. In only a couple hundred years, they created an empire that stretched from coast to coast in ancient Mesoamerica.…

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Practicing Remote Science

COVID-19 related travel restrictions and social distancing protocols have precluded many archaeological field projects in the past six months. And while conferences and meetings can be taken to the virtual realm, the challenges facing those of us whose work is founded on field-based research are becoming readily apparent.…

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David French – A Life in Anatolian Archaeology

“French, the son of a Yorkshire policeman, graduated with a BA in Classics from Cambridge University, but found his vocation as an archaeologist in Greece through encounters at the British School at Athens…” The latest digital publication of the British Institute at Ankara is a collection of papers that commemorate and appraise the work of David French, director of the BIAA from 1968 to 1994.…

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The Last of the Moderns

Adalet Ağaoğlu, one of the most prominent authors of modern Turkish literature, passed away at the age of 91 leaving behind a literary legacy that will be difficult to match for years to come.…

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The Türkmen-Karahöyük Intensive Survey Project (TISP): documenting the discovery of a lost kingdom in Anatolia from the Late Bronze and Iron Ages

“The Türkmen-Karahöyük Intensive Survey Project (TISP), led by James Osborne (University of Chicago), was begun in 2019 and determined that the site might not just be big, but among the very largest sites in Anatolia during the Late Bronze and Iron Ages…” One of the paradoxes of archaeology is that, although understanding of the past is usually achieved only after years of painstaking work, once in a blue moon something may be found that instantly changes one’s theories or suddenly leads to completely new research avenues.…

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Prehistory and the pandemic: taking the long view

Prehistory is all about taking the long view. But living in this maelstrom that perspective is difficult. The pandemic affects all archaeologists; from the closure of heritage sites, to furloughing staff, the added workload of rapidly devising online teaching, cancelling exhibitions, the disruption to research students because museum collections, libraries, and laboratories are closed, and fieldwork postponed.…

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Pursuing the prayerstone hypothesis

Incised stones have long attracted my attention because of the large assemblage (more than 400) that we excavated at Gatecliff Shelter. My interest was recently re-awakened after learning of Southern Paiute oral histories about the use of incised stones as prayerstones, and I reached out to indigenous colleagues in the Great Basin...

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New wallaby-sized dinosaur from the ancient Australian-Antarctic rift valley

Upper jaws of a new dinosaur from Victoria, Australia, give fresh insight into the diversity of small herbivorous dinosaurs that once inhabited the ancient Australian-Antarctic rift valley 125 million years ago A new, wallaby-sized herbivorous dinosaur has been identified from five fossilized upper jaws in 125 million year old rocks from the Cretaceous period of Victoria, southeastern Australia.…

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The Cambridge Classical Journal eyes the prize

Shaping 2019: Introducing the Cambridge Philological Society Prize As the year draws to its conclusion, the Cambridge Philological Society was pleased to see that three articles in Classical Archaeology and Ancient History (published between 2015 and 2017 in our society journal – The Cambridge Classical Journal) featured among the most downloaded papers of 2018!…

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