The Phantom Forests That Built Mesa Verde
For years, archaeologists working in Mesa Verde National Park have been looking for evidence of where Ancestral Puebloans harvested the thousands of trees they used to build their elaborate cliff dwellings.
Column / Curiosities
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Do Twins Share a Soul?
An anthropologist—and identical twin—grapples with different cultural understandings of twinship.
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An Archaeology of Marijuana
How did cannabis—a plant humans have been using for more than 10,000 years—become so vilified in the U.S.?
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Wildfire Archaeology and the Burning American West
Archaeologists in New Mexico are pioneering surprising research methods—involving tree rings, pottery, and blasts of light—to explain why wildfire suppression doesn’t work.
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Two Surgeries, 800 Years Apart
An archaeologist’s hip surgery prompts him to reimagine the experience of a Puebloan woman who survived a terrible fall centuries ago.
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A Curator’s Search for Justice
One museum’s saga of returning stolen vigango statues to Kenya reveals how repatriating sacred objects is both the right thing and a very hard thing to do.