All stories

Colored in sepia tones, a photo shows a person in a dark headwrap and robes with a walking stick traveling behind a herd of sheep and goats on rocky terrain that rises into a steep hill.

What Ancient Goat Teeth Reveal About Animal Care

Unraveling a mystery around millennia-old goat bones, an archaeologist reflects on the harm people can cause their most cherished animals.
A large furry, horned animal stands on grassy terrain with a forest behind and airborne dust surrounding it.

Why Store 41,000 Bison Bones?

An archaeologist explains why a museum keeps so many bones from the Jones-Miller site, an ice age bison kill on the North American plains.
An image shows a tan llama’s head and torso against a beige, sandy ground.

Unearthing Culinary Pasts—With Help From Llama Poop

A food archaeologist investigates everyday eating and lean times among the ancient Moche of Peru through a remarkable discovery of thousands of llama “beans.”
A black-and-white film still features a person wearing a hoodie, clear vest, and cap looks upward at the face of a person holding small objects in front of them with a gloved hand. The two are on rocky terrain in front of a graffiti-covered stone wall.

Excavating a 19th-Century Detroit Saloon

A filmmaker highlights the work of urban archaeologists who are excavating the site of a woman-owned business that opened in the late 1800s.
From the neck up, a close-up photograph features a spotted black-and-cow facing left but looking straight at the viewer against a blue sky.

What a Cow’s Horn Reveals About Khoisan Medicine

An archaeologist explains what a 500-year-old horn container found in South Africa illuminates about precolonial Khoisan medical and spiritual knowledges.
A photograph features two people kneeling by buckets and working to clean a tiled mosaic on the ground.

Piecing Together History From a Roman Mosaic

The 2020 discovery of an ancient villa in Britain uncovered the most important Roman mosaic found in the last century. An archaeologist explains how the mosaic offers an alternate ending to a grim tale from the Trojan War.
A photograph features a man walking in a shadowy forest with sun shining in from the right side. He has disheveled brown hair and a beard, wears a fur pelt, and holds a wooden spear with a stone tip.

Did Meat Do Neanderthals In?

Studying zinc levels in unearthed Neanderthal skeletal remains, an archaeologist examines whether the carnivorous eating habits of Neanderthals in the Eurasian steppe contributed to their eventual extinction.
A black-and-white photo features three baboons near the side of a dirt road. Two look on as a third bends over to drink from a puddle.

Extracting Hominin Evolution From Fossilized Teeth

Two scientists explain how analyses of oxygen isotopes from 17-million-year-old ape teeth could lead to new insights on early human evolution amid environmental changes.
A landscape photo shows brown and green long and short grasses growing in and on top of still water.

Cooking Debris in an Australian Cave Tells a Story of Resilience

An archaeological project in Australia investigates 65,000 years of food scraps to understand Aboriginal peoples’ resilience amid changing plant life, sea levels, and climate.
Three people sit in an excavation pit, working to uncover ancient Nubia, and look back at the camera while three others stand on the sand and approach the platform.

Reinterpreting Life and Death in Ancient Nubia

In the Nile River Valley, powerful yet misunderstood civilizations flourished thousands of years ago. Now bioarchaeologists are rethinking funerary rituals and life in ancient Nubia, and empowering local Sudanese scholars.
Four hand shapes are shown on black and brown stone outlined with white paint next to a black, white, red, yellow, purple, and green measuring stick.

The Amazing Archive of First Nations Stories Written on Stone

Rock art created by First Nation peoples over the millennia are more than decorative. Non-Indigenous archaeologists are beginning to appreciate how they constitute an Indigenous archive of memories, histories, and relationships to the land and Ancestors.
An elderly Yaghan woman with shoulder-length black and gray hair wears a purple sweater and stands in a grove of reeds, holding reeds in her hands and under one arm.

The Yaghan Rise Again

The Yaghan, an Indigenous community in Tierra del Fuego, were falsely considered to be “extinct” by Europeans and their descendants. Now archaeologists are helping the contemporary community document their ancestors’ ancient stories.
An image features a group of figures drawn in reddish-brown paint on a rock face in what is today Tanzania.

What Ancient DNA Reveals About Life in Africa 20,000 Years Ago

Newly sequenced African aDNA shows dynamic ancient migratory patterns and interactions around the Later Stone Age that shaped human history.
A group of white stone buildings, with the Acropolis complex at the top, sit on a hill surrounded by trees at sunset.

Was the Acropolis a Harem? A Myth of Orientalism

New research makes a case for reexamining the way 15th-century Turks used the Acropolis of Athens—and the role of Western beliefs in exoticizing the people of the Ottoman Empire.
A golden decoration features an animal set upon by lions on three sides.

The Last Wild Lions of Europe

Mounting archaeological evidence is revealing that modern lions may have roamed free in Southeastern Europe—overturning long-held assumptions about art and mythology in the process.
A person wearing a white helmet sits on the floor of a cave holding a yellow notebook and looking at drawings on a wall. Another person stands farther back.

Ancient Art Deep in the Southeastern United States

An archaeologist examines the history and diversity of art found in the dark zones of caves across the Southeastern U.S.