If ever a single ingredient epitomized human nature, it must be chocolate. Can you think of another flavor that has seduced so many cultures?

How Alexandre Lacassagne, the “French Sherlock Holmes,” solved a grisly crime at the dawn of forensic anthropology.

For many Pueblo Indians, the ladder is at once a practical tool and a powerful metaphor. The ladder is used to descend and ascend—and to cross multiple worlds.

Researchers are racing to record—and save—the cultural treasures of the western Canadian Arctic before they fall victim to climate change.

When it came to carving the likeness of the immortal Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on the world’s most valuable sapphire, there was no room for error.

Archaeology gives us the ability to see the impacts that natural events like the little ice age can have on human culture.

Anthropologist Hugh Gusterson traces the history of combat casualties attempting to communicate beyond death, from Gallipoli to nuclear war.

An anthropologist from urban Los Angeles looks at how science, history, religion, power, and politics colluded to create the illusion of race. 

Why was love across ethnic boundaries in colonial nations so dangerous? For one thing, it threatened to wrench nations apart because it risked binding them together.

After the Nazis’ three so-called Operation Reinhard camps swallowed more than a million and a half Jewish lives, the camps were themselves destroyed. Forensic archaeologists are finally exploring what lies beneath the earth—but not without resistance.