Many people see “history” as something we get from written records that tells us how important people influenced great events—colleagues in my institution’s history department sometimes make that clear. From that perspective, the “history” of indigenous people on the North American Great Plains is a story of Euroamerican expansion resisted by groups like the Comanches […]
Read MoreWe do! The Aztecs have gotten a lot of bad press over the years. Popular accounts stress human sacrifice, warfare, and imperial exploitation. Although historians and archaeologists have tried for decades to counter such biases, that effort has had only partial success. We are both Aztec specialists, and we have published many technical books and […]
Read MoreAs Covid 19 has swept the globe, leaving over a million causalities in its wake, it has generated a profound crisis of confidence. Citizens throughout the world question their governments’ abilities to protect them. Everyday life has become akin to a game of Russian roulette, where we leave our homes knowing that we exist only […]
Read MoreMy earliest spitting memory comes from a movie. A character, trussed up or held down, spits at the villain. I’ve forgotten the name of the movie but there are half a dozen similar scenes in Hindi cinema where the hero, or heroine, or one of the other good guys is overpowered and, in a show […]
Read More“Not much,” might be one’s first reaction to this essay’s title question. Archaeologists are not exactly first responders. We are, if anything, last responders. And yet surprisingly, archaeology is not as odd a source of insights as it might seem. Archaeology offers a 3.5 million-year-long scientific record of human and earlier hominin problem-solving. As we […]
Read MoreThe COVID-19 pandemic that has shaken our globe to its core has highlighted the need for rapid, responsive and relevant research, now more than ever. The field of rapid research is not new and different approaches have been developed over at least 40 years to enable the sharing of research findings at a time when […]
Read MoreToilet paper has become the unlikely posterchild of the coronavirus. Toilet paper, and its absence. Much has been written about what seems, at first sight, an unlikely association: after all, diarrhea is not one of the disease’s side effects. Hypotheses abound, from the sociology of herd response (copy-cat behavior) over the economics of panic buying […]
Read MoreIn this book, Cathy Willermet and Sang-Hee Lee reflect that the “steadfast obsession with the scientific approach that characterized biological anthropology, like no other subfield in American anthropology, is in fact a response to mask the dark history surrounding its birth”.
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