Thank you, Kambiz, for letting me introduce my new book to the Anthropology.net community.
The story behind The Genius of Kinship is an interesting one. In 1991, then a student of history at the St. Petersburg State University, I wrote a course paper on the traditional social organization of the Shoshone Indians as could be gleaned [...]
Monte Verde, Chile is a very interesting archaeological site. First discovered in 1976, the site is about 500 miles south of Santiago and has yielded artifacts of a small settlement of 20 to 30 people living in a dozen huts along a small creek. Aside from artifacts, a wide variety of midden has also been [...]
(GIS) are a critical aspect of modern day archaeological and paleoanthropological research. GIS systems expedite analyzing and managing large amounts of spatial data, and can really improve mapping locations where artifacts or fossils are found. Unfortunately, the price point and learning curve involved in using GIS applications, like ArchGIS make it an unapproachable technology.
An article [...]
Nature has put up a little teaser book review of Amos Nur & Dawn Burgess’ new book, “Apocalypse: Earthquakes, Archaeology and the Wrath of God.” The book investigates the possibility that earthquakes are a cause for the collapse of many ancient civilizations. Nur is a geophysics professor, and my understanding is that he advised Dawn [...]
Afarensis shared with us a news that 35,000 year old artifacts were found from an iron ore mine site is seen at Hope Downs, Australia. I think this is a interesting find, but it is by no means the first time artifacts of this antiquity have been found in Australia, nor is it the oldest [...]
For those of you out there interested in Mayan archeology and culture, or even those out there interested in how linguists crack codes, tomorrow night PBS’s NOVA will be airing a special on how the Mayan language was deciphered. The show is called, “Cracking the Mayan Code.” It airs tomorrow night at 8 p.m. on [...]
Perhaps the biggest anthropology news of this week has been the analysis of ancient DNA from fossilized human poop found in 14,000 year old cave in Oregon. The paper, “DNA from Pre-Clovis Human Coprolites in Oregon, North America,” was published in this recent issue of Science. Even though the study is literally based off of [...]
A multidisciplinary and duo of scientists have analyzed the Codex Vergara. The Codex Vergara is a 660 year old document made by Aztec surveyors used to measure the surface of a field. It contains schematic drawings and measurements of individual fields. They were able to figure out that that Aztec surveyors probably used several types [...]
There’s so much anthropology news all of a sudden, I’m gonna do my best to share them with you but I can’t promise I’ll cover it all. This first tidbit is of an archaeological find from Stockholm’s Arlanda airport. Archaeologist Karin Beckman-Thoor tells the BBC News that she and her crew found over 470 coins [...]
According to this press release, Oded Lipschits from the department of Archaeology in Tel Aviv University has found evidence that Assyrians were establishing ‘local administrative centers,’ branch offices if you may, that kept tabs on their Judaen vassals. This ain’t really surprising finding by itself, from the very start of the Assyrian empire, they [...]
