A few years back there was a survey of archaeologists to determine the 25 Grand Challenges that archaeology could help solve…That survey was pretty specific about what they considered ‘Grand Challenges’: ‘The Web survey defined grand challenges to be fundamental problems in science and explicitly excluded “disciplinary challenges with respect to the practice of archaeology, […]
October 28, 2013
An article in the Mexican newspaper La Cronica de Hoy reported last Thursday on a new book being presented in Mexico this week, The Spectacle of the Late Maya Court: Reflections on the Murals of Bonampak. Written by art historians Mary Ellen Miller and Claudia Brittenham, the book builds on a long-term project by Miller […]
June 3, 2012
The rich dude gets the hot chick even in prehistory. Thus a perceptive reader commenting on Wired Science’s coverage of newly published research on the roots of inequality in Neolithic Europe sums up the whole story. More soberly, the BBC News emphasizes the contingency of the new findings in its story, titled Cardiff uni claims […]
April 2, 2011
Just back from the annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, where I had the pleasure of being a discussant on a session organized by Sabrina Agarwal and Julie Wesp. Since my comments run to 2200 words, no way to post them and no point either– who would read them? But here are some […]
March 19, 2011
I read a wide swath of archaeological news every day, and this past week the news I am reading has been resonating– or really, has presented a counterpoint to– the writing I have been doing myself. Because, as is typical, many of the news stories I am reading are about finds of human remains, which […]
June 5, 2010
“Her name is synonymous with power and glamour”: so starts an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer prompted by the opening of a new exhibit that opened this week at The Franklin Institute. Which raises the question: what is the relation between an archaeology of sex and gender and the long-standing fascination of the public, shared […]
April 21, 2010
Ancient Bodies, Ancient Lives is a book published in 2008 by Thames and Hudson. A product of my teaching an interdisciplinary course, “Archaeology of Sex and Gender”, in Berkeley’s Discovery Course program, the book is an experiment in making archaeological knowledge available to others interested in teaching about sex and gender, from anthropological, historical, archaeology, […]
January 31, 2016
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