Supplying archaeological and oceanographic evidence, this book persuasively links Clovis technology with the culture of the Solutrean people who occupied France and Spain more than 20,000 years ago. [...more]
People living along the coast of Peru were eating popcorn 2,000 years earlier than previously reported and before ceramic pottery was used there, according to a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. [...more]
As a coastal archaeologist and expert in prehistoric and historic settlement sites in the Chesapeake Bay region, Darrin Lowery of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History and University of Deleware, is carefully watching the effects of coastal erosion and rising sea levels on coastal archaeological sites. [...more]
It takes a Tlingit artist up to 2,000 hours, or 83 days, to weave just one ceremonial robe. Not surprisingly, this art form is practiced by a dedicated few including Tlingit artists Teri Rofkar and Shelly Laws of Alaska. In their presentation for the Smithsonian Spotlight series hosted by the Arctic Studies Center at the Anchorage Museum, Rofkar and Laws discuss the methods and cultural significance of robes, spruce root baskets and more. For more information, go to http://www.mnh.si.edu/arctic/html/alaska.htm [...more]
“Camping With the Sioux: Fieldwork Diary of Alice Cunningham Fletcher ” is a Web site of the Smithsonian’s National Anthropological Archives consisting of two fascinating journals kept by American anthropologist Alice Fletcher (1838-1923) during a six-week venture into Plains Indian territory in 1881. Drawings of the plains, Indian reservations, and her many campsites in eastern [...] [...more]
Members of the Human Origins Program team at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History describe why they love their job. [...more]
Bruce Smith, anthropology curator at the Smithsonian's Naitonal Museum of Natural History, talks about the Smithsonian explorations in the 1880s to determine who built the ancient earthen mounds in eastern North America. [...more]
Viewed from inside the SOMATOM Emotion 6CT scanner used at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, the skeleton and internal organs of this well-preserved Peruvian mummy can now be studied non-destructively and non-invasively. CT scanners are fundamentally changing the way scientists examine museum specimens. The SOMATOM Emotion 6CT scanner was recently donated to the Smithsonian by [...] [...more]
This fossil represents a new genus and species of extinct aneuretopsychid, Jeholopsyche liaoningensis, recently described in a paper in the journal ZooKeys by Conrad Labandeira of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, and Dong Ren and ChungKun Shih of the College of Life Sciences, Capital Normal University, Beijing. The aneuretopsychidae are a family of long-proboscid insects that lived in Asia from the Late Jurassic to Early Cretaceous. The paper documents the first formal record of fossil Aneuretopsychidae in China. The new fossils reveal previously unknown and detailed structure of the mouthparts, antennae, head, thorax, legs and abdomen of this distinctive insect lineage.
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