Archaeology January 2012 Archive

For some mysterious reason, faience--that striking turquoise colored stuff used as fake precious stones in Mesopotamia and Egypt beginning some 5500 years ago or so--has always fascinated me. Faience tiles ... Read More

Fish traps, which go by an astounding array of terms, are at least 8,000 years old, and were invented by complex hunter-gatherers all over the world. Fish Weir off Deer ... Read More

A couple of articles published in the last month or so have continued the debate as to the earliest domestication of the dog. Images of the canid from Razboinichya Cave, ... Read More

Mongooses (Herpestes spp) are kind of like cats, in that they really never became what you could call domesticated, but they do make great pets. Like cats, they also make ... Read More

Butrint, on the coast of Albania across from the island of Corfu, is an astonishing blend of architecture. Founded in the 6th century BC, the strategically important port was owned ... Read More

Shillourokambos is a Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB) site on the island of Cyprus, at the east end of the Mediterranean Sea and not terribly far from the more-famous and visitable ... Read More

A recent residue analysis of the microscopic contents of a classic period Maya "tobacco flask" from the Kislak Collection of the Library of Congress found... evidence of tobacco! But that ... Read More

The January 12th issue of National Geographic magazine features a story on recent excavations at the Gran Coclé site of El Cano, one of the chiefdoms of central Panama. We ... Read More

The domestication history of various plants and animals is only the starting place to understanding what shows up on our modern dinner plates. Olive oil, for example, is often cited ... Read More

I confess that I read the edited collection of articles in Ideologies and Archaeology from Reinhold Bernbeck and Randall H. McGuire, published last year by the University of Arizona Press, ... Read More

A continuing debate concerning shifting residences for rulers at the 13th-16th century AD African Iron Age capital of Great Zimbabwe makes for interesting reading today. The Great Enclosure at Great ... Read More

The Khmer Empire--sometimes called the Angkor Civilization--was a highly sophisticated state which gathered up hundreds of thousands of people in Cambodia, Thailand, Laos and Viet Nam between the 9th and ... Read More