Archaeological Photo Essays

In May 2007, a baby woolly mammoth was discovered exposed on the Yuribei River in Yamal Peninsula of Russia, by a nomadic reindeer herder named Yuri Khudi. This photo essay discusses some of the intensive research and questions surrounding this momentous discovery.

Ah, well, you can't win them all. NatGeo's Expedition Week 2009 was not as fabulously scientific as the 2008 version, but there were still some interesting things to think about that developed out of the week-long video extravaganza.

The Cascajal Block is a huge block of limestone with ancient carvings on it--and it may or may not e an example of Olmec writing from the early formative period of central America. This photo includes some close up images of the markings.

An audio and visual tour of what the Society for American Archaeology meetings are like, with commentary and slides of attendees to the 2005 Salt Lake City meetings.

In 1998, the now-late archaeologist Stuart Munro-Hay contacted me and asked if I would move his wonderful website on the history of excavations at Axum to my website. I was happy to be able to do so. The present feature is an update of that project I built from Munro-Hay's website, in that it is in a new format, with some additional figures. I hope he would approve.

This photo essay of shell beads recovered from ancient Homo sapiens sites illustrates how shel beads are a key piece of evidence about the transition between the Middle and Upper Paleolithic, and addresses some of the issues of behavioral modernity, and ultimately what it means to be human.

During the Summer of 2004, architectural conservator Marc LeFrançois oversaw the restoration of the building known as Kiva F at Gran Quivira, the ancient ruins of a pueblo city in central New Mexico.

One of the few times people can actually get into the Neolithic stone circle called Stonehenge is on the summer and winter solstices, and there is almost always a professional news photographer out there taking images. Here are photos take from the last few years.

Recent investigations by Takeshi Inomata studying the role of plazas in Maya festivals led me to put together this photo essay of the plazas of some of the more famous Maya sites. Photos include those of Tulum, Tikal, Copan, Bonampak, Uxmal, and Calakmul.

A handful of images of Mesopotamian art and archaeology, objects currently on loan to the Beijing Museum from the University of Pennsylvania's Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology